Shorts, 9/14.

"While the tendency of critics and film historians to label the late Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene 'the father of African cinema' might seem slightly glib, even a casual assessment of recent African filmmaking confirms that the influence of key Sembene films such as Black Girl, Mandabi and Xala has indeed been far reaching," writes Richard Porton at Moving Image Source. "Perhaps the key to Sembene's complex appeal to filmmakers who continue to wrestle with his legacy resides in his dual focus on both the inequities of Western colonialism and the tendency of African elites to internalize the same colonialist mentality, replete with corruption and class stratification, which inspired a wave of liberation movements in the post-World War II era."

"Can it be coincidence that [Fatih] Akin, perhaps the most acclaimed director to emerge from Europe in this decade, is an artist whose background spans two cultures?" asks Godfrey Cheshire in the Independent Weekly. "And not just any two - the two that lie closest to the gaping fault line separating the West and Islam, site of this era's most challenging and crucial geopolitical drama.... Far more than Head-On, with its ragged, punk-rock energy, The Edge of Heaven cleaves closely to European literary models. It is, without an apology or undue self-consciousness, the most novelistic of recent movies."

As Cloud 9 plays in Germany, signandsight translates Birgit Glombizta's interview with Andreas Dresen for the taz.

"Great documentaries survive as lasting stories of people, their environments, the forces that shape their lives," writes Barbara Kopple, introducing a list of her favorites at MediaRights. Via Movie City News.

"Don't think about a movie title too long." But David Bordwell does think about a whole lot of them, at least for a bit. Related: Bob Rehak on how floating 3D titles, particularly in Panic Room, "make us acutely uneasy by conflating two spaces of film spectatorship that ordinarily remain reassuringly separate: the 'in-there' of the movie's action and the 'out-here' of credits, subtitles, musical score, and other elements that are of the movie but not perceivable by the characters in the storyworld." Via Chris Cagle, who adds that he's "noticed a crucial shift in the title sequence that takes place sometime in the early-to-mid 1950s."

"Inasmuch as Manoel de Oliveira's films convey what Randal Johnson describes as a cinematic hybridity that illustrates the amorphous nature of representation, No, or the Vain Glory of Command also reflects a temporal hybridity, where time is presented as a conflation of seemingly arbitrary, but integrally connected history," writes Acquarello.

"Writer-director Clark Gregg's adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk's 2001 novel [Choke] has a number of things going for it," writes Ed Champion. "It has, first and foremost, the intriguing choice of Sam Rockwell cast as sex addict Victor Mancini." Still: "One cannot view Choke without being aware of Fight Club's imposing shadow." Gregg "doesn't quite have [David] Fincher's talent to properly translate Palahniuk's cartoonish riffs on reality to the big screen.... If a Chuck Palahniuk film adaptation cannot unsettle us, what then is the point of making it?"

Vulture's Joshua David Stein asks Slavoj Zizek why he finds The Dark Knight and Kung Fu Panda to be ideologically dangerous.

"One of the most fascinating things the reader learns about The Night of the Living Dead, a film that seems squeezed of new insights by years of exegesis, from the new BFI Film Classics edition by Ben Hervey, is the multitude of previously unknown, to me anyway, cultural influences," blogs DK Holm for the Vancouver Voice. "Among them are the paintings of Goya and others, especially Goya's Saturn Eating His Children, as well as, logically, the EC Horror Library, which director George Romero read as a kid in the 1950s."

Zach Campbell: notes on Jon Jost's Sure Fire, Irving Lerner's Murder by Contract and more.

Michael Douglas will play Liberace in Steven Soderbergh's biopic, reports Variety's Michael Fleming.

From Toronto, AO Scott discusses "the new American realists - or neo-neo-realists, or cosmopolitan regionalists, or whatever name we settle on once the wave has crested." But it's also "a global phenomenon, less a style than an impulse that surfaces, with local variations, from Romania to Kazakhstan, from Argentina to Belgium."

Also in the New York Times:

• Mike Peed reviews Beatrice Colin's novel, The Glimmer Palace: "Over the course of nearly half a century, as troops parade through Berlin and bread lines erupt into riots, [Lilly Nelly Aphrodite] is transformed, almost accidentally, from Tiny Lil, the unwanted baby, to Lidi, one of Germany's most celebrated film stars."

• Sarah Lyall is rather taken with Daniel Radcliffe: "He has a catholic array of deeply held opinions - on sloppy diction, on whining actors, on male competitiveness, on the changing-of-the-guard ceremony at Buckingham Palace, on the spelling of 'aluminum' - and in several conversations over the summer he was more than happy to disseminate them. But although he says his chatty forthrightness makes him 'an intensely annoying person,' it comes across instead as an endearing sign of post-adolescent normalcy." Equus opens on Broadway on September 25.

• Joe Rhodes meets Bruce Campbell: "That he finds himself on a hit television series at the age of 50 - playing big-lug sidekick to Jeffrey Donovan on Burn Notice - is an unexpected windfall for the lantern-jawed Mr Campbell, best known as a horror-film hero since he starred in his childhood pal Sam Raimi's Evil Dead trilogy in the early 1980s."

• Mervyn Rothstein: "In Mandy Patinkin's world these days there are two tempests: Shakespeare's, in which he stars as Prospero at the Classic Stage Company, and the ever-raging one in his mind."

• And: "Secrecy is equal parts history lesson, meditative essay, didactic poem and call to arms. If the movie follows no single thread of inquiry, nor sustains any argument or research in depth, it nevertheless explores some chilling corridors of the clandestine." More from Joshua Rothkopf in Time Out New York.

• "There's no question that [Hava] Volterra has some fascinating ancestors - including Italy's first Jewish prime minister and the former New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia - and that The Tree of Life, despite an onslaught of dates and facts that often come too rapidly to be absorbed, offers an interesting history lesson about Jews in Italy since the 13th century," writes Laura Kern. "But there's also a prevailing sense of premeditation." More from Lawrence Levi in Nextbook.

• "Directed with a cheerful touch by Manish Acharya from a warm, insightful screenplay he wrote with Anuvab Pal, Loins of Punjab joins show-time antics to sociocultural commentary without reducing its characters, colorful as they are, to cartoons," writes Nathan Lee. Also, The Little Red Truck: "[I]f it sounds like the cutest thing in the history of cuteness, that's because it is. It would take a superhuman capacity for cynicism to resist the radiant optimism of the Missoula Children's Theater players and the unabashed pep of this joyful portrait." More from Robert Wilonsky in the Voice.

• "Proud American, a series of dramatic vignettes about tolerance and can-do spirit, aspires to be inspirational, but suffers from its shameless, jackhammer-style manipulation," writes Andy Webster.

• Jeannette Catsoulis: "Jewish mental patients and murdered Palestinians unite to solve the problems of the Middle East in Forgiveness, a mystifying mishmash of ghost story and group therapy." More from Matt Noller in Slant and Tasha Robinson at the AV Club.

• "Produced, written and directed by [Tyler] Perry, a one-man industry serving a niche audience that is primarily African-American, The Family That Preys doesn't worry about how it gets from A to Z," writes Stephen Holden. "There is no problem that a miraculous (and preposterous) plot development can't resolve in two minutes."

• Neil Genzlinger on Greetings from the Shore. More from Guglielmo Anthony in Films in Review.

In the 9th episode of Best Pictures from the Outside In, Nick Davis, Michael Phillips and Nathaniel R discuss American Beauty and The Great Ziegfeld.

"Remember movies before the cellphone?" asks Zachary Pincus-Roth.

Also in the Los Angeles Times:

• "The representation in American movies of immigrants (and of two close relations, ethnicity and 'race') is practically as old as the movies themselves, from Birth of a Nation and Charlie Chaplin's The Immigrant to Crash and Under the Same Moon," writes Reed Johnson. "Today, as mass immigration has evolved into a global phenomenon, a growing number of filmmakers in Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America as well as the United States are probing immigration's causes as well as its consequences for the lives of ordinary people."

• Michael Ordoña reviews Surfer, Dude: "Yeah, there's a comma in there, presumably to imply something deeper than the disjointed mess it actually is."

• James Marcus talks with Philip Roth about his new novel, Indignation.

Brian Gibson in the Vue Weekly on sex in the 21st century: "It was a long time coming, but at last the movies expose the red-blooded North American male becoming tragicomically aware of the wrinkles, flab and basic farce of the flesh, the flush of his desire paling into a trembling, white-cheeked joke."

"I recently stumbled across this fascinating description of Richard Burton's first meeting with Elizabeth Taylor written by Burton himself and borrowed from his book Meeting Mrs Jenkins (1966)," notes Kimberly Lindbergs. "I enjoyed reading it so much that I just had to share it."

A "brilliant new movie Die Welle (The Wave) serves as a warning of how simple psychological mind tricks can transform disaffected people into fascists," writes Johnny Dee. "Director Dennis Gansel, whose acclaimed Before The Fall was about the nazification of young Germans in the 1930s, felt compelled to make the film for several reasons. He was interested in the fundamental psychology of group pressure and he felt that Germans, especially young Germans, were becoming too blasé about the past."

Also in the Guardian:

• David Thomson considers a few landmark films that failed, one way or another, and their impact on film history.

• Alex von Tunzelmann gives a B to Disney's Pocahontas for entertainment; a D+ for historical accuracy.

  Rosana Greenstreet chats with John Waters.

A list from the AV Club: "The Old Cult Canon: 16 cult films that paved the way for the new cult canon." Related: In the Independent, Sophie Morris talks with David Lynch about the initial critical reception of Eraserhead.

Online browsing tip. The Collages of John Ashbery.

Online listening tip. NPR: Keith Brand on The Blob @ 50.

Online viewing tip #1. Survivors, a film by Errol Morris for Stand Up to Cancer. Via Movie City News.

Online viewing tip #1. For those in the US: Orson Welles's The Stranger is now viewable on Hulu. And a tip from Jerry Lentz: Welles's last interview, given two hours before he died.

Online viewing tips. Mike Everleth rounds up some "scary" video art.

Posted by dwhudson at September 14, 2008 1:12 PM