Shorts, 12/8.

"[I]t could be argued that we need more art historians writing about movies and fewer literary critics who operate from the model of narrative fiction. And a potent suggestion of what art historians could offer us is found in a highly original study of the B films of producer Val Lewton, practically all of which were made during World War 2." Jonathan Rosenbaum on Alexander Nemerov's Icons of Grief: Val Lewton's Home Front Pictures.

"Film criticism, it seems to me, is the hardest place to get any serious critical footing." Wyatt Mason, who's tried his hand at it, explains.

"Because Revolutionary Road became the decade's great, terrifying indictment of suburban surrender, [Richard] Yates's stories are often likened to John Cheever's," writes James Wood, "but they are closer to JF Powers's: the same richly restrained prose, luxuriously lined but plain to the touch; the same anxious comedy; the same very cold, appraising eye; and the same superb ear for the foolish histrionics of speech. Out of the apparently diplomatic conformity of mid-twentieth-century American realism—the sort of style that made short stories commercially salable—bursts the monstrous ego of Yates's male characters, smashing all the eggshell niceties." Related: Via Anne Thompson, Timothy Dumas on Yates in Westport Magazine.

Also in the New Yorker: Anthony Lane on The Wrestler: "The pathos of personal ruin is an established trope, and the trick, as demonstrated by John Huston in Fat City and by Martin Scorsese in Raging Bull, is to stop it from sliding into the sentimental. [Darren] Aronofsky doesn't always succeed in this, and there are lines in Robert D Siegels script that wave their symbolic purpose in the audience's face.... But the movie, like its hero, manages to yank itself back into shape, and that, it strikes me, is mostly due to [Mickey] Rourke."

"De'Angelo Wilson should have had an inspiring story of his own," begins a report from E! Online. "On Nov 26, the Antwone Fisher actor was found dead in the back room of a Los Angeles business. Wilson, 29, hanged himself."

Online listening tip. Ryland Walker Knight, Mark Haslam and Jennifer Stewart discuss Milk. Related: Tony DuShane talks with Gus Van Sant for Mother Jones.

Online viewing tip #1. Ray Pride has three minutes of Ingmar Bergman talking (in English) with Dick Cavett.

Online viewing tip #2. "Man in Space was a short film made by Disney about the possibility of putting humans into space," writes Jason Kottke. "The film was first shown in 1955 and features several prominent scientists of the day, including Wernher von Braun."

Online viewing tips, round 1. At Twitch, Todd Brown has a trailer that's... well, it can't be ignored: Chandi Chowk to China. Then there's Yatterman: "No doubt about it, I love me some kid-friendly Takashi Miike."

Online viewing tips, round 2. "James Parker dissects two of Jim Carrey's most unnervingly subversive onscreen moments, and contrasts them with a scene from the Bill Murray film Groundhog Day." These three videos accompany Parker's piece in the December issue of the The Atlantic, "The Existential Clown," via Matthew Clayfield, who clips this bit:

Movie after movie finds Carrey either confronting God ("Smite me, O mighty Smiter!" he roars in Bruce Almighty) or enacting, violently and outrageously, some version of the dilemma identified by the Spanish existentialist José Ortega y Gasset - that man, as he exists in the world, is "equivalent to an actor bidden to represent the personage which is his real I."

[...]

All of which would be the sheerest philosophical prattle if Jim Carrey didn't so consistently, as a performer, embody these various propositions. Here, buzzing in his shoulder sockets, is the struggle for authenticity; there, warping his tongue, is the torment of becoming. At his most Carrey-esque, he is always trapped mid-metamorphosis, wrestling visibly with the sort of transformative inner pressure that in another context would produce a superhero - or a man-size cockroach.

Online viewing tips, round 3. "One of the films that [Edward] Dimendberg considers as a pivotal moment 'in the history of encounters between highways and the cinema' is Hartmut Bitomsky's 1986 film Reichsautobahn. The film, a 'juxtaposition of excerpts from Autobahn film footage, photographs and paintings from the 1930s, and the director's voice-over narration' creates 'new modes of perception and representation.' If we understand these cinematic images of highways and other forms of conveyance infrastructures as representations of centrifugal space, this begs another question: what does this space sound like?" Enrique Ramirez posts a collection of Kraftwerk music videos.

Posted by dwhudson at December 8, 2008 2:10 PM