Shorts, 12/14.

Doug Cummings posts a big Carl Theodor Dreyer, pointing to the Danish Film Institute's new Dreyer site, a work-in-progress; reviewing James Schamus's Carl Theodor Dreyer's Gertrud: The Moving Word: "As you might expect from a professional dramatist, Schamus is particularly sensitive to Dreyer's attitudes on adaptation, especially his commitment to the authority of a text, an original text (like the transcript of Joan of Arc's trials, or the real woman - Maria von Platen - who inspired Gertrud's playwright) and the inspirations as well as restrictions, even oppressions, that arise from written source materials." Also: Notes on "the Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864 - 1916) and his influence on Dreyer." Doug wraps it all up with an online viewing tip: video analyses of Hammershøi's portraits at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

Alain Resnais "is a very dapper man," reports Criterion's Lee Kline, who's just returned from Paris, where he's been working on a release of Last Year at Marienbad. And he shares some notes on warming up the image and on why there'll likely be two soundtracks, one restored, the other not.

Via the House Next Door: Mike D'Angelo's columns for Esquire, from April 2004 through July of this year.

"If artists depend on angst and unrest to fuel their creative fire, then at least in one sense the 43rd presidency has been a blessing.... Newsweek asked its cultural critics to pick the one work in their field that they believe exemplifies what it was like to be alive in the age of George W Bush." In the package, then: Joshua Alston on Battlestar Galactica, Marc Peyser on American Idol, Peter Plagens on Jeff Koons's Hanging Heart, Jennie Yabroff on Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, Evan Thomas on Black Hawk Down, David Ansen on Borat, Lorraine Ali on Green Day's American Idiot, Jeremy McCarter on Caryl Churchill's Far Away and Lisa Miller on Rick Warren's The Purpose-Driven Life.

Michael Guillén talks with Kiyoshi Kurosawa about Tokyo Sonata.

"[PG] Wodehouse was 49 when he arrived in Los Angeles," writes Tony Staveacre, who, in the Independent, shares some recently rediscovered screenwriting work Wodehouse did in the 30. "The English writer created a stir at the studio on his first day, by insisting on walking the 12 miles from his home to Culver City. 'Even the hookers don't walk in LA!" his producers warned him.'" Related: Google Books offers a preview of PG Wodehouse and Hollywood: Screenwriting, Satires and Adaptations.

"A generation before Baz Luhrmann unleashed Australia upon a lucky nation of the same name, bonzer box office boffo was made by They're a Weird Mob, the tale of a hapless Italian immigrant who finds himself bamboozled by the 'strine' lingo and crude culture of mid-century Sydney." In the Age, Greg Burchall tells a story behind one of the lesser known Michael Powell films.

Stephen Vider in Nextbook on Harold, "the birthday boy of Mart Crowley's 1968 play The Boys in the Band," and of course, William Friedkin's 1970 adaptation: "Harold may not be entirely at ease with either his sexual or religious identity, but he refuses to downplay or mask either - that phrase 'Jew fairy,' barely a pause between, acknowledges bigotry and persistent self-loathing at the same time it defies both.... However Harold might actually feel about himself, his humor provides a crucial mode of resistance and resilience - a way of accepting and performing identity while still holding it at a critical distance. One can see a similar strategy on display in Portnoy's Complaint or the stand-up of Lenny Bruce, as well as the camp humor of later gay artists such as John Waters, Charles Ludlam and even Tony Kushner."

Andrew Tracy in the Auteurs' Notebook on Berlin Alexanderplatz: "[W]here Döblin offers an almost cinematic range of sensory experience with his kaleidoscopic novel, Fassbinder, several artistic generations later, wants instead to delve into the psychological realm which had long been the novel's province and the cinema's ambition."

"The Belgian novelist Jean-Philippe Toussaint is frequently, if anachronistically, grouped with early cinematic masters like Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati," writes Tom McCarthy. "Reading the opening sequences of Camera one understands why.... "That Camera should have waited 20 years to find an English-language publisher is scandalous. That the wonderful Dalkey Archive has taken on the task is unsurprising." And the Dalkey Archive runs Laurrent Demoulin's 2007 interview with Toussaint.

Also in the New York Times:

• Philip Gefter pays a visit to a legend: "No one has had a greater influence on photography in the last half-century than the Swiss-born [Robert] Frank, though his reputation rests almost entirely on a single book published five decades ago. While he has produced other volumes over the years and made 31 films and videos, all roads in his career lead back to this masterpiece, The Americans, an intimate visual chronicle of common people in ordinary situations drawn from several trips he made through his adopted country in the mid-1950s."

• "Herbert, a mad, messy and frequently amazing epic from India, features many of the qualities you expect from Bollywood: garish verve, dizzy excess, punishing duration, wild leaps in narrative tone and structure." Nathan Lee: "But that's the simple part.... This is, rather incredibly, [Suman] Mukhopadhyay's first film, and it exhibits the passionate, more-is-more abandon of an artist bursting with welcome (if exhausting) enthusiasm onto the scene."

• What Doesn't Kill You "tells a good story well, and in the process quietly says a little something about what it means to look at the American dream from the bottom up," writes Manohla Dargis. "Because [Mark] Ruffalo approaches his roles like a character actor instead of a star - he slips into his films, doesn't take ownership of them - it can be easy to take him for granted. We shouldn't. Mr Ruffalo is one of the greatest actors working in movies right now, and each performance is a gift." More from Nicolas Rapold (Voice), Nick Schager (Slant) and Gabriel Shanks.

• Nothing Like the Holidays is "an efficient home-for-Christmas ensemble comedy trimmed with plastic teardrops," writes Stephen Holden. "The only distinguishing characteristic of this mildly agreeable variation of a worn-out formula is that the boisterous family under examination is Puerto Rican, and the screenplay includes a smattering of Spanish." More from Leah Churner (Reverse Shot), Roger Ebert (Chicago Sun-Times), Ben Kenigsberg (Time Out New York), Nick Pinkerton (Voice), Nick Schager (Slant), Eric D Snider (Cinematical) and Scott Tobias (AV Club). Related: Capone talks with Freddy Rodriguez and Luis Guzman for AICN.

• "In the last few years Hindi films have become slicker and faster, full of dizzying camera moves and blink-and-you'll-miss-it editing," writes Rachel Saltz. "How refreshing, then, to settle into Rab Ne Bana di Jodi (A Match Made by God), a love story that has a different pace and feel than the recent crop of action thrillers."

• More book reviews of likely interest to Daily readers: Thomas Mallon on Annie Leibovitz at Work and Douglas Wolk on Art Spiegelman's Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!, Dean Haspiel's The Alcoholic and David Heatley's My Brain is Hanging Upside Down.

• Ethan Bronner talks with Ari Folman about Waltz With Bashir.

• "Van Johnson, a film actor whose affable charm and boyish good looks helped turn him into a major Hollywood star during World War II, died Friday in Nyack, NY," reports Aljean Harmetz. "He was 92." More from Robert Cashill, Edward Copeland, Glenn Kenny, Joe Leydon, Scott Marks, the Self-Styled Siren and Bob Westal.

Leo Goldsmith remembers Xie Jin at Moving Image Source: "As his films were all made under the aegis of state-controlled film studios and released with the imprimatur of government censors, his career offers something like a lesson in Maoist historiography - didactic, contradictory, and mercurial. During this period - from the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, to the brutal oppression of the Cultural Revolution, to the social and economic reforms of Deng Xiaoping's regime and beyond - Xie's accomplished melodramas alternately extolled, endured, and criticized the political and economic vicissitudes of his country."

In FilmInFocus, five San Franciscans on their city and the movies: Barry Jenkins (Medicine for Melancholy; related online viewing: My Josephine), Graham Leggat (San Francisco Film Society), experimental/documentary filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt, Rob Nilsson (9@Night) and playwright Amy Freed.

Screenwriter Simon Beaufoy recalls the day he dreamed up Slumdog Millionaire: "I am lost in the maze of alleys in Mumbai's Juhu slum, a network of dark passages a few feet across, pierced by arrows of sunlight. In these canyons I stumble across dogs, chickens, water pipes, open sewers and thousands of families. Everywhere I go, I am pursued by two dozen grubby Indian kids all pointing and laughing at my pink, sunburnt face. 'Hey, Mr Bean, you hot?' says a 10-year old troublemaker. (One is either Mr Bean or Rambo to these children, and it didn't take them long to make their decision.)"

Also in the Guardian:

• Alfred Hickling briefly reviews Alexander Ahndoril fictional biography of Ingmar Bergman, The Director, which "became notorious in Sweden when the director, having originally approved the manuscript, denounced it in a television interview shortly before his death." More from Paul Binding in the Independent.

• "Once, which cost £40,000 and won an Oscar, Following, made by Christopher Nolan for £6,000, and London to Brighton, by Paul Andrew Williams, are proving that no-budget features - which in truth can cost anything from a few thousand pounds to half a million - can be attention-grabbing and even profitable. Lately, the microbudget template has been adopted by a number of lottery and public-funded schemes." Mark Salisbury reports.

• Peter Bradshaw on Inkheart: "CGI fantasy adventures in the post-Potter, young-adult, old-child mode are not quite my taste, but this one is likably boisterous, and Iain Softley directs with flair." More from Philip French (Observer), David Gritten (Telegraph), David Jenkins (Time Out), Derek Malcolm (Evening Standard), Anthony Quinn (Independent) and Neil Young.

• And Béla Tarr's The Man from London finally arrives in London. "Pacy it ain't," notes Peter Bradshaw. "There is, however, something intriguingly subversive about Tarr's anti-thriller. As if in some experiment, he has boiled away the excitement, to leave behind a viscous residue of existential dread. If you read [Georges] Simenon's book last thing at night, then this might be the dream you would have after turning out the light." More from Philip French (Observer), David Jenkins (Time Out, where Wally Hammond interviews Tarr), Derek Malcolm (Evening Standard), Anthony Quinn (Independent) and Neil Young.

"Set in a dystopian metropolis bathed in shades of amber and blue, Rachel Samuels's retro-noir Dark Streets feels like a labor of love, the kind that blinds as well as inspires," writes Sam Adams in the Los Angeles Times. "The movie, drawn from Wallace King's adaptation of Glenn Stewart's play, drips with style, but it's all flourish and no reveal." More from Roger Ebert (Chicago Sun-Times), Tim Grierson (Voice), Eric Hynes (indieWIRE), Michael Russell (Oregonian), Nick Schager (Slant) and Scott Tobias (AV Club). And indieWIRE interviews Samuels.

Back in the LAT, Susan King talks with Rod Lurie about Nothing But the Truth; Michael J Ybarra with Matteo Garrone about Gomorrah.

Christopher Plummer has a new memoir out, In Spite of Myself, and Jeff has a good long talk with him at Movie Morlocks.

"Having failed to win the Congratulations For Not Dying Yet award for Venus at the 2007 Oscars, Peter O'Toole soldiers on," writes Ryan Gilbey in the New Statesman. "In Dean Spanley, set in an early-20th-century England of fog and frost, the 76-year-old actor wears a look of livid, bug-eyed amusement, and his silver locks seem metallic against his puce skin.... The picture is essentially a triangle of dotty but deeply felt performances. [Sam] Neill is the revelation." The third: Jeremy Northam as Henslowe, son of Horatio Fisk (O'Toole). More from Philip French (Observer), Wally Hammond (Time Out), Derek Malcolm (Evening Standard) and Tim Robey (Telegraph).

In an obituaries issue of the Observer Magazine, Terry Gilliam remembers Heath Ledger:

In terms of his acting, it still rankles with me that he's dead because he would have been streets ahead of anyone else in his generation. He just kept getting better and better. He was fearless. On [The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus], he was improvising all the time and it was better than what we had written. I don't normally encourage that kind of improvisation, but in a sense I felt Heath was writing this film. He was an incredibly funny performer when he wanted to be - his comic timing was just extraordinary - and then he could break your heart the next minute.

Also: "I think it is clear from his work that Anthony Minghella had a great heart," writes Jude Law. "His subtle understanding of people is what makes his interpretation of souls so engaging in his work."

And Ronnie Wood remembers Bo Diddley: "His sound, which has been described as the devil moving his furniture, still turns me on today."

In the Observer Review, Ajesh Patalay argues that, "When it comes to web series, Hollywood can't afford not to be ahead - particularly given how quickly viewing habits are changing as a growing number of consumers view content online." Among those trying their hands at the new format are Ashton Kutcher (Blahgirls) and Stephen Colbert (Children's Hospital). "Also in the pipeline are projects from Josh Schwartz (creator of Gossip Girl and The OC), the Coen brothers and film directors Bryan Singer and David Lynch. In the United States, all the leading studios have digital arms (including HBOlab, Warner Bros' Studio 2.0 and Sony's Crackle) which produce spin-off web series from mainstream shows (such as The Wire and Gossip Girl) as well as original content."

And Philip French looks back on the career of Ava Gardner, while Vanessa Thorpe reviews a new biography, Arthur Miller: "Christopher Bigsby's lengthy, sympathetic study contains electrifying new perspectives on its subject."

For Rolling Stone, Mark Binelli visits Brad Pitt on the set of Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. The first round of the conversation, about The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, naturally, is online; for the rest, you'll have to borrow a copy. Related online viewing: The Playlist has Wes Anderson's Tati-inspired Brad Pitt-starring ad for a Japanese phone company.

"The story behind the making of Delgo is heartwarming and inspiring," writes Peter Martin at Cinematical:

Fathom Studios, based in Atlanta, Georgia, has been creating commercial computer animation for more than ten years. When they decided to produce their own feature-length narrative film, they did it completely independent of the Hollywood studio system. They labored long and hard with a much smaller budget and a much smaller staff than the animation behemoths. They bravely posted "digital dailes" throughout production, a kind of progressive, online series of "making of" snippets. They recruited a slew of actors with name recognition - Freddie Prinze Jr, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Val Kilmer, Malcolm McDowell, Louis Gossett Jr, Michael Clarke Duncan, Burt Reynolds, Chris Kattan and the late Anne Bancroft in her last performance - to voice the characters.

If only the film as a whole was as dramatic and lively as the behind-the-scenes story.

More from Mark Olsen (Los Angeles Times) and Luke Y Thompson (Voice).

"Kim Basinger, what's happened to you?" asks Sara Vilkomerson. More on While She Was Out, also in the New York Observer, from Andrew Sarris.

"If you could cut all the music from Where God Left His Shoes, you might actually have a solid family drama," suggests Matt Noller in Slant. More from Nick Pinkerton (Voice) and Stephen Snart (L Magazine).

"When I moved to the United Arab Emirates, I thought I knew what censorship meant," writes Craig Courtice, who then describes for Artforum how four months in Abu Dhabi have effected him in surprising ways.

Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing: "Tim Jones of the Electronic Frontier Foundation has some good commentary on the news that the MPAA has asked Obama to spy on the entire Internet, and to establish a system where being accused of copyright infringement would result in loss of your Internet connection (and your VoIP line, your access to your university, your lifeline to your parents in the old country, your means of participating in civic life, your means of fighting your parking ticket, etc etc etc)."

Booze Movies: The 100 Proof Film Guide. Via Movie City News.

What's Glenn Kenny doing in Popular Mechanics? Talking HD, naturally. "The piece contains a lot of interesting information about how your Blu-ray sausage is made, if I may say so myself, and also delves into the differing philosophies involved," he notes at Some Came Running. And there's a list, too: "20 Must-Have Blu-ray HD Epics."

Online browsing tip. "You know, at heart, that the movies are truly another version of magic when you recognise the emptiness, the feeling of desertion, at the end of every film. Where did they all go? And why can't we go with them?" David Thomson in the Guardian on The End, a Flickr photo set from Dill Pixels.

Online listening tip #1. Tom Ashbrook talks holiday movies with Ty Burr and Claudia Puig.

Online listening tip #2. A roundtable at the House Next Door commemorating the one-year-anniversary of Preston Miller's Jones.

Online viewing tip #1. From Jason Kottke: "Just Like the Movies is a short film by Michal Kosakowski that samples footage from movies that were made prior to September 2001 to recreate the events of 9/11."

Online viewing tip #2. FilmCatcher talks with Steve McQueen about Hunger.

Online viewing tip #3. Nathaniel R's promo for StinkyLulu's third annual Supporting Actress Blog-a-Thon, happening January 4.

Posted by dwhudson at December 14, 2008 1:27 PM