Books, 11/3.

For the Los Angeles Times, Rich Cohen reviews Matt Birkbeck's Deconstructing Sammy: Music, Money, Madness, and the Mob: "Sammy Davis Jr was the epitome of the artist as brilliant naif" and "a hero for our times, a personification of the current American Dream, living in a mansion owned by the bank, short the mortgage but certain he can dance his way out. As Sinatra sang, 'Riding high in April, shot down in May.'"

The Self-Styled Siren sparks a chorus of horrified gasps with an anecdote taken from "Kate Buford's fine biography Burt Lancaster: An American Life."

"Steve Roden found a 1981 interview with Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray at the flea market," notes Greg Allen. "He transcribed a bit onto Airform Archive, starting with an encounter Ray had with the 1913 Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore."

"Pavle Levi's insightful and well-argued book, Disintegration in Frames: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Cinema examines the evolution of the national Yugoslav and regional post-Yugoslav cinema within its shifting political and cultural landscape," writes Acquarello: "initially, in the context of individual expression under the repressive government of Josip Broz Tito, then subsequently, as a reflection of ideologically motivated historical revisionism that sought to reinforce the myth of deep seated ethnic conflict and selective representation as a means of defining national identity through the artificial creation - and consequently, justified persecution - of the other."

FilmInFocus runs an extract from Helen de Winter's What I Really Want to Do is Produce: Top Producers Talk Movies and Money in which JoAnne Sellar describes working on George Sluizer's Dark Blood: "So we went off to Utah, and shot there for six weeks, all of the location stuff. Then we came back to LA to spend three weeks shooting interiors that we had built on a stage. We had shot one day in LA, and then on the first night River Phoenix died."

Have You Seen...? A Personal Introduction to 1000 Films "is a big, glorious, infuriating and illuminating mess," writes Charles Matthews in the Washington Post. "You'll be happiest with it if you're on [David] Thomson's wavelength, that is, if your favorite directors include Renoir, Hawks, Welles, Hitchcock, Sturges, Ozu, Mizoguchi, Antonioni, Bergman. You'll be less happy if you prefer Ford, Wilder, Lean, Woody Allen, Scorsese, Kurosawa or Fellini, all of whom he finds wanting in one way or another. Thomson acknowledges what he regards as their best work, but even then his preferences can be startling. He thinks, for example, that Otto Preminger's Exodus is better than Lean's Lawrence of Arabia. His favorite Allen film is Radio Days, which he calls 'a masterpiece.' Annie Hall, on the other hand, he regards as "disastrously empty." Related: John McMurtrie talks with Thomson for the San Francisco Chronicle.

And Michael Fox has a long talk with Thomson for SF360.

"Better, more current, and cheaper than Peter Dendle's infamous Zombie Movie Encyclopedia, [Glenn] Kay's Zombie Movies captures the satire, the fear, the politics, and the humor of both classic and modern horror flicks," writes Justin Dimos at PopMatters.

"The Right Stuff is now best read as an elegy - a remembrance of vanished times," writes Robert Winder. "It describes a place and a mood that have crashed and burned."

Also in the Guardian: Roberto Saviano's "book, Gomorrah, has inspired an award-winning movie that is Italy's candidate for an Oscar," writes John Hooper, introducing his interview. "But the number of his bodyguards has increased to five and now he can only be contacted within Italy by telephone. It took 10 days to arrange. Even then, it didn't happen at the appointed time."

Posted by dwhudson at November 3, 2008 1:49 PM