Shorts, 12/10.

You'll be reading (or skimming, or ignoring) many, many reviews of Valkyrie in the coming weeks, but I'd bet good money that none will make you laugh as heartily as Robert Davis's at Daily Plastic will.

"Scott Foundas, the film editor at LA Weekly and the Village Voice, emailed me the other day to say that 'your predictions about the Los Angeles Times' film editor Tim Swanson have turned out to be more than true' and to complain that what Swanson is doing at the newspaper 'strikes me as the death of film criticism in a nutshell.'" So Nikki Finke asked Scott Foundas to elaborate. And so he has.

Related (and recommended): Roger Ebert's blistering commentary on the Tribune Co's filing for bankruptcy. Via Movie City News.

"[W]ho, to you, are the 'essential' American movie reviewers, past or present?" asks Nick Davis, and he has his reasons.

"Jay and Mark Duplass are abandoning the mumblecore movement for Hollywood." That's how Christopher Campbell sees it in the SpoutBlog. "And not only will they work with a bigger budget, they've also acquired an Apatow-appropriate cast featuring John C Reilly, Jonah Hill and Marisa Tomei. The untitled comedy (formerly called Safety Man) will have us believe that Tomei actually birthed Hill and still looks as good as she does."

"Stefan Kanfer's new biography of Brando, Somebody, is an antidote of sorts to the unsavory and voyeuristic 1994 biography written by Peter Manso, who focused on the actor's personal difficulties - his eccentricities, his many affairs and his often capricious behavior - in voluminous and unseemly detail." Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times: "Mr Kanfer, who wrote an estimable biography of Groucho Marx in 2000, focuses here on Brando's work, and while the reader may wish that he'd devoted more space to pivotal films like Streetcar, Waterfront, The Wild One and The Godfather and less space to such forgettable ones as Sayonara and The Ugly American, he does a solid job of describing Brando's preparation for various roles and evoking the often tortuous route such projects took on their way to the screen."

"What is stardom if not to sell a recognizable brand?" asks Jason Sperb. "Stardom, stars themselves, are commodities, as what is stardom if not an attempt to sell a new product through a pre-existing brand? With this is mind, it should not be terribly surprising that so many of the prominent characters in PT [Anderson]'s films which are performed by established stars are also, sometimes literally, salesmen. Mackey sells self-help books. Egan sells plungers. Plainview sells oil. Horner sells sex (while both Diggler and Mackey sell male heterosexual fantasies). Stardom, according to writers such as [Richard] Dyer, is also about performing a certain life, a certain work ethic, as a model for its audience. PT's stars make that mechanism explicit. They are not a sales pitch disguised in and through a narrative character - it is pure sales pitch."

"'I'll plug anything into the DVR that has Constance in the cast,' said Karen last week, and the Siren agrees with her.... The Siren has now seen six Constance Bennett movies in the past two months and feels ready to offer some thoughts on her abilities."

Kevin Lee on La roue: "Even in its present 4 plus hour cut, it can be an uneven slog at times, as [Abel] Gance lingers on moments until they creak with significance. But there's no denying his all-embracing ambition in bringing as many forms of cinema as he can conceive: from grimy working class realism to cliffhanger action to costumed fantasia interludes to moments of avant garde abstraction."

"A drunkard's lament. A bluesman's wail. The mischievous grin of children. A carnival geek's chicken act. Seething with images of the mundane and transmundane, photographer William Eggleston's lost film Stranded in Canton is an extraordinary exegesis on the ordinary. After 35 years on the museum and midnight movie circuits, Stranded has finally been given a proper DVD release by art publisher Twin Palms." Erik Morse in the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

"Appropriately, Slobodan Sijan's The Marathon Family opens with footage of the assassination of Yugoslavia's King Alexander I," writes Adam Balz at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. "As the King's motorcade proceeds down a crowded street in Belgrade, a sudden commotion erupts around his car. Soon we see his lifeless body lying in the street, blood pooled around his head; Louis Barthou, the French Foreign Minister and a fellow passenger, is slumped over in the backseat, also shot. It is 1934, and through this soundless, black & white footage we've witnessed more than just the end of the 'January 6 Dictatorship': this is the death of silent film."

For the Independent, Ian Burrell reports on the Microwave project, which aims to see ten British films produced for £100,000 each by 2011: "The first Microwave film, Mum&Dad, due out on Boxing Day, will be shown in selected cinemas and available on DVD, as a download and as a movie-on-demand from Sky Box Office, an unprecedented synchronised multi-platform release."

Anthony Kaufman: "Recently, I spoke with Baz Luhrmann, David Fincher as well as Dark Knight filmmaker Christopher Nolan for this Variety article, 'Three filmmakers widen their canvas.' What's fascinating is not simply how the studio - or studios, plural, in some cases - gave the directors as much leeway as they did, but how each director stayed true to the independent maverick that lives inside each of them."

"What does Barack Obama mean for black cinema?" asks Salim Stephenson. Also in Seven, Jess Chandler: "As more and more filmmakers search for alternative means of funding and distribution, the internet may provide a final haven with documentaries leading the way in the inevitable progression of digital media."

John Magary talks with Arnaud Desplechin about A Christmas Story for the Reeler.

"It's possible that Europa, long considered an exercise in arty excess, may in fact be [Lars] von Trier's most personal film." Nicolas Rapold explains in Nextbook.

"Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in, 2008) is a new Swedish horror film of many distinctions, one of them being that it was based on a Swedish horror novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist," writes Tim Lucas. "The writer, whose book has been translated into English, reportedly moonlights or daylights as a stand-up comic and his writing would seem to confirm the theory that every comedian is a closet tragedian."

Brad Pitt will be starring in George Miller's adaptation of The Odyssey. "But it seems Brad Pitt hasn't had his fill of epics," notes Ben Child: "he's agreed to play an explorer searching for a mysterious Amazonian civilisation in The Lost City of Z, according to Variety.... 'This is a terrific opportunity to do something entirely different for me," said director James Gray, better known for brooding east coast dramas such We Own the Night and The Yards."

Also in the Guardian: "Brokeback Mountain and Victim are both given a starring role in a new book about the history of gay cinema," writes Guy Dammonn. "Following a rather gushy preface by Simon Callow, author Steven Paul Davies displays a well-judged queer eye for numerous ostensibly straight films, showing on a movie-by-movie basis how gay and lesbian sensibilities find themselves reflected throughout the history of modern society's love affair with celluloid." And the book is Out at the Movies: A History of Gay Cinema.

"Suman Mukhopadhyay's Herbert is what happens when Godard's influence comes to India 40 years too late," writes Vadim Rizov in the Voice. More from Benjamin H Sutton in the L Magazine.

For FilmInFocus, Kaleem Aftab walks 7.5 miles through London, taking in various locations that've appeared in the movies.

"Even at his most pastoral, Sokurov’'s spiritual temper is more aligned with a humanist reverence for love, simplicity, endurance, and the liberating wonder of art, which Sokurov frequently celebrates (most profoundly in Russian Ark, 2002) as the life-affirming embodiment of hope and meaning." Steve Garden in the Lumière Reader: "Of all his films, the one that arguably comes closest to a ‘mystical’ view of existence is Mother and Son (1997)."

Alvaro Vargas Llosa in the New Republic on Slumdog Millionaire: "I cannot think of a movie that the residents of Mumbai, traumatized by the recent series of terrorist attacks, would find more inspiring than this one."

Lars von Törne talks with Frank Miller about The Spirit in the Tagesspiegel (and in German).

Rob Spence is having a camera installed in his eye socket. Priya Ganapati reports for Wired. Thanks, Jerry!

Online listening tip. Carrie Fisher talks about her new memoir, Wishful Drinking, on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Online viewing tip #1. The cinetrix has Sofia Coppola's 1996 debut, Lick the Star.

Online viewing tip #2. A two-minute intro to a new movie recommendations site, Clerk Dogs.

Online viewing tip #3. The Observer's Jason Solomons talks with Alex Gibney about Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S Thompson.

Online viewing tips. "The BBC reports that British animator and TV show creator Oliver Postgate has passed away at age 83," notes Amid Amidi. "He's responsible for TV series like Ivor the Engine, the Clangers, the Pogles, Noggin the Nog and Pingwings (which I wrote about on the Brew last year)." And he's got a couple of clips. Catherine Grant gathers linkage; more remembrances are gathered in the Guardian.

Online viewing and fiddling around tips. The New York Times launches Conversations and TimesWidgets.

Posted by dwhudson at December 10, 2008 2:14 PM