Venice. Infamous.

"[T]he good news is that it's not a bad effort," announces Time Out's Dave Calhoun. "The bad news, though, is that Infamous, in its focus on the writing of In Cold Blood and Capote's ambiguous, varied motives for completing that work, is in many ways a carbon copy of the concerns and themes of Capote. Worse, it doesn't handle those same concerns as well as its predecessor.... All that was painted grey in Capote becomes black-and-white in Infamous. It's an inferior approach to a character as complicated, as multi-faced as Truman Capote."

"[T]here was an integrity and character-complexity to the 2005 release that's missing from this glossier biopic," finds Variety's David Rooney. Still, "Sandra Bullock's understated performance as Capote's friend [Harper] Lee is a high point here." On the other hand, "The parade of famous names playing famous names - Sigourney Weaver as Babe Paley, Isabella Rossellini as Marella Agnelli, Peter Bogdanovich as Bennett Cerf, Hope Davis as Slim Keith - is diverting but they're like glamorous wallpaper in a slick package.... Toby Jones is a good physical match for Capote, getting his flamboyant mannerisms and creepy, nasal voice down. But unlike Philip Seymour Hoffman's Oscar-winning turn, there's no texture, no under-the-skin sense of the conflict between Capote's ambition for his book and his compassion for, and attraction to, Perry."

Updated through 9/3.

Updates, 9/1: There's hope yet. Lee Marshall in Screen Daily: "Infamous is a fascinating film, dramatically more rewarding than Capote, and anchored by a mesmeric performance from British actor Toby Jones which more than measures up to last year's Oscar-winning turn by Philip Seymour Hoffman."

Both are "brilliant movies," insists the Hollywood Reporter's Kirk Honeycutt.

Updates, 9/2: Blogging for the Telegraph, Hugh Davies raves.

Boyd van Hoeij focuses on the contrasts between the duelling Capotes.

So how did it come to pass that two films addressing the same chapter in Capote's life would be made all but simultaneously (the release of Infamous was withheld nearly a year)? Ray Pride pieces the story together at Movie City Indie.

Update, 9/3: Jason Solomons interviews Toby Jones for the Observer. Guess what the first question is.

Telluride. Lineup.

Got an email last night from a guy I like and respect chastising me for merely pointing to speculation as to what might be in the lineup for the Telluride Film Festival. The surprise is half the fun, he argued, making an analogy: suppose, a few days before Christmas, you told the kids what was in the gifts under the tree? I'm still of two minds on this, but at least for this year's edition, it's no longer an issue. Festival director Tom Luddy has unwrapped the packages and Eugene Hernandez reports in full.

While you're at indieWIRE, you might check Brian Brooks's report on the official selection for the 54th San Sebastian International Film Festival and his report on the winners at the 12th Palm Springs International Festival of Short Films & Short Film Market (ShortFest).

Interview. Andrew Bujalski.

"I think I might actually be being filmed. Now. As I speak to you." If Hannah Eaves had to be interrupted during her talk with Andrew Bujalski about Funny Ha Ha and Mutual Appreciation, she couldn't have asked for a more appropriate disruption.

Reviews of Mutual Appreciation have been accumulating ever since the film's premiere at SXSW in 2005, but the last round is as lively as any of them.

"About the unlikeliest, most unassuming critical flashpoint imaginable, Andrew Bujalski somehow sparked an immediate and testy divide amongst the Reverse Shot critics when his rumpled first film, Funny Ha Ha, hit theaters last year after years with no distribution but a solid underground following." And Jeff Reichert opens another round at indieWIRE. It was Michael Koresky (pro) vs Nick Pinkerton (con) last time, and so it is again. As for Reichert, "Bujalski's a poor man's Rohmer to be sure, but this is, in my book, better than a host of Kevin Smiths or similarly untalented indie hacks." Meanwhile, Brian Brooks introduces iW's interview with Bujalski.

Updated through 9/2.

"Gently persistent in its ironies, Funny Ha Ha managed to be both charmingly lackadaisical and annoyingly smug; Mutual Appreciation, which Bujalski shot in grainy black-and-white in hipster Brooklyn (and is self-distributing), is even more so," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "Variety's reviewer nailed the format: Bujalski turns a John Cassavetes camera on an Eric Rohmer talkfest, except that the camera is more relaxed and the actors less animated."

In Slant, Nick Schager calls it "a modest step up from its assured predecessor in both content and form, revealing discerning truths about, and wringing deadpan humor from, post-college anomie through a carefully arranged narrative structured around casual ellipses and sly symmetries."

An "A-" from Scott Tobias at the AV Club.

Update: Anthony Kaufman: Justin Rice's "jittery, electric music performance at Williamsburg club Northsix... is worth the price of admission alone."

Updates, 9/1: Manohla Dargis in the New York Times: "It's the sort of unassuming discovery that could get lost in a crowd or suffer from too much big love, and while it won't save or change your life, it may make your heart swell. Its aim is modest and true.... If Mutual Appreciation doesn't look like any film out on screens today, it does boldly look back at Jean Eustache's landmark of modern French cinema, The Mother and the Whore." This one, she adds, along with Half Nelson and Old Joy, are "hopeful signs of cinematic life from young American directors."

Bilge Ebiri at Nerve: "It deserves the highest praise one can give such a unique film: It's hard to imagine this story being told any other way."

Updates, 9/2: Daniel Kasman: "Mutual Appreciation often feels like a naturalistic Hong Sang-soo film. Because of that director’s highly structured way of directing his characters through rhythmic plot points, this unexpected comparison warrants a far closer look at the way Bujalski organizes his stories and his character portrayal than his aesthetic seems to ask from the audience."

At Twitch, Peter Martin writes that Funny Ha Ha "engaged me on a subatomic level.... The beauty is that the film holds up to repeated viewings. Each time I saw it, I peered deeper into it, trying to figure out how Bujalski and his collaborators made something so substantial appear so lightweight, until I gave up and gave in to its gentle rhythms." Along comes Mutual Appreciation and... "And nothing clicked."

The Reeler gets a microphone and a camera in front of both Joe Swanberg and Andrew Bujalski.

Online viewing tip. Karina Longworth latest edition of "Netscape at the Movies."

Venice. The US vs John Lennon.

Having screened in Venice, The US vs John Lennon will move onto Toronto before opening on September 15 in NY and LA before expanding on September 29.

Martin A Grove, writing in the Hollywood Reporter, thinks the doc could be an Oscar contender. "It's a film that's likely to resonate with older Academy members, who lived through America's tragic involvement in the Vietnam War, as well as younger Academy members, who will view it in the context of today's tragic US involvement in the war in Iraq." Grove talks with directors David Leaf and John Scheinfeld.

"[B]y getting Yoko Ono to cooperate and open the vaults, the storyline follows the Ono-approved bio that posits Lennon as saint, excising his dark periods and their years apart, which could have enhanced the portrait," writes Phil Gallo for Variety.

Updated through 9/7.

Earlier: David Leaf at Toronto's Doc Blog.

Update: John Scheinfeld at the Doc Blog: "I do love gumshoeing my way into people's hearts, minds, data bases and closets in search of audio/visual material that has not been seen in a zillion other Lennon/Beatles-related documentaries."

Update, 9/2: Jeffrey Wells lays out a few points on which he disagrees with Gallo's review and adds a few of his own: "In short, Leaf and Scheinfeld's movie celebrates what a brave and commendable guy Lennon was when he got into a standoff with the government, but doesn't even acknowledge that his abrupt withdrawal from this activity, from occupying his persona as Lennon-the-bold-and-outspoken, is what ended his life. They could have spoken to some friend or biogrqapher who could have at least mentioned this (without giving Chapman's motive any respect, I mean)... but the irony never surfaces. It isn't even breathed upon."

Update, 9/6: "[S]nazzy, mawkish, and practically Pavlovian in recycling all requisite late-60s images," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "Given its subject, though, this David Leaf-John Scheinfeld production is not only poignant but even topical."

Update, 9/7: Ed Gonzalez in Slant: "[T]he film is pure fluff, a competently detailed catalog of Lennon's political ambitions told in the visual shorthand of the VH1 rock-doc."

Venice. The Black Dahlia.

"There will be a few less than favorable comparisons to LA Confidential and Chinatown: it goes with the territory," predicted Anne Thompson, and sure enough, Variety's Todd McCarthy obliges. The first film is "significantly superior" and: "Chinatown it ain't, not in any department. On its own level, however, new pic generates a reasonable degree of intrigue." Brian De Palma's The Black Dahlia is, for McCarthy, nevertheless a "lushly rendered noir."

"During the first hour, the hope that the director has tapped into something really great mounts with each passing minute," writes the Hollywood Reporter's Kirk Honeycutt. But "the second half feels heavy and unfulfilled, potential greatness reduced to a good movie plagued with problems."

Updated through 9/3.

Lee Marshall for Screen Daily: "De Palma has nailed the queasy, menacing atmosphere of post-war Los Angeles and its obsession with violent death. Some classic De Palma themes - voyeurism, lookalikes, sexual ambivalence, shifting perspectives on the truth - are paraded, ensuring that fans of the love-him-or-hate-him director will be kept busy with the rewind button when the film comes out on DVD."

James Ellroy's fine with it, reports Hugh Davies for the Telegraph: "Twice in my 27-year novel career I've been lucky with film adaptations. The first was LA Confidential, and now The Black Dahlia."

Update: James Israel writes... oh, sorry, where was I?

Updates, 9/1: "Typically these days, no studio would back a movie like Dahlia. After director David Fincher dropped out, De Palma patiently plugged away for three years at realizing Josh Friedman's adaptation of James Ellroy's Los Angeles novel," writes the Hollywood Reporter's Anne Thompson, who talks with the director.

Two via Cinema Strikes Back, Derek Malcolm in the Evening Standard: "This is De Palma back to something like his best." And an "A-" from Emanuel Levy.

Updates, 9/2: "De Palma stages some terrific set-pieces including a stunning crane shot over the roof of a house where a shootout is taking place, to a deserted field where Short's mangled body lies and the story really begins," writes the Telegraph's David Gritten.

David Jenkins, blogging for Time Out, compares the film with Genesis. The band. (Infamous, by the way, would be The Strokes; "well produced and with many wonderful moments, but ultimately too derivative for long-term admiration.") Anyway, Genesis/Dahlia: "lumbering, overcomplicated and unfashionable like you wouldn't believe. It's his first film since 2002's Femme Fatale, which didn't make it to these shores for reasons of quality control, and it's average in a way that only de Palma could get away with."

Ryan Wu points to Geoffrey Macnab's "Wagnerian" profile of Scarlett Johansson in the Independent. I'll let him explain what he means by that.

Update, 9/3: Another Scarlett Johansson profile, this one from Alice Fisher in the Observer.

Towards Telluride.

How do you preview a festival if you don't know what films will be shown there? Well, you can't. Instead, Jonathan Marlow reminds us why the anticipation's to be relished.

Fall festival season rains down upon us in earnest, even for those in denial about the pending change of seasons. As Cannes is the first indication that the warmer months are about to begin, the Telluride Film Festival is the cinematic reminder that there are colder months ahead. But, for those four days over Labor Day weekend, if you're among the several hundred folks that make the journey to Colorado for one of the true highlights of the film festival year, there is little time to talk about the weather.

Unlike most festivals, Telluride waits until the last possible moment to announce its schedule. Attendees are only informed of the screenings on the first day of the event, requiring some hasty scheduling to determine what to see and when to see it. It also requires a great deal of good faith to make a lengthy expedition into the unknown. While this might otherwise seem problematic, you are in good hands with their remarkable programming team. Of course, it makes a preview of the festival entirely pointless. Despite my intense dislike for the first person pronoun, the following paragraph will be peppered with them.

For example, festival co-founder Tom Luddy telephoned me a few days ago. That, by itself, is not an unusual occurrence. I was quite pleased that TFF borrowed a few words from an entry that I wrote for the Daily in their Variety and Entertainment Weekly advertisements. It seemed, in that call, that Tom was about to tell me a few things about the forthcoming schedule. If he did, I couldn't tell you about it here. However, he didn't. Sometimes it is better not to know. But he hinted. I already knew that one of my favorite films of the year thus far would not be screening there. I even agreed with his reasons not to show it. I'll have to tell you about that one later. I presumed that a few other titles that were well-received at Cannes would finally get their state-side debuts at Telluride. No surprise there. He confirmed as much, discretely. Outside of these scant crumbs, I'll have to wait until Friday. Just like you. Fortunately, I suspect that it will be worth the wait.

Glenn Ford, 1916 - 2006.

Glenn Ford, a laconic, soft-spoken actor with an easy smile who played leading roles in many westerns, melodramas and romantic films from the early 1940s through the 60s, died yesterday at his Beverly Hills home. He was 90.

Richard Severo in the New York Times.

Another screen legend has passed away before the Academy ever got around to lauding him with an honorary Oscar.

Edward Copeland.

Updated through 9/1.

He was a journeyman actor of the finest kind, working in an impressive array of genres: Everything from gritty Westerns (Budd Boetticher's The Man from the Alamo, Delmer Daves's 3:10 to Yuma) to hardboiled film noir (Charles Vidor's Gilda, Fritz Lang's The Big Heat), from family-friendly comedies (Frank Capra's Pocketful of Miracles, Vincente Minnelli's The Courtship of Eddie's Father) to edge-of-your-seat thrillers... My favorite of his many first-rate performances: His chronically boozy, increasingly desperate small-town doctor who fears he has contracted rabies in a remote desert community, and who's repeatedly detoured by distractions (like the va-va-voom Stella Stevens) while on the road to seeking aid, in Gilberto Gazcon's Rage (1966).

Joe Leydon.

His son, Peter Ford, is writing a biography.

Update: Online listening tip. Clips from NPR.

Update, 9/1: Ronald Bergan in the Guardian: "The hairstyles signposted Glenn Ford's long and active career; from the full and wavy to the sleek, dark gigolo look, to the short back and sides, to a severe crewcut that gradually shrivelled like dry grass on the prairie. His face, that began boyish in prewar B films, hovered somewhere between the rugged handsomeness of William Holden and Tom Ewell's Thurberesque one, allowing him to be extremely dour in films noirs or to display the righteous nobility of a lone western hero, while also being able to play perplexed characters in comedies."

From France.

"Eric Rohmer has become my favorite filmmaker in just the way that Eric Rohmer would prefer - without my even noticing," writes Stephen Metcalf in Slate. "Apprehensive over its status as a new art form, film had generated its own vocabulary, inward and semi-mystical, of mise en scene, a vocabulary that cut itself off from other cultural antecedents. Rohmer re-sutured it to Pascal and Balzac and Melville and Kant and Moliére, to the writers from the literary and philosophical past he cared for, on the one hand, and to conversation, to simple human speech, on the other."

For the Guardian, Hannah Westley meets Agnès Varda to talk about a bit about the past ("They called me 'The Ancestor of the New Wave' when I was only 30") and about her current exhibition, L'Ile et Elle, at the Fondation Cartier in Paris through October 8: "[I]n many ways Varda's exhibition is a return to the very beginnings of her career, when she started out as photographer-in-residence for the Théâtre National Populaire."

"For those who (perhaps wrongly) measure Chabrol to Hitchcock, however, one comparison seemed obvious: if La Cérémonie was Chabrol's Frenzy, then The Swindle was his Family Plot," writes Ray Young at Flickhead, where he points us to The Claude Chabrol Project and to My Gleanings' collection of "Chabrol's thumbnail critiques of Robert Aldrich, John Brahm, Edward Dmytryk, Philip Dunne, Martin Ritt and William Wyler from the Dec63/Jan64 special 'American Cinema' issue of Cahiers du Cinema."

Marc Caro, who co-directed Delicatessen and City of Lost Children with Jean-Pierre Jeunet, will be coming back with Dante 01; Brendon Connelly tells us what's known so far about this dark sci-fi thriller.

Michael Guillén talks dream theory and The Science of Sleep with Michel Gondry. Related: The Reeler's report on Gondry's SoHo appearance last night. Eugene Hernandez has a clip.

"Dumas amuck..." in the thoughts of David Jeffers at the Siffblog.

"Playtime has been likened to Joyce's Ulysses; in the sense of the cityscape and its noise and mutterings, are as essential to the picture as the lost figures wandering on it," writes Richard von Busack at Cinematical. "Lately, in films as different as Magnolia, Amores Perros and Crash, there were attempts to link city dwellers through mutual suffering, Tati suggests mutual pleasure might be just as valid a way depicting our connection."

From Japan.

Acquarello on Carmen Comes Home: "Filmed in 1952 at the end of American occupation, [Keisuke] Kinoshita presents a thoughtful, humorous, and (still) relevant commentary on the legacy of cultural imperialism enabled by the Occupation."

Todd at Twitch: "[Sogo] Ishii's films will simply not be for everyone. In fact, the large majority of people will likely outright hate them. He spurns standard ideas of narrative, opting instead for raw sensory experience but for those open to that change he is an experience not to be missed. Play them loud."

David Austin at Cinema Strikes Back: "In Teruo Ishii's final film, Blind Beast vs Killer Dwarf, famous fictional detective Kogoro Akechi states that 'There is only a fine line between genius and insanity.' No more apt words could ever be said about the career and films of Teruo Ishii, of which BBVKD is a perfect exemplar."

Andrew at Lucid Screening: "At a time in Japan's history when revolutionary violence was on a lot of (young) people's minds, Funeral Parade of Roses ensured that subversive sex couldn't be ignored."

Shorts, 8/30.

There are fresh Opening Shots and just a whole lot of other great things going on at Jim Emerson's scanners again.

Maysoon Pachachi set up a documentary course at the Independent Film & Television College in Baghdad in 2004; it was to have run three months, but it took a year. "The violence in Baghdad - criminal, political and sectarian - has increased exponentially in both quantity and brutality over the past two years, and like everyone else in the city, our students are burdened with physical and psychic traumas," writes Pachachi in the Guardian. "Many have had relatives kidnapped, injured or killed. And just getting to the school is a challenge. As one student said, 'every morning, I say a prayer, make up with my parents if we've rowed - just in case - and then leave the house. You can't just sit at home - afraid all the time.'" Their films have been made and will be seen.

Also in the Guardian:

• Simon Callow, who played Mozart, recalls the first production of Peter Shaffer's Amadeus, previewed five years before Milos Forman's adaptation.

• Paul Arendt reports on Michael Haneke's projected English-language remake of Funny Games: "[Producer Hamish] McAlpine is adamant that the film will not be sanitized for US audiences."

• Ronald Bergan remembers Arthur Franz, 1920 - 2006.

Ella Taylor: "Front-loaded with family discord, terminal cancer, prodigal jailbait, a cute kiddie looking for love, and other accessories of the ready-to-wear soap opera, Zhang Yimou's Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles is as heartfelt, sincere, and soggy with nostalgia as some of his other periodic homages to the virtues of peasant life in the backwaters of China." Related: at Twitch, logboy finds a trailer for Zhang Yimou's next one, Curse of the Golden Flower, with Gong Li and Chow Yun-Fat. Also in the Voice: "The Wicker Man's genre-bending, thematic daring, and tortuous history have made it the UK's definitive cult movie." Graham Fuller tells its story.

For Bilge Ebiri, Jack Clayton is "perhaps one of the most underrated filmmakers of all time." As part of Screengrab's "Forgotten Films" series, he writes that what makes Our Mother's House "so unique - and so heartbreaking - is Clayton's mastery of mood.... Clayton calibrates his tone so smoothly, we don't even notice we're watching a horror film until it's too late."

Puritan "has it all - the gorgeous cinematography heavy on shadows and contrast; the hard boiled, down on his luck anti-hero; the beautiful femme fatale; the betrayals and double crosses," writes Todd at Twitch. "Puritan has got all of the noir hallmarks in spades plus a healthy supernatural element thrown in to boot."

Frank Borzage "was a crucial developer of the ways that talking picture melodramas might resemble and distiguish themselves from their silent film predecessors," writes Brian Darr among the Cinemarati. "But it's also interesting to take a look at Borzage flourishes that did not become assimilated into the 'Classical Hollywood Style.'"

David Lowery on 8½: "It's all about any filmmaker who watches it, I think - including Fellini, who was only telling most of the truth when he said that, of all his films, this one is the least autobiographical, the most fantastical."

"Disguise is more appealing as an idea than a practice, and works best when it fails." In the London Review of Books, Michael Wood ruminates on what Michael Mann is up to in Miami Vice.

"2006 marks the moment that the dizzying pinball effect of hyperspeed editing has finally permeated every last corner of mainstream American cinema-not just the ADD-inducing action spectaculars that breed in summertime, but also the character-driven, explosion-free films offered as an alternative to the blockbusters," writes Jessica Winter in the Boston Globe. Via Jason Kottke. Paul Harrill responds, sparking several interesting comments.

After posting a friend's account of watching Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts in New Orleans (more from Paul Schrodt at Slant), the cinetrix recommends the Katrina Experience.

Has the Al Franken/Ann Coulter face-off been pulled from Al Franken: God Spoke "because Franken makes her look like the wingnut idiot that she is"? wonders Anthony Kaufman. As it turns out, yes. Commentary: Joe Leydon. Related: Jonathan Sheldon, co-author of Declaration of Independent Filmmaking, suggests "Seven Films Looking for Remakes... Starring Ann Coulter" to the Los Angeles Times. As for the film itself, Ed Gonzalez writes in Slant, "A better, less passé film about Franken's wife Franni forming the backbone of her husband's career lies dormant here, as does the man's rebel spirit. Perhaps the man could stand to learn from the Last Testament and fight fire with fire."

Solace in Cinema finds news that Richard Linklater is contemplating a sequel to The Last Detail.

Janet Maslin: "The Return of the Player does what it means to. It reanimates Griffin Mill and sends him straight from [Michael] Tolkin's darkest daydreams into your own. What it does not do is strike at the heart of Hollywood in the way the first book did, because both its interests and its fears have expanded."

Also in the New York Times:

• Dave Kehr on State of the Union, "the last important film of [Frank Capra's] career," and more new DVD releases. More takes on different releases from Susan King in the Los Angeles Times.

• "[E]conomists and other academics that study the movie industry" tell Eduardo Porter and Geraldine Fabrikant that stars "are simply not worth the expense."

• Ross Johnson on Robert Evans: "His durability surely says something about the power of myth in the movie world."

Half Nelson is "a non-didactic, intergenerational historical/political critique," writes Greg Allen. "But it works, because the filmmakers never lose touch with their film's emotional core, which is Dunne's development. This is such a well-realized film, I'm tempted to say it's hard to believe it's a first film. But then, I can't really imagine this thoroughly conceived-yet-modest film coming from anyone but a young filmmaker."

Jason Morehead on Little Miss Sunshine: "[T]he constant quirkiness and oddity becomes as rote and routine as any generic Hollywood melodrama, and just as subtle - this one just happens to reference Proust and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and have a foul-mouthed grandpa." More from Paul Schrodt at the Stranger Song and from Jeffrey Overstreet.

Daniel Kasman: "If Match Point was about what a morally compromised person can do when put in an awful, trying position, the elements that move forward to bring about death, Scoop is about coming to terms that not everything is what it seems, and about laughing at the seriousness of the façade and understanding what is behind it, for better or for worse."

In an interview translated into French, Bob Dylan tells Paola Genone and Thierry Gandillot in L'Express that he imagines his albums as films that tell stories of American identity. And in El Pais (and in Spanish), Michel Legrand, who has composed scores for the likes of Godard, Louis Malle and Jacques Demy, tells Rodrigo Carrizo Couto:

These days, I can't find a good film composer anywhere. Only John Williams and Ennio Morricone remain, although recently I've been finding them boring at times. The music of the avant-garde is a cul de sac. Atonal, serial, experimental music, it's all dead. The work by people like Boulez or Stockhausen often seems to be to be pure betrayal. Fortunately, we're gradually becoming aware of when we're being fooled. The music of the future, I believe, will draw closer to that of the great masters of the past.

That's translated from the German translation of Perlentaucher's "Magazinrundschau," where I found both interviews. In German, you'll find Verena Lueken and Michael Althen in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung talking with producer Bernd Eichinger about Perfume and a disappointed Fritz Göttler in the Süddeutsche Zeitung. He's seen Tom Tykwer's adaptation and suggests that it might have been a terrific little "dirty movie" (he uses the English there) had it been filmed in the 40s or 70s; as it is, Eichinger is banking on the genre known as "world literature adaptation," as he has in the past with The Name of the Rose and House of the Spirits. "Perfume, too, is aimed at the world market and is meant to prove that big international cinema can be made in Germany - at a cost of more than 50 million euros [over $64 million], it's the most expensive production ever made in this country." That's made Eichinger and Tykwer too cautious, argues Göttler, too worried to get through "without mistakes."

In Slant:

• Nick Schager on Looking for Kitty: "Ed Burns's "habitual regurgitation of well-trod themes (romantic loss, masculine bonding, and maturation) continues to pay ever-smaller dividends." And Crossover.

• DVDs: Eric Henderson on Let's Scare Jessica to Death ("Let's bore gorefreaks to distraction") and Keith Uhlich on Iron Island ("clear-sighted and compassionate, a mythic expression of people in a constant state of flux").

• Ed Gonzalez on Saint of 9/11, Paper Dolls and more DVDs: Summer Storm, Say Uncle and Guys and Balls.

Jeffrey Wells asks: What film have you loved that the rest of the world sneered at? The comments, they are streaming.

Joan Blondell would have been 100 today. Josh R pays tribute at Edward Copeland on Film.

Previously undiscovered love poems by Marlene Dietrich have been, well, discovered. Among the addresses: Noël Coward, Orson Welles, Ernest Hemingway, Yul Brynner and... Ronald Reagan? Evidently. Anna Weinberg has the story at the Book Standard. Via Ed Champion, who's found another one.

Apple's "possible entry into the movie download business could change the landscape of video entertainment much like its iPod devices and iTunes service rocked the music world," reports Patrick Seitz for Investor's Business Daily.

Mediabistro notes that Paramount is donating ten percent of the profits made during World Trade Center's opening five days to to 9/11 charities. That's $2.6 million. Related: Stanley Kauffmann's review for the New Republic.

For Stop Smiling, Michael Helke talks with Paolo Ventura about his mixed-media work, War Souvenir.

Online you-gotta-see-this tip. Tom Sutpen posts an amazing photo at If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger....

Online listening tip. Vince Keenan and Rosemarie " take a look at two groundbreaking films from an era when films about sex were for adults and not horny teenagers: Last Tango in Paris and Carnal Knowledge."

Online viewing tip #1. StinkyLulu is hosting another "Supporting Actress Smackdown," the year is 1962, and Nathaniel R's got the clip reel so you can sample the performances of Mary Badham in To Kill a Mockingbird, Patty Duke in The Miracle Worker, Shirley Knight in Sweet Bird of Youth, Angela Lansbury in The Manchurian Candidate and Thelma Ritter in Birdman of Alcatraz. StinkyLulu and Nathaniel R are joined in their rumble by Nick Davis and Tim R.

Online viewing tip #2. The Memory. Via wood s lot: "In this house the great film director Andrei Tarkovsky spent his childhood and adolescence, Zamoskvorechye, 1st Schipkovsky Lane, 1997."

Online viewing tips, round 1. At the Daily Reel, Anthony Kaufman points to "a number of professionally-made politically charged viral videos" by Franklin Lopez.

Online viewing tips, round 2. The Trailer Mash. Via Movie City News. Related: Trailer Trashers at Google Video.

Online viewing tips, round 3. DVblog offers a couple of Hal Hartley clips.

Online viewing tips, round 4. Save the Internet. Via filmtagebuch.

Joseph Stefano, 1922 - 2006.

Joseph Stefano, 84, who after leaving Philadelphia as a young man to pursue a career in show business ended up writing the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and becoming a co-creator of television's seminal science fiction anthology series The Outer Limits, died of lung cancer Friday at Los Robles Hospital in Thousand Oaks, Calif.

[...]

His 1993 movie Two Bits - about an 11-year-old boy who tries to scrape together a quarter to go to a movie - recounted the hard times he and his family faced. The movie was filmed in South Philadelphia, and starred Al Pacino.

Gayle Ronan Sims for the Philadelphia Inquirer, via Ed Champion.

Updated through 9/5.

He also wrote a romantic drama called The Black Orchid, for which Sophia Loren won a best actress prize from the Venice Film Festival.

Adam Bernstein in the Washington Post.

Updates, 9/2: As he notes in the comment below - and thanks! - Marc Savlov interviewed Stefano for the Austin Chronicle in 1999.

Online listening tip. NPR's Scott Simon. Briefly.

Update, 9/5: C Jerry Kutner on the origins of Norman Bates in Bright Lights After Dark.

Fests and events, 8/30.

"Sundance has swag, Cannes has yachts, Toronto stars. Telluride has class." In the Los Angeles Times, John Horn previews this weekend's edition of the festival that really is all about the movies and nothing else - and risks a few predictions as to what might be in the lineup, usually a secret right up to opening day. Which is Friday. The fest runs through Monday. And Jeffrey Wells is sure Severance will be there.

The Venice Film Festival is open and running through September 9; the Guardian and Time Out have previews and the AP's Colleen Barry already has what seems to be the first press conference report with lots of Black Dahlia quotage. Hollywoodland, also screening at the fest, and Dahlia are both are set in mid-20th century Los Angeles. And, as Borys Kit notes in the Hollywood Reporter, both were shot outside the US.

Euro | topics rounds up a dossier on the Venice vs Rome feud: "The European press has already declared Venice the cinematic winner, but nonetheless sees great potential in its rival in Rome."

Matt Dentler follows up on Tom Hall's and Eugene Hernandez's thoughts on the "how many is too many" question when it comes to festival lineups. Also, a reminder for Austinites as to Surviving the Blacklist: Joseph Losey in Europe, a series running September 5 through October 10 at the Alamo Drafthouse Downtown.

In the run-up to its month-long series London on Screen, Time Out runs an extract from a 1971 interview with Mick Jagger, in which he talks about Performance.

For the Independent, Charlotte Cripps previews the Bird's Eye Film Festival, "devoted entirely to the work of international female filmmakers" (September 15 through 17 at the ICA in London).

Back in the Guardian, Ronald Bergan looks back on the Sarajevo Film Festival.

The award-winners at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, which wrapped on Sunday: the Michael Powell Award for Best New British Feature Film goes to Brothers of the Head (Joe Bowman's take); the Standard Life Audience Award to Clerks II; the Best Documentary Feature Award to The Great Happiness Space: Tale of an Osaka Love Thief; the Skillset New Directors Award to London to Brighton. Brian Brooks has more at indieWIRE and Trevor Johnson files an overview for Time Out.

Related: "On opposite sides of Edinburgh... two grand septuagenarians - each, in his different way, a British cultural icon - were taking the opportunity to vent their respective spleens." Charlotte Higgins reports in the Guardian on comments from Sean Connery and Harold Pinter.

Mark Swed caught "A Tribute to the Sounds of Forbidden Planet" last Friday and reports for the Los Angeles Times.

TIFF + Toronto.

Pedro Costa's Colossal Youth will be screening at the Toronto International Film Festival (September 7 through 16) and Andy Rector is among those who are hoping this will drum up interest in his work in North America (e.g., Cinema Scope). In the first of a series of entries at Kino Slang aimed at just that, he offers a translated transcription of a talk Costa delivered to young filmmakers in Tokyo in 2004. As Zach Campbell writes in his comment on the entry, "Whew, that's some read!"

"Throw Another Blog on the Fire." J Robert Parks launches framing device, just in time for Toronto. Doug Cummings has his schedule worked out; Girish is hosting a discussion of the lineup.

Fresh entries at the Doc Blog come from Andrea Picard (on experimental docs), Lucy Walker (a journal entry written while shooting Blindsight), Liz Mermin (on the origins of her Office Tigers), Hoabam Paban Kumar (on A Cry in the Dark) and Amy Berg (on the already feted Deliver Us From Evil).

"If you think Australian films have felt a bit safe lately - often dark, yes, but nothing like the art house films made overseas - it might be time to think again." Garry Maddox in the Sydney Morning Herald on three films screening in Toronto: The Book of Revelation, Macbeth and the controversial 2:37. Via Movie City News.

At Twitch, Todd unveils seven titles to be screened at Toronto After Dark (October 20 through 24).

Only somewhat related, but interesting anyway: Michael Barclay in Exclaim!: "This is Torontopia." Via Chromewaves.

SFBG. Fall Arts.

As The Black Dahlia opens the Venice Film Festival tonight, it also leads Cheryl Eddy's list of ten most anticipated films of the fall season. Also part of the San Francisco Bay Guardian's "Fall Arts" package are Johnny Ray Huston's detailed guide to upcoming series and retros throughout the Bay Area (dates, URLs, the works), Midnites for Maniacs programmer Jesse Hawthorne Ficks's picks and an annotated calendar.

Related: Dennis Cozzalio catches the winds of De Palmania in his sails and steers them to his own defense of the director.

And Slant's "Auteur Fatale" grows a little each day; plus, they've got a titles-only but excruciatingly complete fall release schedule.

As for Venice, Roderick Conway Morris has a preview for the International Herald Tribune; Filmz.de gathers German press coverage.

Updates: Brian Darr has a massive roundup of fall goings on in the Bay Area, including word of when San Franciscans will get their first look at Bong Joon-ho's The Host. Speaking of which, at Twitch, Todd's found a new trailer.

David Pratt-Robson on Carlito's Way: "De Palma is almost certainly the only director who has consistently been able to give tackiness the pathos it usually aspires to."

Naguib Mahfouz, 1911 - 2006.

Naguib Mahfouz, who became the first Arab writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature for his novels depicting Egyptian life in his beloved corner of ancient Cairo, died Wednesday, his doctor said. He was 94.

Lee Keath for the AP.

Everything to do with dramatisation interests me; it has been my career.... I used to watch a lot of films. I would go every week to at least one foreign film and one Arabic film. I loved action and crime in particular and was a fan of Hitchcock.

Mahfouz, talking about his screenwriting career, as recorded by Mohamed Salmawy for the Al-Ahram Weekly.

See also: Bio, bibliography, Nobel lecture and more at Nobelprize.org; Wikipedia entry; Books and Writers.

Updates: Lee Smith in Slate and Robert D McFadden in the New York Times (a sidebar points to related pieces as well).

Update, 9/2: Laila Lalami in the Nation: "With the death of Mahfouz, Egypt has been deprived of its greatest living writer and of its last icon of the twentieth century, and the world has lost one of its most humane literary figures."

Update, 9/5: A dossier in the Al-Ahram Weekly.

New York and everything.

"Glenn O'Brien's TV Party - which featured appearances by Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Klaus Nomi, Debbie Harry, John Lurie, Tuxedomoon, DNA, David Byrne, Jean-Michel Basquiat, hip-hop pioneers Fab Five Freddy and Funky Four Plus One, among many other guests - ran for four years, from 1978 - 1982," Steve Gallagher reminded us in the Filmmaker blog when Danny Vinik's TV Party screened at Tribeca last year. O'Brien, former editor of Interview, contributor to the Voice and so on, naturally has a million stories to tell, and he tells more than a few of them to Charlotte Robinson in PopMatters. "A lot of the people who were my contemporaries, the artists, were in bands.... That was what you did, a little bit of everything." The interview's accompanied by two clips.

Ric Burns has completed his four-hour Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film and it'll screen at Film Forum from September 1 through 14 before airing on PBS later in the month. Ed Gonzalez in Slant: "More light is shed on the culture vulture's personal life than ever before, and though we are told over and over again why Warhol and his art still matter, the documentary doesn't shill for the man."

Updated through 9/3.

"Laurie Anderson narrates, and Jeff Koons reads Andy's voice when needed (a slyly apt bit of casting, since Koons's entire career could be seen as a vast Warhol quotation, and his own press face is as calculatedly plastic)," writes Ed Halter in the Voice. "The result is an intellectual history of Warhol, bucking the trend toward the star-studded VH1-ization of biodocs and constructed with a mission to dispel the artist's own self-created image as high-fashion hobnobber in favor of a more profound depiction. Burns argues for a cogitating, agitating Warhol: deep thinker, cultural barometer, and world changer.... Warhol's advice to other artists is suitably cited: 'Do everything.'"

Updates, 9/1: Bilge Ebiri has a fun, long talk with Burns at Nerve.

"Ric Burns's solemn four-hour hagiography Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film may set a record for the number of times the label 'genius' is applied to its subject," writes Stephen Holden. "The label sticks." The film "assures us that Warhol was the greatest artist of the second half of the 20th century, just as Picasso was of the first half."

More from Salon's Andrew O'Hehir in Salon, who's hesitant to buy just that.

Update, 9/2: "'There is no artist as famous as Andy Warhol who is held in as much contempt,' Burns told The Reeler," who remarks of the doc, "Like Warhol's most accomplished work, it manages fastidiousness and cleanliness - even austerity at times - without being antiseptic."

Update, 9/3: IndieWIRE interviews Burns.

Interview. Joe Swanberg.

Even as Joe Swanberg's first feature, Kissing on the Mouth, comes out on DVD, his second, LOL, is screening at the Pioneer Theater in New York through September 3, his webisodic series Young American Bodies rolls on at Nerve - and he's just completed shooting yet another feature, Hannah Takes the Stairs.

Just up at the main site: Andrew Grant, whom we all know and read as Filmbrain, asks Joe about all this hyperactivity, his influences, the state of indies, and of course: what's next.

Earlier: "Online viewing tip. Young American Bodies.

Updated through 9/2.

Update, 8/30: Don R Lewis on LOL in Film Threat: "Swanberg continues to grow as a filmmaker and I can’t wait to see what he comes up with next."

Update, 8/31: Michael Tully's seen Hannah. And says only so much as he can. At this point.

Updates, 9/2: Michael Tully snaps shots on Joe's 25th.

The Reeler gets a microphone and a camera in front of both Joe Swanberg and Andrew Bujalski.

Date Number One.

Few online evangelists for DIY filmmaking and distribution have been as zealous as Sujewa Ekanayake. Besides spreading the good word on MySpace and indieLOOP, he also blogs, naturally - DIY Filmmaker Sujewa, just as naturally - and hosts Indie Features 06, where around 20 indie filmmakers swap hard-earned tips. His campaigning skills, then, can hardly be called into question. But eventually, put-up-or-shut-up time rolls around: What about the film? Does Sujewa's first feature, Date Number One, warrant all the noise?

New Yorkers will be able to judge for themselves this Thursday, August 31, when DN1 screens at the Two Boots Pioneer. I don't doubt that verdicts will vary, but, after struggling with DN1 during its opening stretch, its clumsy but genuine charm eventually won me over.

A series of loosely interrelated vignettes that will likely draw more warm smiles than out-n-out laughs from the endless comic potential of an all but unavoidable ritual, the first date, DN1's appeal has something intangible to do with its no-budget aesthetic. Intangible, undefinable, because not all no-budget aesthetics are alike. Watching the work of Andrew Bujalski, for example, or Joe Swanberg, two filmmakers who also tell stories about relationships among 20-somethings, suspension of disbelief, forgetting the distance between the characters and the actors, is easier. The atmo of DN1 reminds me a bit of a few 60s-era underground films or post-punk works like Downtown 81 or Liquid Sky, though DN1's cast of characters are a lot friendlier and live a few stories higher on the under/above ground scale. But in all three films, you never forget for a moment that the actors are trying, that there's a camera in the room, that the lines were written before spoken. The resulting sense of reality is neither Brechtian nor Godardian; the spell of the stage or the screen never needs to be broken in DN1 because it's never convincingly established in the first place. Not necessarily a bad thing, of course.

There's a sentence in Jerry Brewington's review of DN1 for Hollywood Is Talking that I find rather telling: "Story 2, 'A Romantic Dinner for Three,' was my favorite because I have to admit, I found the characters and the premise sexy, sexy, sexy." They are, but would Brewington have made the same observation in quite the same way in a review of, say, Two Girls and a Guy? The relatively slick aesthetic (emphasis on "relatively") of James Toback's film keeps us on our side of the screen, Robert Downey, Jr, Heather Graham and Natasha Gregson Wagner on theirs. In DN1, we feel we're getting to know Kamal, Sunshine and Rupa and Shervin Boloorian, Jennifer Blakemore and Dele Williams, the actors who portray them, at the same time on two parallel tracks that never quite meet. We suspect that we could, any day of the week, run into any of the six - perhaps in that inviting Kensington, Maryland bookshop where most of the film's characters hang out.

As refreshing, intentionally or not, as this reality effect is, the edges of DN1 are so rough that - and this may sound harsh, but I mean it in the best possible way - watching, I couldn't help wonder here and there whether Sujewa is something of an Ed Wood of the handheld digital DIY era. Does a joyous love of movies and their making blind him to a shot in which the camera, barely keeping up with a dialogue for all its ping-pong pans, settles on a frame that slices off half a profile? Or are such choices made precisely with the aim of retaining what's real about the scene as it plays out?

Regardless, the screenplay is witty (I particularly like the recurring references to a band's unlikely popularity in Ohio), often inventive (the story in which the first date isn't really the first date at all is particularly well-written and performed) and, even better, airy: characters are given time and space to spell out their views on abortion, Buddhism, quantum physics or the ongoing war in Sri Lanka, views that never bear the artificial markings of a Hollywood screenwriter's compulsion to reduce them to sound-bites.

Chuck Tryon's pointed out another aspect I appreciate: "I think Sujewa Ekanayake's Date Number One offers an image of urban culture that might be understood as the anti-Crash depiction of life in the city. Instead of a city or community marked by distrust and hostility between racial and ethnic groups, Sujewa's film depicts a comfortably multi-ethnic community."

Don't let the touch of quirk (to which so many us who seek out indies have become downright allergic) put you off right from start. The ninja outfit, I mean. Mark, the guy inside it (played by John Stabb Schroeder), has his reasons for wearing it and, as you come to understand them, you learn not only that DN1 has its own rhythms worth shifting gears for, but also that the other characters pulling for him to get that first date right in this supportive community are way ahead of you.

New York. Fall preview.

"We wanted to take Marty's genre, the gangster thriller, and find a way to flat-out do it differently, and to push the envelope. And, well, we pushed it." Jack Nicholson tells Logan Hill about cooking up a role meaty enough for him to join The Departed.

Hill also talks with Steven Shainberg about Fur, in which Nicole Kidman plays Diane Arbus: "This is not a biopic at all. It's an imaginary portrait that tries to capture the otherworldly, hallucinogenic, mythological quality of her photographs." And Hill blurbs a few more upcoming highlights.

"In prospect, The Black Dahlia is a disturbingly perfect marriage of filmmaker and subject," writes David Edelstein. For one thing, "De Palma is a kindred spirit to James Ellroy, the traumatized romantic who wrote the novel." For another, "no director this side of David Lynch has the potential to bring out all the meanings in the haunting image of that severed, 'smiling' corpse in that empty Hollywood lot." Related, and via Ray Pride at Movie City Indie: Ellroy in the Los Angeles Times Magazine on leaving LA - and coming back.

Also, Infamous: "As Capote, Toby Jones is dandy; I'd be praising him to the heavens if not for you-know-who." But: "The problem with [Douglas] McGrath's writing is that there's no subtext."

Emma Rosenblum asks Maggie Gyllenhaal about Sherrybaby, about the fallout from those comments she made during the Tribeca Film Festival and about how tough it is to get an indie picture out there. Also, a chat with Cate Blanchett about The Good German: "Steven [Soderbergh] would say, 'If it doesn't feel bizarre, then it's not right.'"

And then, the big, slightly annotated calendar.

Related: Via Anne Thompson, Premiere's fall preview in a slide-show format.

Earlier: Entertainment Weekly and Time.

Offscreen. Vol 10, Issue 7.

"In recent years, Iranian cinema has become the yardstick of cultural, social and political progress in Iran," writes Najmeh Khalili Mahani in the first of two pieces in the new issue of Offscreen, which focuses to a great extent on films distributed by Women Make Movies.

The world knows Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen and Samira Makhmalbaf and Jafar Panahi, and that's all well and good, but, as noted a few days ago, Iranians, like moviegoers the world over, are making lighter fare much more popular. Mahani sets out "less to debate the artistic or cinematic merits of this type of Iranian cinema, than to examine the efficacy of its particular mode of narrative in bringing about social reforms," and particularly for women. Also: "Although different in style and in form, Iranian Journey and The Ladies Room overlap in one message: that the Iranian women seek the sources of their strength from within."

Donato Totaro: "In Sentenced to Marriage and Highway Courtesans women of vastly different social, cultural, racial and economic background similarily suffer hardship under unjust and archaic patriarchal social custom and law."

For Gilda Boffa, Time of Love "is very important in understanding the shift that [Mohsen] Makhmalbaf made artistically and ideologically" as he shifted into his "third phase" in the early 90s.

David Durnell on Anatomy of Hell: "[Catherine] Breillat's feminist salvation is to make what is deemed impure beautiful, and to make what is sin - what is filth - a work of art, of righteousness, a Nietzscheian transvaluation."

Shorts, 8/27.

"When we meet Griffin this time... he is suitably consumed with dread," writes Seth Greenland, reviewing Michael Tolkin's new novel. "It is one of the achievements of The Return of the Player that it utterly captures the most salient quality of life in Hollywood: the bowel-shaking fear that underlies everything."

"[T]he Ballards' 'pathology' in Crash seems oddly healthy, their marriage a model of well-adjusted perversity." Mark Fisher explains.

"I think if you wanted to be doctrinaire about it, the ultimate test of what animation might be would be life that is created rather than just photographed." John Canemaker won an Oscar for The Moon and the Son: An Imagined Conversation just this year, but he's been writing about and making animated films for decades now. Michael Guillén has a terrific talk with him at the Evening Class.

Satoshi Kon's Paprika "may very well be his finest work to date," writes Todd at Twitch. "Nobody captures the shifting reality of dream life better than Kon, the peculiar logic that rules there, the unsettling way that dreams can turn from pleasant to terrifying seemingly without warning." Also: "While it shows many of the growing pains that you would expect from the first ever martial arts film to emerge from Chile, Ernesto Espinoza's Kiltro also shows a great deal of promise."

Slant's Ed Gonzalez: "In spite of its improvisational roots, Le Petite Lieutenant feels a little too cleverly thought-out, but this is still a rare police film that uses work to illuminate life." Also, with Red Doors, "all [director Georgia] Lee has done is rip pages from the same Alan Ball Playbook filmmakers Arie Posin and Mike Mills used to pander to hip movie trends that nowadays guarantee a distribution deal." And: Alfonso Cuarón's 1991 feature debut, Sólo Con Tu Pareja is a "little one-note perhaps, but consistently funny and sexy."

Also in Slant: Nick Schager has a long talk with Kirby Dick about This Film Is Not Yet Rated and gives Hollywoodland two out of four stars.

"Infidelity, in a Lubitsch movie, barely registers on the sin-o-meter. The worst crime of all is to be a bore." The Self-Styled Siren on Heaven Can Wait.

Writing for Cinetext, Daniel Garrett finds in The New World "a film in which profundity can be read on its surface, in its images, dialog, and meditations, a film in which being as much as doing, perceiving as much as desiring, are important... Terrence Malick] makes being - the luminescent fact of existence - vivid."

MS Smith on Zhang Yimou's Raise the Red Lantern: "I've seen few films in recent years that are this coherent in their visual style and narrative, that rapturously fulfill the visual potential of cinema while simultaneously offering a thoroughly devastating social commentary."

For Newsweek, Lorraine Ali talks with Alejandro González Iñárritu and a few of his cast members about Babel.

In the New York Times Magazine, Deborah Solomon asks CC Goldwater the doc she's produced, Mr Conservative: Goldwater on Goldwater. And Catherine Keener poses for the NYT Style Magazine; Lynn Hirschberg takes on the accompanying interview.

Miranda Sawyer interviews Owen Wilson for the Observer. Also, Killian Fox talks with Laurie David, co-producer of An Inconvenient Truth, about her efforts to raise awareness of global warming issues and another rave for Volver, this one from Philip French.

The adaptation of Michael Chabon's The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay looks to be stalled again; Kim Voynar has details at Cinematical, where Scott Weinberg notes the nominations for Spike TV's Scream Awards and for Fangoria's Chainsaw Awards.

Via Joe Leydon, fall movie previews in the New York Daily News: the short overview from Jack Mathews and the film-by-film rundown from Mathews and Elizabeth Weitzman.

BBC: "Leading Indian filmmaker Hrishikesh Mukherjee has died in hospital in the western Indian city of Mumbai."

Canadians: Avi Lewis will begin hosting The Big Picture on CBC on September 13.

Online browsing tip. Black Dahlia: The Story As It Was Originally Reported by the Los Angeles Times. Via Film-Fatale. Related: Peet Gelderblom presents his "contribution to what seems to have become another unofficial Blog-A-Thon" and That Little Round-Headed Boy watches De Palma's "great, unsung comedy," Phantom of the Paradise.

Online viewing tip #1. Brenda Ann Kenneally's "Children of the Storm" in the New York Times (click down to the "Interactive Feature").

Online viewing tip #2. Richard Lester's Running Jumping & Standing Still Film at If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger..., where Tom Sutpen reminds us that Lester "would soon have as defining an impact on the development of Cinema in the 1960s as anyone you can name."

Online viewing tip #3. Everyone's talking about the trailer for Todd Field's Little Children; Jeffrey Wells gets word from Mark Woollen & Associates on the thinking behind its conception.

Online viewing tips, round 1. Christopher Arcella's Crime Scene Greenpoint, via Scott Macaulay at Filmmaker, where he's also pointing to Nash Edgerton's video for Toni Collette's "Beautiful Awkward Pictures."

Online viewing tips, round 2. At Twitch, Todd's got a trailer for John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus, another for a thriller from Russia, Obratnyy otschet, and another for Michel Ocelot's Azur et Asmar.

Fests and events, 8/27.

The latest entries in Toronto's Doc Blog come from David Leaf (The US vs John Lennon), Ron Mann (Tales of the Rat Fink) , Michael Tucker (The Prisoner, or How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair; a helluva post: "a few observations from what turned out to be 72-hour ten-kilometer ride into Baghdad") and host Thom Powers, who surveys the fictional features by "directors who have notable backgrounds in documentary" screening at this year's fest.

Meanwhile, tiffreviews.com keeps finding items on films heading to Toronto (September 7 through 16).

Das Fräulein, which took the top award at Locarno just two weeks ago, has won two more at the Sarajevo Film Festival: Best Film, awarded to director Andrea Staka, and Best Actress for Marija Skaricic. You'll see a pretty strong showing in the full list of award-winners for films from countries that were once part of Yugoslavia.

The Amnesty International Film Festival runs September 14 through 16 in Washington DC.

European Independent Film Festival, set for March 2007 in Paris, is accepting submissions.

Weekend shorts.

"Conventional wisdom would paint Wong Kar-wai as a stylist and Hong Sang-soo as a naturalistic filmmaker," writes Chris Stults. "However, despite their matter-of-fact cinematography Hong's films are as far removed from realism as Wong's are, and his style is as every bit as distinct and definable. In all likelihood, no one working today thinks as consistently and complexly about form in narrative film as Hong does. As he has said, 'People tell me I make films about reality. They're wrong. I make films based on structures that I have thought up.'"

Also at Koreanfilm.org, Kyu Hyun Kim on Yim Dae-woong's debut, To Sir With Love, "an unapologetically gory throwback to the 80s slasher formula."

Half a century after Giant was filmed there, coincidence brings two productions - Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men, with Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin and Tommy Lee Jones, and Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, with Daniel Day-Lewis - to Marfa, Texas, population 2400. Whitney Joiner checks the scene and finds Marfans taking it in stride.

Also in the New York Times:

• John Anderson's one state north: "Four Sheets to the Wind, the debut feature by the writer and director Sterlin Harjo, is a coming-of-age story, set in Tulsa and nearby Holdenville. Almost the entire cast and many of the crew members are American Indians."

• Kristin Hohenadel has a backgrounder on Paris je t'aime: 20 directors, 18 stories, five minutes each. Well-received in Cannes, and now, co-producer Emmanuel Benbihy "is currently developing a film brand he's calling Cities of Love. Up next: New York, je t'aime."

• Ira Cohen's 1968 psychedelic head trip The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda hits DVD; James Gaddy reports.

• Jeannette Catsoulis: "Invincible counters its predictably inspirational trajectory with close attention to historical detail and blue-collar hardship." Also: "In Beerfest, a gaseous celebration of binge drinking and family honor, the five comedians known collectively as Broken Lizard have created a frat-house staple for the ages." (Related: Mike Russell interviews Broken Lizard.) And: "Ostensibly a comedy about the pending nuptials of three gay couples, Queens is far more interested in their overbearing mothers."

• Nathan Lee: "Suicide Killers reminds us that the following things are bad: murder, revenge, fundamentalism, extremism, anti-Semitism, conditions in Gaza, despair, poverty, nihilism, chauvinism, the oppression of women and cruddy documentaries that replace analysis with a litany of bummers."

• Manohla Dargis on How to Eat Fried Worms: "Nicely directed, the film version proves refreshingly free of the customary blights that affect most modern children's movies, notably adult condescension. But, man, is it mean."

• Stephen Holden: "Although the early scenes hold out some promise that Greg Pritikin's Surviving Eden, a parody of Survivor in which contestants compete for a million-dollar payday by playing Adam and Eve in a jungle setting, could amount to something, the movie quickly runs out of ideas."

Brian Brooks introduces indieWIRE's interview with Joe Swanberg.

With Battle in Heaven, "[Carlos] Reygadas proves that rare filmmaker interested in tackling both the personal and the political through expressly confrontational means," writes Nick Schager. Also: "Volver proves to be one of Pedro Almodóvar's most temperamentally restrained efforts, though such a muted tone doesn't detract from its emotional power."

Related: Ryan Gilbey in the New Statesman, Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian, Sukhdev Sandhu in the Telegraph and James Christopher in the London Times on Volver and Chris Wisniewski at Reverse Shot on All About My Mother.

Odd Man Out, Some Mother's Son, The Crying Game, In the Name of the Father, The Devil's Own, Hidden Agenda, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, The Boxer... What do members of the IRA think about these films set in Northern Ireland? Malachi O'Doherty asks a few.

Also in the Guardian:

• John Patterson preps for the Congressional election season and "the battle of the anniversaries," 9/11 and Katrina, each marked by two films, World Trade Center and When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. "If these movies were running for election instead of the politicians, the hot money says Spike Lee and Katrina would win hands down." More on WTC, by the way, from Stuart Klawans in the Nation. Also, with Hollywood remaking so many British classics, "it's time we took our revenge and savoured the possibility of debasing some of the great works of American cinema by subjecting them to the lamest kind of British makeover." First up: The Searchers.

• As it happens, Alex Cox has seen The Searchers in Monument Valley: "Very few American films deal with race, and race hatred, in such unsentimental terms.... No such complex film could be made by Hollywood today." Related: At Bright Lights After Dark, Gordon Thomas revels in the Dell comic included in Warners' recent special edition.

• Oliver Burkeman interviews Julianne Moore.

• Bernardine Evaristo reviews Terry McMillan's The Interruption of Everything, mentioned here because: "Oprah is making the film of the novel."

Susan Gerhard: "This week, SF360 checks in with a few of the Bay Area's festival insiders to see what they're most excited about in the coming film festival season."

David Poland on Todd Phillips's School for Scoundrels: "the duet between [Billy Bob] Thornton and [Jon] Heder is well worth the ticket price in and of itself."

The Reeler's most recent pinch hitters: Eric Kohn (Screen Rush), David Schwartz (Museum of the Moving Image), Lauren Wissot (writer), James Ponsoldt (filmmaker) and Andrew Wagner (filmmaker).

"No British film producer in the past 30 years has had a more varied or interesting career than Jeremy Thomas [who] has worked with a dazzling array of world-class directors, travelled the globe and shot films in extraordinary locations, while amassing a body of work that is consistently subversive in tone." The Telegraph's David Gritten meets him.

For SuicideGirls, Daniel Robert Epstein talks with "(mostly) cult film actor" Norman Reedus - and photographer Stephen Berkman.

In the Independent, Kaleem Aftab talks with model Helena Christensen about her acting debut in Christoffer Boe's Allegro.

Atom Egoyan will direct a Canadian Opera Company production of Wagner's Die Walkure. Julie Mollins reports for Reuters.

"[Rourke's Chinaski was more about Bukowski the mythic beast; [Matt] Dillon's is about Bukowski the listless human," writes Josh Tyson for Stop Smiling. "Put stupidly, Dillon is more the waltzing grizzly to Rourke's panda on a unicycle." Related: "This movie may think it's about a man who boozes and works fitfully while pursuing his muse as a writer, but that's not the way it plays," writes Jim Emerson at RogerEbert.com. "Factotum is about a man who rarely works and occasionally writes, but only as fleeting distractions from his boozing."

WSWS's Joanne Laurier finds Little Miss Sunshine to be "a compassionate and sometimes humorous work that attempts to address the increasing insecurity and anxiety of layers of the US population forced to survive in a cut-throat environment." More from Chuck Tryon.

Nathaniel R presents "the first in a four-part obsessively detailed look at one of my favorite films Moulin Rouge!," setting off quite a string of comments.

Ted Cogswell: "Clean is simple, unpretentious, tasteful sentimentality with enough rock 'n' roll grime under its nails to appeal to one's earthier instincts as well."

David Austin presents Cinema Strikes Back's picks from among current DVD releases.

After scrolling through 700 entries, Dana Stevens introduces the winners of Slate's Snakes on a Plane-inspired catchy movie titles contest.

Online viewing tip #1. Daily Dolores's Dear Julia, based on the comic by Brian Biggs.

Online viewing tip #2. OK Go: "Here It Goes Again."

Weekend fests and events.

Filmbrain blurbs his picks for the New York Korean Film Festival (through September 3).

Much more than a gimmick aimed at drumming up buzz for the documentaries program at this year's Toronto International Film Festival (September 7 through 16), Thom Powers's Doc Blog has, within just a few days, turned into a lively and wide-ranging celebration of the genre. Scan the list of contributors, dozens of filmmakers - they're actually posting.

Fur, featuring Nicole Kidman as Diane Arbus, will open the Rome Film Festival, reports Reuters. The Guardian notes that rivalry between Venice and Rome is all but inevitable.

For Cineuropa, Vitor Pinto surveys the lineup for the 54th San Sebastian International Film Festival (September 21 through 30).

Ongoing: Short Attention Span Cinema, a series of shorts at the IFC Center featuring the music of Will Oldham.

Johann Hari has an Edinburgh International Film Festival wrap-up in the Independent; SF Said has another in the Telegraph. The fest itself wraps tomorrow.

Interview. Jamie Babbit.

You know Michael Guillén from The Evening Class (and if you don't, do see his wonderful and quite personal entry in the Friz Freleng Blog-A-Thon and his latest, on Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu). Today sees his first interview for GreenCine, in which he talks with Jamie Babbit not only about her latest feature, The Quiet, but also about what makes the closet such a resilient fixture in Hollywood.

Most critics have found The Quiet frustrating. Cinematical's Martha Fischer, for example, finds it "a movie seething with unrealized potential."

Manohla Dargis in the New York Times: "Neither ambitious enough to take seriously nor sleazy enough to enjoy, The Quiet flirts with the trappings of exploitation cinema without going all the way."

Ella Taylor (LA Weekly/Voice): "The Quiet has an excellent supporting cast in Edie Falco, Martin Donovan, and Katy Mixon, in a minor but more interesting role as the school vixen, and is competently, even lyrically, directed in high definition by Babbit (with input from students at the University of Texas). But thematically the movie never reaches beyond the ready-for-prime-time mentality that specializes in psychological shorthand."

Leading a furious round of Reverse Shot reviews at indieWIRE, Lauren Kaminsky seems pretty ticked off: "[T]his film somehow manages to surpass even American Beauty (to which the filmmakers no doubt hope their effort will be compared) in hateful representations of women, dopily sympathetic men, and heaps of misplaced misogyny." Yikes.

The AV Club's Scott Tobias: "Abandoning the garish hyperactivity of her previous effort, the camp comedy But I'm a Cheerleader, director Jamie Babbit here employs a chilly ambience that makes the film seem weightier and more substantial than it turns out to be."

Ed Gonzalez in Slant: "Babbit goes for the perfume-commercial chic of an Adrian Lyne film while her writers push for the sexual frankness of The Slumber Party Massacre. This mismatch of intentions produces a misshapen curiosity at once impossible to dismiss because of its rich ideas but difficult to defend because of its slapdash execution."

"Director Jamie Babbit has a certain gift for gloomy atmospherics that might work in a flat-out horror film," suggests Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "But The Quiet wobbles around between genres, a terrible example of what can happen when the wrong sets of talented people get together."

Justin Ravitz in the New York Press: "This is an absurdly sordid B-movie that doesn't follow its own whispered suggestions about moral responsibility and human empathy."

For SuicideGirls, Daniel Robert Epstein also talks with Babbit.

Updates: Steve Erickson at Gay City News: " didn't think it was possible, but The Quiet beats Michael Cuesta's Twelve and Holding for the coveted crown of 2006's most smug assault on American suburbia."

indieWIRE's interview.

Shorts, 8/24.

Tom Tykwer's Perfume, the Bernd Eichinger-produced adaptation of Patrick Süskind's novel, doesn't open in the States until December 27 and doesn't even open in Germany until September 14, but Die Zeit's Katja Nicodemus has seen it. I honestly wish I could report that she likes what she's seen. But:

Perfume is the work of an assiduous illustrator who doesn't know how to use the novel as a gateway to a world of his own imagination.... Tom Tykwer may be a fount of invention and enthusiasm, ideas and visions, but his problem is that the images for all this completely escape him. He's the painter who, equipped with all the paints and brushes, stands in front of his easel, the scene before his eyes, and dreams of transcendence but ends up painting by numbers after all.

Anthony Kaufman on Michael Haneke's forthcoming remake of his own Funny Games with Tim Roth and Naomi Watts: "I can't imagine the English language version will be as cold-hearted and subversive as the original version, but then again, with popular, mainstream films such as Hostel and Saw and the US government making torture an accepted aspect of everyday life, maybe Haneke has an even greater licence to upset than he did in 1997."

Charlotte Higgins talks with Charlize Theron about the doc she's produced, East of Havana: "You have to ask: would I take the free healthcare and education and accept being a prisoner in my soul?"

Also in the Guardian, Paul Arendt reminds us that two Philip K Dick biopics are in the works. Plus news of two forthcoming features from Trey Parker and Matt Stone and news that Chiwetel Ejiofor has been cast in Ridley Scott's American Gangster.

Edukators director Hans Weingartner is shooting Free Rainer with Moritz Bleibtreu, reports Bénédicte Prot at Cineuropa, where the new "film focus" is The Wind That Shakes the Barley.

"Taken together, Culloden and The War Game, the film that followed it, represent an important first strike in a career of film and television work that radically challenges conventional modes of historical representation in the mass media," writes Leo Goldsmith at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. Related: "The Radical Histories of Peter Watkins."

"Apocalypse Now? Child's play - everything Coppola tried to do in his film on violence and imperialism and cinema, Hopper has already done - better - by 1971." Zach Campbell on The Last Movie.

Film by film, Aaron Aradillas argues the case for Oliver Stone at the House Next Door.

The Quays' The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes is "a tragic fairy tale drenched in otherworldly visual splendor," writes Nick Schager. The film's "pulse-pounding passion is derived not from narrative plotting - which, though more linear than [Institute Benjamenta], is obscure and lethargic by design - but from stunning close-ups of their cast's expressive countenances." All in all, it's an "unsettling descent into dreamlike imaginativeness." Also, well, Beerfest, "gorging at the trough of raunch resulting in moments alternately insipid and inspired." And the "poignant and often humorous" So Much So Fast.

And also in Slant:

• Ed Gonzalez on Daniel Burman's Family Law.

• Fernando F Croce on Invincible.

• DVDs: Croce on Hunger, Jeremiah Kipp on Satan's Playground and Dan Callahan on State of the Union.

"Two Drifters is clever moviemaking," writes Jason Shamai. "Its story is too over-the-top to be sincere, its imagery too giddy to be dismissed as simply ironic." Also in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Cheryl Eddy on Our Brand is Crisis and Half Nelson, "a film with no wasted space, and that goes double for its acting." More from Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer and Andrew O'Hehir in Salon ("If a smarter, more heartfelt or more challenging American film comes out between now and Christmas, I'll be shocked") and Scott Foundas in the LA Weekly: "It may be the least overtly rousing motivational-schoolteacher drama in movie history, and also the most profound." Related: Susan King talks with director Ryan Fleck for the Los Angeles Times.

Also in the LAT, Nancy Ramsey on a new project: "10 young Lebanese artists will each make a nine-minute film over a two year period."

"It's not often that I come away from a movie feeling mesmerized solely because of the way it evokes a bygone period of history, but Patrice Chéreau's Gabrielle had that mysteriously exhilarating effect," writes Godfrey Cheshire. Also in the Independent Weekly, David Fellerath: "Darwin's Nightmare may be the most horrifying film you'll see this year. While we may understand that there are millions of people in the world who are 'less fortunate,' we don't really understand what that means until [Hubert] Sauper shows us Tanzanians eat the rotting, maggot-infested fish carcasses that remain after the choice fillets have been airlifted north."

Sheila Johnston files the latest in the Telegraph's "Filmmakers on Film" series: "[Christopher] Smith realises that the 'gore-bores' raving about Severance on the internet might be a bit perplexed by his chosen film. Described by JG Ballard as the greatest war movie ever made, Come and See is a harrowing, monumental epic set during the Nazi invasion of Belarus. 'It's a horror movie, too, in a certain way,' Smith says. 'It leaves you shell-shocked.'"

Kim Ki-duk vs The Host? Or all of South Korea? Grady Hendrix has details.

Dave Kehr watches The Thirteenth Chair, "[Tod] Browning's first pairing with Bela Lugosi, two years before Dracula," and Inner Sanctum, " dark, almost nasty stuff, and typical of the tone of Lew Landers, a prolific B-movie director whose career stretched from Universal serials in the early 30s to TV westerns in the late 50s."

"People who have no understanding of the role of movie critics in 'the industry' tend to believe that studios are afraid of bad reviews because they might hurt their big pictures. That's flattering to critics, but it has never, ever been the case." Not only does Jim Emerson explain why much of the recent discussion of how much or how little weight critics throw around is hot air, he follows up: "A movie audience that has no use for film criticism, doesn't understand it or realize that it has nothing to do with predicting box-office success or failure, and even less with predicting what you will think of a movie (most critics don't know you), can hardly be expected to understand that movie reviewing is only incidentally a consumer guide - or that the vast majority of film critics I know never even think about influencing audience behavior. They're critics because they like to write about movies."

Time Out's Dave Calhoun talks with director Stephen Frears and writer Peter Morgan about The Queen.

Takashi Shimizu's Reincarnation "is genre cinema and it is tradition, and it certainly is fresh, original, intelligent, and extremely well-crafted," writes logboy at Twitch.

Cinematical's Martha Fischer approves of Queens, "quite proudly a piece of fluff."

Joe Leydon recommends that you catch I Trust You to Kill Me if you can. And don't go just for Kiefer Sutherland. The band, Rocco DeLuca and the Burden, whose first tour the film documents, is evidently terrific, too.

Samuel Shimon "seems to have been content to live a film instead of making one," writes Youssef Rakha in a fascinating profile for Al-Ahram Weekly. "Ironically, in a way, Shimon's experience is potent testimony to Arab and pan-Arab failure - an implicit aspect of hankering after 'English times.' But [his autobiographical novel] An Iraqi in Paris is more than a long-in-the-coming vindication." Via Perlentaucher's "Magazinrundschau."

The Reeler's latest pinch hitters: Evan Shapiro (IFC), Martin De Leon and Lauren Kinsler (Blank Screen), Brian Newman (National Video Resources; Springboard Media), Bennett Marcus (Open All Night), Bill Plympton (filmmaker), Lewis Beale (writer), Joe Swanberg (filmmaker), Jamie Stuart (filmmaker), Lawrence Levi (Looker) and Karen Wilson (Cinecultist).

In the Age, Penelope Debelle, Alexa Moses and Garry Maddox don't really break new ground, but their Tuesday piece on the controversy sparked by Murali Thalluri and his 2:37 did mark another note of it in the mainstream media. But by Monday anyway, reports Penelope Debelle, Thalluri'd decided it's time to move on. "Thalluri dismisses a News Ltd report claiming he would never work in Australia again, saying he had no problem with the industry other than film director Daniel Krige, who was the source of the allegations against him. 'I was a bit pissed off because the work speaks for itself and the next film will show everyone up, I know that,' Thalluri says."

Richard Goldstein in the New York Times: "Joe Rosenthal, the Associated Press photographer who captured the enduring image of the American fighting man in World War II with his depiction of five Marines and a Navy corpsman raising a huge American flag over the Japanese island of Iwo Jima, died Sunday in Novato, Calif. He was 94."

Reviews in the NYT: Nathan Lee: "A maudlin melodrama about prostitutes in Madrid, Princesas is not, alas, the new film by Pedro Almodóvar, but a dilution of his manner by the writer-director Fernando León de Aranoa." More from Melissa Levine in the Voice. Also: "Authentic in texture if narrow in scope, LOL is a movie about the way we live — or rather about the way white, urban, heterosexual circuit boys are failing to live." More from Joshua Land (Voice).

A lot's being made of LOL's NYC premiere at the Pioneer, which is as it should be, but it should also be noted that Blogumentary sees its NYC premiere there, too - on August 30. Related: Steven Snyder in the Star-Ledger.

For Manohla Dargis, Fratricide is a "crude attempt at a cinematic bildungsroman." More from Ed Halter in the Voice and from Aaron Dobbs, but for Salon's Andrew O'Hehir, "Fratricide marks [Yilmaz] Arslan as one of Europe's hottest young talents, drawing simultaneously on the film traditions of America, Western Europe and the Middle East."

Marrit Ingman talks with Bob Dolman about making How to Eat Fried Worms. Also in the Austin Chronicle, Steve Uhler on the Mr Moto collection. Related: At Hollywood Bitchslap, William Goss talks with Luke Benward.

Jennifer Merin talks with Bobby Moresco about 10th & Wolf. Also: Princesas and Eric Kohn on the Pusher Trilogy and Armond White on Snakes on a Plane.

Stanley Kauffmann in the New Republic on Scoop: "This picture's very existence is an argument against Allen's power." Related: Cinematical's Martha Fischer has info on Woody's next one.

"How come James Dean seems less interesting to me now than his various co-stars and supporting players?" asks John McElwee at Greenbriar Picture Shows. "Having checked out East of Eden, I was again struck by the artful manner in which experienced character actors accommodated Jimmy’s ultra-mannered playing and very often pulled his inexperienced bacon out of the fire."

"Allan Dwan may well be the last great-undiscovered master of the silent era," writes David Jeffers at the Siffblog.

"[W]hatever the reason, the sense of disappointment that's always shrouded Tron is precisely what makes its fans so protective of it," writes Steve Palopoli in Metro. "Among geeks, it's practically a cause celèbre: screw Mumia, free Tron!"

"It is what it is, a indie style film made on a small budget, shot on video, utilizing a handful of sets and employing a small group of actors... a very good calling card movie." DK Holm sees Kisses and Caroms.

IFC's Matt Singer and Alison Willmore pick what'll likely be their favorites of the fall season.

"To commemorate his ninetieth birthday this November 24, Flickhead proposes a Forrest J Ackerman Blog-A-Thon, a/k/a ForryThon."

New lists at the AV Club: Tasha Robinson's "14 Movies From Two Ages of Theremin Music" and the full team's "Best TV-On-DVD Sets."

Online listening tip. NPR's Joel Rose talks with Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe about Brothers of the Head.

Online viewing tip #1. The trailer for William Friedkin's Bug. Via Movie City News. Related: Gwynne Watkins's review of this one and more for Screengrab.

Online viewing tip #2. "Further bizarreries from Harmony Korine" at DVblog.

Online viewing tip #3. The teaser for Eytan Fox's The Bubble.

Online viewing tip #4. Agent Cooper's dream at Modern Fabulosity.

Online viewing tips. Grady Hendrix has a few.

Fests and events, 8/24.

"No wonder the upcoming series at the Museum of Fine Arts refers to Bohemian cinema as 'rare,'" writes Peter Keough in the Boston Phoenix. "But not non-existent. In recent years there's been a renaissance of sorts. I would suppose that this movement is being carried out by a small cadre of committed artists, if only because the same actors keep cropping up in different films in different roles, kind of like a Mike Leigh movie or a recurrent dream."

At Toronto's Doc Blog, programmer Thom Powers not only notes that Michael Moore will be bringing a teaser for Sicko to the fest but also has early word on another doc Moore's been editing, "a scrappy road trip movie following his two months of daily campaigning against George W Bush in the 2004 election."

"[A]nyone who thinks Almodóvar has lost his subversive edge should take another look at the last half hour of Talk to Her (2002), which suggests that only a gay man knows how to love a woman, while implicating that same nurturing man in the rape of a comatose young woman," writes Ella Taylor, previewing the Viva Pedro series. "What has changed is Almodóvar's tone... More than anything, and this is why I have yet to encounter a woman who regards Almodóvar as a sellout, the later movies extend this generous director's ongoing redefinition of femininity within melodrama, a form that has fallen so far off the Hollywood cliff that, aside from Todd Haynes (Far From Heaven), it's hard to think of an American director working successfully in the genre."

Also in the LA Weekly: "Welcome to the Roger Corman dream factory, where schlock is the business and business is still good." Scott Foundas tells his story and has a good chat with him, too. Roger Corman In Person: The Early Years: tomorrow through Sunday.

Susan King previews more Mods & Rockers for the Los Angeles Times.

The Audience Award-winners of the Melbourne International Film Festival were announced today and Matt Riviera's got 'em.

Biz and tech, 8/24.

"Cruise Goes Indie" is precisely the phrase I'd decided to use here when I saw all those blazing headlines yesterday morning, but Anne Thompson beat me to it. Eugene Hernandez, though, thinks she's serious. Now I'm confused.

Regardless, in case you haven't heard, even if you run a major Hollywood studio, your ass is not your ass as long as a global media conglomerate is calling the shots. Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone aimed one at Tom Cruise yesterday, firing him, basically, and Paramount chairman Brad Grey has so far been very, very quiet.

In Variety, Michael Fleming and Chris Gardner look into the matter of what'll happen to the projects Cruise and his producing partner Paula Wagner had been developing with Paramount. In short, it's too early to tell, but: "Negotiations could get very complicated." They explain. Via Movie City News, also recommending the piece as the most substantial story yet.

Updated through 8/27.

Oliver Burkeman reports for the Guardian, which considers this a front page story; the New York Times team gets quotage, plus commentary from Caryn James; the Los Angeles Times sees a decline in A-list clout and notes that Wall Street approves; the Hollywood Reporter's Nicole Sperling hears that it's all about DVD sales.

For fun: Nikki Finke roars at the Huffington Post and Deadline Hollywood Daily; the Wall Street Journal's Marisa Marr, who broke the story, does not on NPR.

"We started with Tom Cruise and we end with Tom Cruise... ah, the horror of symmetry." David Poland looks back on the summer. "In the most expensive summer season ever, studios were hit by the harsh realization - which started becoming clear 18 months ago, when Christmas DVD movie sales disappointed - that they could lose a shitload of money."

But in Iran, the movie business is booming. Alireza Ronaghi reports for Reuters. Iranians are flocking to "a greater number of homegrown romantic comedies."

"In many ways, Apple is uniquely positioned to transform the home AV space the way they transformed the music industry," writes Steven Johnson at Slate. Related: At GigaOM, Robert Young suggests that Apple buy YouTube. But that was before Sony bought Grouper. Business Week's Catherine Holahan surveys other potential online video acquisition targets.

Stephanie Kang reports in the Wall Street Journal on a forthcoming videogame "set in the period between "Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith and Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope, during the rise of the rebellion against Darth Vader and the Empire. Jim Ward, president of LucasArts, the videogame unit of Lucasfilm, says players will discover new pieces of the Star Wars story that help fill in the blanks."

Update: Doug Ireland argues that Redstone fired the wrong guy.

Updates, 8/25: "As the drama took on almost Shakespearean proportions, here's how the major players emerged." Anne Thompson in the Hollywood Reporter: "Redstone was sending a message: We are no longer coddling talent. There were many in Hollywood who applauded his bravado.... Grey now has several fires to put out." As for CAA, "the whole episode is illustrative of how studios are taking back power from the agencies." And Cruise? "Freeing himself from a studio like Paramount could be the best thing to happen to him."

Jon Healey rounds up coverage in the Los Angeles Times.

Neal Gabler chimes in in the New York Times.

Updates, 8/26: Online viewing tip: David Poland.

David Usborne profiles Redstone in the Independent.

The Los Angeles Times presents a "Tom Cruise Week-In-Review" quiz. Also, Cam Simpson reports on Cruise's efforts to enlist the State Department "in Scientology's battle for legitimacy in Europe under the banner of religious freedom."

Update, 8/27: "If we're lucky the movie industry will go the way of the record industry and the world will find itself back in a frenzy of DIY creativity where artists can control their own destinies." Ann Magnuson at Papermag, via the Filter.

On these notes.

MTV's James Montgomery talks with Michael Azerrad, author of Come As You Are, and director AJ Schnack about Kurt Cobain About a Son, "a documentary only in the loosest sense of the word. Rather, through Cobain's own, unguarded conversations, the film weaves a personal, haunting bio of the man very few knew." Slated to premiere in Toronto; via Matt Dentler.

"Directed by Steven Cantor and Matthew Galkin, [loudQUIETloud] is a bit like a Pixies song itself. It is film where simmering tensions erupt into primal storms, where high tragedy goes cheek-by-jowl with low comedy, and where the drummer goes mad and won't finish his solo." The Guardian's Xan Brooks talks with Cantor and with Frank Black, who has a few bones to pick with the portrayal of the Pixies reunion tour - and who, as it happens, appears in Schnack's Gigantic: A Tale of Two Johns.

Fests and events, 8/23.

"These films take you back to the stories and shine new light on them." Owen Richardson revels in the Australian Centre for the Moving Image's "Focus on Robert Altman & Raymond Carver," through September 3, in the Age.

At Facets Features, Dan Mucha notes the highlights of the first half of the Chicago Underground Film Festival, wrapping tomorrow.

For the London Times, Wendy Ide surveys the contenders for awards at the Edinburgh International Film Festival (through August 27). Related: Filmstalker's ongoing coverage and Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian on Sommer '04: "The spirit of Roman Polanski's Knife in the Water is revived in this engrossing and disquieting film from Germany, directed by Stefan Krohmer."

Time Out's Nigel Floyd previews London's FrightFest (August 25 through 28).

On September 8, Exhumed Films and the Philadelphia International House will be presenting Valerie and Her Week of Wonders with a new soundtrack performed live by members of various bands representing the new folk movement. Via Todd at Twitch.

In the Voice:

• J Hoberman: "Film Forum is following The Girl Can't Help It with a week of [Frank] Tashlin features and one program of his animated cartoons. The two forms should be seen together. Tashlin's animations are characterized by cinematic angles and editing, even as his features are implacably anti-natural." As for Girl, though, it's "a veritable Parthenon of vulgarity and a supremely unfunny comedy that is pure eau de Fifty-Six."

• Elliott Stein previews Judy Holliday: The Smart Dumb Blonde, August 25 through 31: "In Cukor's Born Yesterday (1950), a clever reworking of the Pygmalion theme, her priceless work as the malaprop-mouthing mistress of a crooked junk tycoon who discovers that the Rights of Man also apply to women earned her a Best Actress Oscar (she beat out perhaps the toughest competition in history: Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard and Bette Davis in All About Eve)."

• Scott Foundas on the Lee Man-hee Retrospective (August 30 and 31), which "proves that, in an age when seemingly no cinematic stone remains unturned, there are still major careers to be reclaimed from obscurity."

Dennis Harvey previews the Friday's Midnites for Maniacs: Digital Sex: 80s Style Triple Feature at the Castro for the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Also: Viva Pedro.

SF360 is co-published by indieWIRE and the San Francisco Film Society, which runs the SF International Film Festival, so Susan Gerhard's naturally got details on the Academy's hefty grant to the fest.

Ars Electronica: August 31 through September 5 in Linz, Austria.

At A Nutshell Review, Stefan reports on the first screening of Saint Jack in Singapore since the ban was lifted earlier this year. The Q&A afterwards was moderated by Ben Slater, author of Kinda Hot, a thoroughly engaging making-of story you'll be hearing more about around here a little further into the fall reading season.

Idlewild.

"It's not a condemnation to note that Idlewild has a lot in common with Prince's first film flop," writes Ann Powers in a consideration of both the film and the album for the Los Angeles Times. "Both projects followed a breakthrough moment for a forward-thinking act who'd made it deeper into the mainstream than anyone expected." As for the film at hand, "the dance sequences alone make Idlewild worth seeing." Even so:

This isn't what we need from OutKast. With hits like "Hey Ya!" and "Rosa Parks," the duo has come closer to confronting the troubling hyperboles of black American culture - the legacies of blackface and coon song - than virtually any other hip-hop-era artist. OutKast's seriously comic take on black eccentricity speaks volumes about the historical weight of notions like "freakiness." Their film needs more of that freakiness, instead of the three-hankie sentimentality that dominates.

"Idlewild has a sober, loving respect for history and the old South, and thereby grants itself a measure of distinction," writes Michael Atkinson in the Voice. "The film is so cornpone that class and poverty aren't even issues."

Updated through 8/27.

Earlier: Jonathan Dee in the New York Times Magazine and Nick Schager in Slant.

Updates, 8/24: "Under the Graffiti Bridge in the Purple Rain" pops up fairly early in Ernest Hardy's review for the LA Weekly; in short, he argues that the movie has its moments but never really comes together.

Armond White in the New York Press: "Despite its grinning fascination with the Jazzbo style of past eras, Idlewild takes such a flashy approach to African-American showbiz history that it winds up being absolutely ahistorical - and unsatisfying."

For Cinematical's Kim Voynar, it's "a fantastically creative film that could - and should - garner a bevy of Oscar nominations."

"Idlewild has moments of sticky sentimentality and stretches of dull exposition, but you've got to give it this: It's unpredictable." Slate's Dana Stevens finds "the world of Idlewild is so heterogeneous, so devil-may-care about shifts in mood and tone and genre, that it winds up feeling like six different movies elbowing for space on the same screen."

Manohla Dargis in the New York Times: "The narrative compression that works so well for [director Bryan] Barber in his music videos for OutKast, particularly in pastiches like 'Hey Ya!' and 'Roses,' damages Idlewild beyond repair."

Updates, 8/25: Teresa Wiltz in the Washington Post: "For all its shortcomings, Idlewild also has something that few films can pull off: moments of such cinematic fabulousness, breathtaking dance sequences and idiosyncratic 3-D animation flourishes that we are more than willing to forgive it for all of its sins."

Online viewing tip. Karina Longworth for "Netscape at the Movies."

Updates, 8/26: Stephanie Zacharek in Salon: "Idlewild is a wild, sprawling movie, one that's bound to be underestimated and misunderstood. But maybe the best way to read it is to treat it as a dream history, as a testament, to borrow [Stanley] Crouch's words, to the ways that inventing, borrowing and refining can bring us closer to the lives we want to lead - yet even within that framework, there's no guarantee of happiness."

Joe Leydon: "When it comes to Idlewild, there is good news, and then there is great news, because the last big blast of the summer - or, if you prefer, the first great movie of the fall - also happens to be one of the very best movies of the year."

"[I]t's too easy for critics to be reductive about Idlewild," argues Alex P Kellogg in the American Prospect. "I'd encourage them to think of Zora Neale Hurston's plays [which] were notable more for their celebration of the language, music, dance, and humor of everyday people than their neat dramatic arcs."

No, writes Will Doig for Nerve, "there are too many inexcusable moments in Idlewild to simply look the other way."

Updates, 8/27: "Does it jell?" asks New York's David Edelstein. "Hell, no! But a lot of invigorating American pop-culture epics are mishmashes - genre-bending follies that end up being more than the sum of their incongruities. Idlewild aims high and sends out lots of entertaining sparks."

Cinematical's James Rocchi: "Idlewild challenges two worlds - Hollywood and Hip-Hop - that can, in their way, be hidebound by conservatism and convention and gives them both a good shake. That alone makes Idlewild exciting; that alone makes Idlewild worth seeing; that alone makes you wonder what Outkast and Barber might try next."

DVDs, 8/23.

As a followup on the entry on Double Indemnity, DK Holm gathers voices from the DVD 'xperts on a few other releases this week.

Does it seem to you as it does to me that all of a sudden we have seen some great DVD releases? Last week we had Apocalypse Now: The Complete Dossier and the Rohmer set, preceded by Roma Citta Libera and such novelties as the Mr Moto series, plus A Canterbury Tale and some Louis Malle box sets, and with Arrested Development, a Mel Brooks box set, more Fox noirs, The Death of Mr Lazarescu, Amarcord, Playtime, and the new three-disc Criterion Seven Samurai in our near future.

Besides Double Indemnity, the other prestige item of the week is Noah Baumbach's Kicking and Screaming, which received the Criterion treatment. At the DVD Journal, Dawn Taylor notes that Kicking and Screaming "was one of a number of popular independent pictures that paved the way for the faux-indie movement of the late 1990s," and praises Baumbach for not trying to make "any of his characters especially sympathetic in their slacker journey. He leaves that to the actors, who make these layabouts lovable," and finds that Criterion's disc "does justice to this charming film." Gary W Tooze at DVD Beaver proclaims that it "has the same stylish wit as Baumbach's more mature The Squid and the Whale, also exposing some of the ironies of academia." DVD Talk's DVD Savant, Glenn Erickson, notes that "Criterion's disc... presents the handsome independent film in a sparkling enhanced transfer that flatters its unfussy visuals."

Otherwise this week, though, we have TV and Lindsay Lohan.

Don't get me wrong. I love Lindsay Lohan, despite, or maybe because of her off-screen reputation. But her film Just My Luck breezed in and out of theaters so fast that, though in a fashion otherwise customary these days, it did bespeak a lack of zeitgeist flowing in her veins. Gregory P. Dorr, however, reviewing Fox's DVD release of Just My Luck at the DVD Journal, found that Lohan "hits all the right notes in this kind of material." On the other hand, the controversial and ubiquitous Eric D Snider, here at DVD Talk, snidely calls the film "this summer's real disaster movie," noting that the film "doesn't even adhere to real definitions of luck. Most of the 'unlucky' events in the film are the result of the person being clumsy or stupid." And the anonymous reviewer at CurrentFilm.com (are they really anonymous, or am I just not seeing their bylines?) finds that the "real surprise here is Lohan, who, for the first time, really seems disinterested [i.e., uninterested] and gives little effort in the performance. " Finally, even the enthusiastic "Fusion3600" at DVD Authority was disappointed: "As frequent readers know, I, along with most males in the world, have an obsession of sorts with Lindsay Lohan, so of course, I have to see all of her movies. I actually like most of her flicks, as they're usually fun and brisk... Even so, I wasn't too thrilled about Just My Luck, as the previews made it seem like a second rate Trading Places." All of the writers more or less pass over the supplements as negligible.

Also this week, all the new network television science fiction shows - Surface, Invasion, Threshold - that were canceled mid-season popped up on DVD. Dawn Taylor at the DVD Journal deemed Warner's Invasion: The Complete Series to be "arguably one of the best dramas of the 2005-2006 television season - smart, creepy and addictive," adding that William Fichtner is...

[O]ne of the finest character actors working today, and his ability to evince charm, menace, confusion, subterfuge, and bravery - sometimes all in the course of one episode - made [his role as] Underlay the show's most fascinating character. Invasion was exceptional in that it examined all aspects of the alien insurgence - the effect on the community as the unchanged residents viewed their altered neighbors with suspicion, fear, and even jealousy; the question of whether a forced evolution of the human species was a threat or an improvement; and the emotional complications that come when a loved one isn't the same being that they once were, even though they retain all of the same feelings, memories, and ideals as they did before.

CurrentFilm.com's reviewer duplicates Taylor's views: "It still provides a good deal of surprises and plenty of creepy (often thanks to Fichtner's eerie performance) moments."

At DVD Talk, John Sinnott contemplates Threshold, which aired on CBS for nine episodes, now released by Paramount on DVD with four additional un-aired episodes and numerous extras. Sinnott seems to come down on the side of the network for canceling the show, complaining about the program that "it never found its voice - episodes would jump around from genre to genre - a lot of subplots were dropped" and that "the characters also were a bit on the thin side," but he still found something to praise: "The horror aspects worked more often than they didn't."

Finally, consumers might have been excited at the prospect of the R3 two-disc Syriana but "bradavon," commenting after Gary Couzens's review at DVD Times, notes that the only difference between the R3 and the earlier releases of this film is but one extra: "A Conversation with Matt Damon."

Interview. Craig Baldwin.

"Where did Spectres come from?" Andy Spletzer asks in our latest interview. Craig Baldwin replies, "I guess you could say Panama. It's oversimplifying to say that there is a seed behind all these films. It really had to do with this alternative history, and again, all of my films are really all about imperialism. After a while you say, 'Look, it's easy to make these horror movies.'"

Easy and yet not so easy. It's a long talk, covering Baldwin's beginnings as a filmmaker and early works such as Tribulation 99; Sonic Outlaws, which you can watch immediately, as it's part of our VOD library; Other Cinema screenings, DVDs and zine; and the film he's working on right now.

Streep/Brecht.

Ben Brantley in the New York Times: "If you ever wanted to watch one willowy human being lift a 12-ton play onto her shoulders and hold it there for hours, even as her muscles buckle and breath comes short, join the line of hopefuls waiting at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park for cancellations to see Meryl Streep burning energy like a supernova in the title role of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children."

Hilton Als presents his take in the New Yorker. Here's the part Ed Champion likes: "While it is no shock that Streep and [director George C] Wolfe are faithful to Brecht's theatrical philosophy, it comes as a pleasant surprise to see Kevin Kline invest himself to a similar degree. Kline - who was the terrifying Nathan in Sophie's Choice, and Trigorin to Streep's Arkadina in Mike Nichols's 2001 production of The Seagull - is, quite possibly, the best partner Streep has had onstage or onscreen."

David Edelstein in New York: "This is the summer of Streep."

For Deutsche Welle, Linda Csapo talks with Berliner Ensemble director Claus Peymann about Brecht's legacy.

Toronto. Lineup.

The Toronto International Film Festival will open on September 7 with Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn's The Journals of Knud Rasmussen and close on September 16 with Michael Apted's Amazing Grace. That much we knew. Today, though, the full lineup was unveiled and among the publications that've got the full list of 352 films from 61 countries is indieWIRE.

Eugene Hernandez: "The massive film festival, considered one of the most important in the world (second only to Cannes), will feature a roster offering 91 percent world, international or North American premieres, according to the festival. 62 features are directorial debuts."

Double Indemnity.

"The most important film noir ever made is Double Indemnity. Don't even attempt a counter argument - there isn't one," declares Eddie Muller, author of several books as well as our primer on film noir, in a new piece up at the main site.

Dave Kehr, undoubtedly aware of such claims, seems determined to let the air out of them a little in his review for the New York Times. Nonetheless, Universal's new double-disc release features "a very good transfer... and it comes with a wealth of supplementary material, including commentaries by Richard Schickel, Lem Dobbs and Nick Redman."

Related: Kevin Jack Hagopian's entry in noir special from Images, where you'll also find an excerpt from Robert Porfirio's 1975 talk with Billy Wilder from Film Noir Reader 3.

Update: Online listening tip. John Powers on NPR.

Updates, 8/23: Looker: "Too many critics say Neff is supposed to be weak-willed, and that MacMurray perfectly embodies weakness. Nice try, but I don't buy it."

At Slant, Dan Callahan calls this a "disappointing disc for a shallow but well-loved film."

Shorts, 8/21.

"Movie history is rife with tales of genius thwarted, trashed, traduced (DW Griffith, Erich von Stroheim, plus dozens of lesser talents), but the story of Orson Welles has become central to a core myth, beloved by passionate cinephiles and the ever-contemptuous literati, that Hollywood wantonly, inevitably destroys its most gifted creators. I think that notion is nonsensical." For the Los Angeles Times, Richard Schickel reviews Simon Callow's Orson Welles: Hello Americans and Joseph McBride's "more personal and passionate" What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career (coming in October) and argues that "Welles was the primary auteur of his own misery."

Also in the LAT, Susan King previews Buzz, a doc about AI "Buzz" Bezzerides: "[H]e became one of the major writers of film noir in the 1940s and '50s, penning such movies as Thieves' Highway (which he adapted from his own novel), On Dangerous Ground and Kiss Me Deadly. His first novel, The Long Haul, was adapted into the 1940 film They Drive by Night, starring George Raft and Ann Sheridan."

New York's David Edelstein on the films of Andrew Bujalski: "These free-floating comedies of manners - of rudderless young people who can't articulate their feelings to themselves, let alone others - turn out to be shapely, cunning, and indelibly strange." Also: Catch LOL when it screens at the Pioneer for a week beginning on Wednesday.

Scoop. The Illusionist. The Prestige. Clarence Carter: "We at Reverse Shot try to avoid silly cultural-moment analyses; though I could argue that the perfect storm of war malaise, terrorism fears, and waning belief in the credibility of our government necessitates the introduction of the magician character into popular fictions (always a ready mirror of our collective unconscious, of course) that would be, well, stupid."

What does Eisenstein's run-in with the Left Front circle have to do with Art Since 1900. Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism? Konstantin Akinsha explains in springer|in.

Will Mel Gibson's AA meetings mess up Terence Malick's shooting schedule? Jeffrey Overstreet has been looking into it.

Among the other things we learn in Jonathan Romney's interview with Pedro Almodóvar is that the turned down the opportunity to make Brokeback Mountain because was afraid he wouldn't be given the freedom to make it his way. Also in the Independent, David Thomson on Alan Arkin and his 1971 film, Little Murders, "exactly what you need to see if you don't yet credit how outrageous and bold American filmmaking could be at that moment."

Sunday-length interviews in the Observer: Sanjiv Bhattacharya with Toni Collette, Sean O'Hagan with Joan Didion and Barbara Ellen with Sigourney Weaver.

Also:

• David Smith asks Sharon Foster about accusations that the film she's written, Shoot the Messenger, pointing a finger at blacks as a source of their own problems, actually fans racist fires.

• This Film is Not Yet Rated prompts Mark Kermode to ask, "Isn't it time America grew up?"

• Philip French on A Scanner Darkly.

And in the Guardian, Stephen Applebaum talks with Larry Clark about Destricted.

"Television has become a more reliably fulfilling and commercially uncompromised medium than film," declares Heather Havrilesky. "This is largely due to the rise, in the last decade, of the serial drama, with its season-long arcs, slow-simmering character development, and diverse permutations, all of which have allowed TV writers more creative range than ever before. Instead of concise, often formulaic, self-contained episodes, we're treated to rich, complexly plotted stories about tortured Mafia families, soulful Muslim CIA agents and intergalactic spirituality crises that we end up caring deeply about." Also in Salon, Havrilesky's "clip-and-save guide to the new TV season's new dramas."

Empire gets Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Harrison Ford talking about Indy IV. Via Movie City News. Related online viewing tip: Panopticist finds Robby Benson's Star Wars audition. Ouch.

Matt Riviera on The Host: "Watching this moody film, I couldn't help but thing of Tsai Ming-Liang's The River. Though very different, Tsai's film also features an evil presence, born out of a river, which threatens an Asian metropolis from the inside... As with Tsai's film, I think all kinds of metaphors can be read in The Host, especially political ones."

"The tension of distance between the lovers becomes the spatial manifestation of love." Selen B Morkoc in Film International on Baran.

From Jonathan Dee's profile in the run-up to Idlewild: "What's compelling about OutKast isn't simply that the interests of two old high-school buddies should have diverged; it's that Big Boi and André have somehow contrived to turn this incompatibility to their musical advantage." Also in the New York Times Magazine, Deborah Solomon's talk with Whoopi Goldberg. More on Idlewild from Kirk Honeycutt in the Hollywood Reporter and John Anderson in Variety: "[I]t has such ineffable charm and pure entertainment value, it's hard to imagine auds going only once."

In the paper:

• Jane Perlez meets Indonesian filmmaker Nia Dinata: "Her movies are more art house than Hollywood, and her success springs from a fearless drive to address issues of the day with poignancy and touches of humor. In her newest film, Love for Share, which portrays the behind-the-scenes anguish of polygamous marriages, viewers can also detect something else: an authenticity bred of experience."

• Material Girls? Check out Martha Coolidge's 1983 comedy Valley Girl instead, suggests Manohla Dargis.

• A deal Will Smith has made with India's UTV "says a lot about Hollywood’s desire to court foreign audiences," reports Laura M Holson.

• Ryan Lizza: "August, usually the sleepiest month in politics, has suddenly become raucous, thanks in part to YouTube." Commentary: Chuck Tryon.

David Lowery talks with Quinceañera directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland.

Another reason you'd better be reading Nick Davis: "Jackie Brown is the AK-47 in Tarantino's arsenal, which is all the more surprising because, on the surface, the director seems to have more on his mind than blowing us away."

James Wolcott: "Seven Men from Now begins in an uncharacteristic downpour (Boetticher films are usually bone-dry), and receives an injection of snake venom once Lee Marvin turns up as the villain. Where Randolph Scott is the most rectangular of laconic movie heroes, Marvin moves like a whip, at one point practicing his quick draw in a saloon with such hipster humor ('pow pow') it's as if he's anticipating Cat Ballou."

The Reeler invites "Pinch Hitters" to contribute entries while he escapes from New York. Contributors so far: Noel Murray (AV Club), Josh Horowitz (Better Than Fudge), Paddy Johnson (Art Fag City) and Lisa Vandever (CineKink).

The Bothersome Man and Free Jimmy were the big winners at the Amandas, Norway's Oscars, reports Annika Pham at Cineuropa.

On Friday, Marcel Carné would have been 100. Filmz.de points to tributes from Gerhard Midding in the Berliner Zeitung and Sabine Glaubitz in the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger. Also, Renate Brausewetter, 1905 - 2006.

Relaunched with new features and all: The Movie Review Query Engine.

Brian Flemming: "Lonelygirl15 jumps the shark."

Recently updated entries:

• "It had to come out." (the Günter Grass entry).
• Spike Lee's Requiem.
• ATTN: Wes Anderson.
• Critics (again).
• The Pusher Trilogy.
• Interview. Jan Svankmajer. and Lunacy.
• Weekend snakes.
• The Illusionist.
• Brian De Palma.

Online browsing tip. Amid Amidi (Cartoon Brew) posts a collection of photos snapped in the summer of 1958 at Disney studios as animators were completing work on Sleeping Beauty and beginning production on 101 Dalmatians."

Online viewing tip #1. Ricky Gervais talks Office Values for Microsoft. At Film Threat.

Online viewing tip #2. "Fellini." "Who?" Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Pictures of Assholes at DVblog.

Online viewing tip #3. Eddie Izzard: "Brit vs US Movies" at ticklebooth.

Online viewing tip #4. Folkstreams. "The Best of American Folklore Films."

Fests and events, 8/21.

What's Jonas Mekas been up to lately? Lots. Logan Hill fills us in in New York: "For Apple's video iPod, he'll be filming 365 short videos and releasing one a day, beginning September 15. Plus, he'll be curating a downloadable series of classic shorts by experimental filmmakers and videos by the likes of Martin Scorsese, John Waters, Jim Jarmusch, and Abel Ferrara. 'Life is beautifully, beautifully busy.' Go to jonasmekas.com for updates, or hear Mekas speak after the screening of Letter From Greenpoint at the Museum of the Moving Image, on August 25."

Jason Solomons has a big Edinburgh International Film Festival roundup, including takes on the "enjoyably strange" Colour Me Kubrick and the "dense, claustrophobic and compelling" Killing of John Lennon; London to Brighton, "an iron-hard film of almost unbearable intensity," and five more. The fest runs through August 27.

In Ft Worth: Tutto Fellini, a retrospective running through September 3. Via David Lowery.

Invisible Cinema has the program for Nouvelle Vague: Submerged Scientific Films at the Anthology Film Archives on Friday evening.

Camillo De Marco at Cineuropa: "Twelve young European directors will be able to meet potential investors for their second films during the first edition of the Rome Film Festival (October 13 through 21)."

Twitch. Recently.

Twitch is always essential reading, but in just the past few days, they've had one helluva run. Besides the trailers and the posters and such that you'll always find there before anywhere else, a remarkable string of reviews warrants sampling in a separate entry.

"It is incomprehensible that [Edgar] Reitz's work has been ignored in this country for over 20 years. If the 52+ hour saga proved daunting to critics, it will not seem long enough to viewers watching it at home," writes Jon Pais, reviewing Heimat: Eine deutsche Chronik. "Now that the trilogy is at last being released on DVD in the UK, France, Belgium, Germany and the US, film lovers will be able to judge for themselves whether critics have been fair in burying in silence a filmmaker as worthy of our esteem as are Wenders, Fassbinder and Herzog."

Todd, in the meantime, perhaps in preparation for his trip to Moscow, has really been cutting loose. For example: "It is apparently a rather good year for Russian war films. While the stellar 9th Company stands as a timely answer to Platoon, Bastards turned heads with its story of criminal youth forcibly conscripted for suicide missions, and now Transit has arrived with its sprawling tale of life on a remote air base."

Related: "With our own Afghan conflict stretching on interminably with no appreciable gains made, seemingly daily reports of new clashes with Taliban forces that just refuse to fade away, and no end in sight, big budget Russian blockbuster 9th Company is a remarkably timely piece of film." And: "Much like Refn's Pusher films or Kitano's Sonatine, Bimmer is a crime film far more concerned with the criminals and criminal culture than it is with the crimes themselves."

More from Todd:

• This: Coisa Ruim: "Beautifully shot and augmented with a minimalist score that evokes the work of Daniel Lanois, the film is a subtle, slow burning tale of a haunting in rural Portugal."

• And this: "Hardly known outside of his own region [Lorenzo] Bianchini is beginning to turn heads with a pair of ultra low budget features now being made available on English subtitled DVD by Centro Espressioni Cinematographiche, a new imprint established by folk associated with the Udine Far East Film Festival specifically to make Bianchini’s films available."

• And this on Duck Season: "[W]hile it could stand to have a little more zip the characters ring remarkably true."

• And a recommendation for Small Gauge Trauma.

Friz Freleng Blog-A-Thon.

"Welcome to the Friz Freleng Blog-A-Thon, in celebration of the late animation master's 100th (or is it 101st, or 102nd?) birthday," writes Brian Darr. "I hope I have something to contribute to a discussion of cartoons, if only an expression of my passionate belief that the best are as essential as the acknowledged great works of the cinema."

He does. After arguing that Freleng has been underappreciated as an animator, Brian offers a close reading of "High Diving Hare" before, of course, gathering links at the bottom of the post to the dozen or so participants in the Blog-A-Thon so far.

Primer. Mockumentaries.

There's more to the mockumentary than Christopher Guest. Not that there's anything wrong with Christopher Guest, by any means, but the genre has a longer history than you might remember and carries on evolving and thriving in the medium perhaps best suited for it: television.

Liz Cole surveys the highlights in our latest primer: "Mockumentaries."

Weekend shorts.

Roger Ebert sends an email from the hospital. It sounds like it's been a tough series of weeks, but it also sounds like he's in great spirits. And that's what we want to hear.

"The original score, featuring John Cage and Paul Bowles, is quite good, but it is obvious that Richter was more interested in the visual image than the music." Stephen Coates of The Real Tuesday Weld explains how their alternative score to Hans Richter's Dreams That Money Can Buy came to be.

Also in the Guardian: Mark Lawson races through a history of docs and concludes: "More than 60 years after the Ministry of Information began the genre, Oscar-hunting documentaries remain a branch of propaganda."

"Since arriving in Los Angeles, I'd discovered that the place was crawling with Brits hoping to become screenwriters." Toby Young relates his adventures once he'd joined their ranks in an extract from The Sound of No Hands Clapping, running at the Telegraph.

The Queen, you know, will be opening the New York Film Festival. Gerard Gilbert talks with Helen Mirren about becoming Elizabeth II. Also in the Independent, Liz Hoggard meets Patricia Arquette.

Up-n-coming news from Martha Fischer at Cinematical: The White Hotel; Susan Sarandon and Helena Bonham Carter in Eleanor and Colette; an update on Be Kind Rewind (that's the Michel Gondry with Jack Black).

James Urbaniak: "The audition for the Michel Gondry film was smooth as silk. Your move, monsieur."

Now Playing's Brent Simon talks with Justin Theroux about David Lynch's Inland Empire. Or at least what he knows about it, having only seen the pages of the screenplay for the scenes he's in. Via Brendon Connelly. Related: An early PSA from Lynch. Via Screengrab.

"What single movie image or moment do you think of more often than any other?" asks Matt Zoller Seitz at the House Next Door. His own: "Terry Malloy's bloodied walk to the warehouse at the end of On the Waterfront. Pretty much any moment from when he first stands up to when he stops in front of the foreman and drops his hook." Dozens of others chime in with theirs.

"I'm fortunate to have made it in other industries, like the resort industry and the wine industry, so I could finance a small film myself every couple of years and have my dream come true. And that's what I aspire to do," Francis Ford Coppola tells Rebecca Winters Keegan in Time. Via Movie City News. Coppola recently appeared on stage in Los Angeles for a Q&A; notes from David Poland and, at AICN, Marty McSkywalker.

"This is the Howard Dean School of Film Funding, very Net-rooty, very social-networky, very now.... You have an idea. You have an affinity group. You have e-mail addresses. You ask for money. And, as William Booth reports in the Washington Post, it's working for Jim Gilliam and Robert Greenwald as they prepare Iraq For Sale: The War Profiteers. Via Chuck Tryon.

Nick Schager finds OutKast's Idlewild to be "a mess afflicted with serious schizophrenia, a condition due not just to its leads' apparent refusal to appear together except when absolutely necessary, but also to its awkward hybridization of '30s fashion and music with contempo hip-hop flash."

Also in Slant, Ed Gonzalez: "Jeffrey M Togman's Home, like Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, is about renovation, only this is a richer work because its focus is more on the reconstruction of family than the rebuilding of an actual house." And DVDs: Kekexili: Mountain Patrol, Lonesome Jim and American Gun.

Acquarello reviews Aleksandr Sokurov's Days of Eclipse, "an exploration of creation and search for enlightenment in an age of pervasive darkness - at the figurative twilight of humanity."

In Stop Smiling, Nathan Kosub reflects on the men and the women in Eric Rohmer's Six Moral Tales.

At Lucid Screening, Rufus considers Shiri's image of the two Koreas.

"I think the reason why a Mary Pickford film (as with a Bogart film) still plays well with a modern audience, is precisely because of her personality." Anne M Hockens on Sparrows at the Siffblog. Earlier: David Jeffers.

Joe Leydon: "Lee Marvin was born to just give everyone, himself included, a damn good time at the movies."

Vince Keenan: "I watched Sea of Love again recently, and it's still razor sharp. But [Richard] Price's original script - with an ending that's subtler and more logical - is even better."

At the Stranger Song, Paul Schrodt and Rob Humanick defend Lady in the Water.

In the New York Times:

• Charles Solomon previews Fullmetal Alchemist: The Movie: The Conqueror of Shambala: "The original manga and the television and movie adaptations provide audiences with the kind of adventures earlier generations found in The Hardy Boys and Tintin."

• Kristopher Tapley revisits the mysterious death of George Reeves and talks with Allen Coulter, who, while directing Hollywoodland, was "fascinated less with Reeves than with the transition he represented."

• Studios are tightening their belts and, while "Hollywood has undergone periodic shifts like this before," writes Laura M Holson, "many people here agree that there is something different this time, a permanence to Hollywood's new austerity plan."

• Manohla Dargis on King Leopold's Ghosts: "[Director Pippa] Scott's outrage is palpable, but she has bitten off enough here for a 10-hour television series." Also, the "trained, flatulent relationship comedy," Trust the Man. More on that one from Carina Chocano in the LAT.

• Jeannette Catsoulis: "Surreal and occasionally disturbing, Moonlight resembles nothing so much as a fevered fairy tale." Also: "A polemic masquerading as a movie, Poster Boy unspools like a humorless lecture on right-wing homophobia." More on Moonlight from Christopher Campbell at Cinematical.

• For Stephen Holden, 10th & Wolf tries to "matter" as much as Crash, but evidently doesn't even measure up that far.

• For Nathan Lee, Accepted is "a disappointing debut for the director Steve Pink." More from Stephanie Zacharek in Salon.

The Energizer Bunny may be gone, but, as Michael Bodey and Michelle Wiese Bockmann report in the Australian, the controversy surrounding Murali Thalluri and his 2:37 most certainly is not.

Best of 2006 so far? Nick Davis breaks it down.

How are the docs doing at the box office? AJ Schnack's been watching.

Vern's "Badass 100." Via Screengrab.

"Gong Li has picked her five favorite movie heroines for The Wall Street Journal." Tom Tapp's got 'em at Hollywood Wiretap; via Anne Thompson.

Gizmodo takes a first look at Amazon's VOD service. Via Andy Beach at Zoom In Online.

New launch: "The Filmlot was developed to support new and independent filmmakers."

Online viewing tip #1. "UbuWeb announces a relaunch of its film and video section. Greatly expanded with liner notes and links, we're now hosting over 300 avant-garde films and videos."

Online viewing tip #2. Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay finds Rian Johnson's video for the Mountain Goats' "Woke Up New."

Online viewing tips. 13 of them. "TurnHere's Director of Content, Kelly Duane (the artist behind indie-music-inflected Monumental: David Brower's Fight to Save Wild America) says the site is designed 'to help the traveler get an inside look into all that is local around the world'," writes Susan Gerhard. "SF360 asked Duane for some of her favorite travelogue shorts, Bay Area and beyond, in the growing TurnHere collection."

Brian De Palma.

"In anticipation of The Black Dahlia's release, fresh off of its premiere at Venice, Slant Magazine is presenting a symposium of De Palma fanatics to present a look back at a turbulent career," writes Eric Henderson. "Check back every day for a new review and, just maybe, a fresh dose of abuse against shortsighted critics too genteel to admit they get off on De Palma."

Peter Nellhaus: "What importance The Wedding Party has is largely based on its being the first film for several participants in the cast. Cast primarily with actors and friends from Sarah Lawrence College, the film includes Jill Clayburgh, as well as three actors who would collaborate several more times with De Palma - Jennifer Salt, and William Finley, seen above [see Peter's entry] to the left of Charles Pfluger and future De Palma star Robert De Niro. Had none of the actors or the co-writer/director gone to greater acclaim, The Wedding Party would probably be another forgotten student movie."

Earlier: Girish.

Update, 8/20: That Little Round-Headed Boy on Mission to Mars.

Update, 8/21: Robbie Freeling at Reverse Shot: "Slant, we begrudgingly, and in true solidarity, admit that if someone was going to beat us to the punch, at least it was you guys."

The Illusionist.

Bet you thought we'd sent The Illusionist packing on Thursday. So did I. But just look...

"At first glance, Neil Burger's first two features [Interview With the Assassin and The Illusionist] couldn't be further apart," writes Jonathan Rosenbaum in a 4-out-of-4-star review for the Chicago Reader. "But Burger's exceptional gifts as a storyteller and as a director of actors are fully apparent in both, and he's up to something similar in both, playing with the imagination and credulity of the viewer."

Updated through 8/20.

Rosenbaum recalls a lesson from Orson Welles to illustrate a point, and lo, Jim Emerson at RogerEbert.com: "Like F for Fake, the delightful meditation on art and deception by Orson Welles, The Illusionist places the very film you're watching at the center of the illusion.... The movie sets up a fascinating parable about art, religion and politics, and the misty boundaries between them."

Stephen Holden in the New York Times: "Storytelling is also a kind of conjuring, and The Illusionist, at least until its frantic final moments, is smart enough not to lose its cool and to stay out of the way of the entrancing yarn it spins."

Slate's Dana Stevens: "It's an exquisitely crafted period picture that keeps promising more and more as it goes along - smarter ideas, richer themes, spookier plot twists - and keeps delivering on every promise, right up until the rug-pulling and overly hasty final sequence."

Salon's Stephanie Zacharek: "It moves along with the utmost certainty that we'll be dazzled by it, as if enchantment were a thing that could be enforced. But in the end, The Illusionist got me."

"[F]or all the handsome upgrades in style, story and production values," writes Josef Braun for Vue Weekly, "The Illusionist still benefits most from precisely the same thing that made its predecessor so memorable: the movie dazzles with possibilities yet never quite gives up its tricks."

Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle: "The Illusionist is very much reminiscent of a forgotten 1932 picture called Arsene Lupin, starring John Barrymore as a master art thief and his brother Lionel Barrymore as the detective determined to put him behind bars. The challenge there was the same as here - to craft an elaborate story that ultimately satisfies the audience's affection for both conflicting characters. In both films, the success is complete."

Carina Chocano, writing in the Los Angeles Times, is less enthusiastic but finds Paul Giamatti and Rufus Sewell "fun to watch."

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram's Christopher Kelly is more in line with Thursday's crowd: "Burger has approached this soapy-sudsy, rabbit-out-of-a-hat material with a joylessness and propriety normally reserved for Holocaust dramas; this is likely the least magical movie ever made about magic."

Update, 8/20: Richard Corliss for Time: "Burger has tricks up his sleeve, but he's not a cheat.... By the end, the canniest viewers may not be fooled, but - and you can believe this - they may be mesmerized."

Weekend fests and events.

First, quickly, if you're in Chicago, Jonathan Rosenbaum is recommending this afternoon's benefit screening for Lebanese war relief.

"A satirist is necessarily a moralist, and for all of the fun Tashlin had with the exaggerated imagery of American pop culture, he insisted on the importance of rejecting the illusions of consumerism for the reality of human emotion," writes Dave Kehr in a piece for the New York Times previewing the series of Frank Tashlin movies at Film Forum (The Girl Can't Help It! runs August 25 through 31; the rest from September 1 through 7). "The most absurd figure in Tashlin's films is not the heavy-bosomed blonde but the pathetic male in a pure, helpless state of arousal, continually provoked by the eroticized environment that surrounds him." Earlier: Fernando F Croce in Slant.

"Anyone who has given up hope of seeing an enjoyable, well-made British comedy will be much cheered by Driving Lessons," writes Sheila Johnston, who talks with director Jeremy Brock. Also at the Edinburgh International Film Festival for the Telegraph is SF Said, who offers quick takes on The Flying Scotsman, Brothers of the Head and The Killing of John Lennon.

Nick Pinkerton at Reverse Shot: "As the sixth and final week of MOMI's well-stocked overview of Frank Borzage's career arrives, it's worth taking a look back to survey the terrain that's been covered so far."

Kevin Thomas writes up a primer for the Viva Pedro for the Los Angeles Times while Kenneth Turan talks with Almodóvar about Volver. Also, with Roger Corman In Person: The Early Years slated for August 25 through 27, Susan King meets the "King of the Bs."

At Twitch, Todd hints ever-so-coyly at what's in the lineup for the Toronto After Dark Festival (October 20 through 24).

In Austin? Jette Kernion has recommendations at Cinematical. San Francisco? Brian Darr.

Holland Carter visits On Photography: A Tribute to Susan Sontag, at the Metropolitan through September 4. Curator Mia Fineman "accompanies the 40 pictures, all from the museum's collection, with Sontag quotations, placed high on the walls, and leaves the play of images and words allusive rather than illustrative, free to generate mood as much as meaning, as Sontag would have wished." Also in the New York Times, Ken Johnson on Elizabeth Peyton, Prints 1998 - 2006 and Andy Warhol, both at the Guild Hall Museum through October 22.

The Oakland Museum of California is showing four newly acquired video works by Bill Viola from August 26 through December 31.

The National Gallery's Portrait of an Artist Film Season runs from September 23 through November 11: "All the films in this season engage with techniques Velázquez employed to establish personality, from his use of light and colour, and a vivid range of facial expression and body language, to his unconventional approach to composition." Via Richard Gibson.

Online browsing and viewing tip. The site for Moving Pictures: American Art & Early Film, 1880 - 1910 (at the Grey Art Gallery from September 13 through December 9) offers a mini-tour with clips.

Weekend snakes.

"I'd urge anyone who's even remotely interested in Snakes on a Plane to see it this weekend, when the curiosity level will be at its highest, and with the biggest, rowdiest audience you can find," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "Because while Snakes on a Plane barely stands up as a movie, it definitely qualifies as an event. A fellow critic present at the same showing said that afterward, he couldn't quite tell if the crowd actually liked the picture. But everyone sure liked being there."

"It was... a perfect night at the movies." Harry Knowles caught it at the Alamo Drafthouse South with Quentin Tarantino and the cast of Death Proof. At AICN, he describes in mouth-watering detail the snake handler pre-show, the menu, the Samuel Jackson Badass Ale... yep, does sound fun.

Manohla Dargis in the New York Times: "As it happens, Snakes on a Plane isn't just about rubber reptiles and [Samuel L] Jackson spewing pearls of profanity; it's also a solid, B-movie-style entertainment crammed with 'boos!' and lightly scented with a whiff of social metaphor." So many Manohla Moments are crammed into the fistful of paragraphs that follow, you can't help but suspect she had a blast, too.

Updated through 8/21.

Updates, 8/19: Watch Brian at Dumb Distraction watch it eleven times. In a row. Really. Meanwhile, Micah's review.

Two points from Film Threat's Pete Vonder Haar:

1. It has the potential to supplant The Rocky Horror Picture Show as the greatest audience participation movie of all time.

2. It is, simultaneously, one of the worst and best movies I've ever seen.

Cheryl Eddy: "Okay, so at long motherfucking last, the countdown clock on the snake crate clicks to 0:00. Why is there a countdown clock? Because there is. Don't fight it. Unbridled hysteria grips the crowd."

Mark Pfeiffer: "Leave it to Snakes on a Plane... to provide a shot in the arm for the theatrical experience."

"I am pleased to report that Snakes on a Plane is everything you could want from a movie with its glorious title.... those of us who had no expectations—much like the characters in the movie who assumed there were no snakes on their plane—were wrong. Dead wrong," writes Dana Stevens in Slate; but wait, there's more: "Snakes on a Plane doesn't need to be conscious of itself as a 9/11 movie to effectively function as one."

Joe Leydon finds it "a pretty damn good rock-the-house, go-for-broke action flick. No kidding: Snakes on a Plane has the style and swagger of a down-to-earth, meat-and-potatoes B-movie of 30 years ago."

For Aaron Dobbs, it's "probably the most entertaining movie of the summer (and could wind up being the same for the entire year... yeah, that's what I'm saying)."

"[I]f you can find a better time at the movies this year than this wild comic thriller, let me in on it. I'm there," declares the San Francisco Chronicle's Mick LaSalle.

Borys Kit: "Credit goes to Jackson, who delivers his lines, many of which had audience members in stitches, with gusto. And thank heavens for that R-rating. The movie would be nothing without the added scenes of sex and gore."

"I just wish [director David R] Ellis had gone more nutso. I wish that someone had gotten sucked out of the window as the plane is approaching the coast of Los Angeles and that the camera had stayed with this person as he/she splashes into the Pacific... and lives." And that's only the first - and probably least outlandish - of Jeffrey Wells's suggestions.

Not everyone's having such fun, though. James Christopher for the London Times: "Films that revel in the glory of being this arm-chompingly bad will always attract a cult following, but the director makes the fatal mistake of letting entire reels slip into the tedious."

For the Los Angeles Times's Carina Chocano, it's "not quite a horror movie (too cheerful and can-do) or a thriller (too cheerful and stupid), nor does it parody itself or take itself seriously, thereby canceling out the camp factor. It's more like an improv sketch at 30,000 feet." Also, Geoff Berkshire highlights the "badass moments" of Jackson's career.

It might have been a fun discovery if we didn't already know everything there is to know about it, suggests David Poland.

Bryant Frazer: "Maybe I'm just getting old, but it bugs me that there's still this perceived equivalence between fun movies and dumb ones. Unhinged genre pictures can be great fun and still have something significant on their minds. When it comes down to it, I'd much rather see Snake Plissken on a plane."

Nick Schager in Slant: "Unsure of whether to deliver scares or laughs, Ellis's aerial action-adventure winds up failing to consistently offer either, its rollercoaster ride straining mightily, and ultimately futilely, to be all things to all (demographically coveted 18-24 year-old) people."

At Hollywood Bitchslap: Dawn Taylor (5 out of 5 stars), Erik Childress (1), William Goss (4), Eric D Snider (4) and Brian Orndorf (2).

James Rocchi at Cinematical: "[I]t feels like after the pitch meeting casting Jackson and crafting the promo plan, everyone let out a big sigh of relief at how this baby was going to sell itself and quit working." And Scott Weinberg: "Judged on the simplest merit system, Snakes on a Plane delivers precisely what its pulpy title promises - but not a whole lot more."

Mike Russell catches it in "a packed house of costumed fans.... As a friend sitting next to me put it before the movie began, 'I feel like I'm waiting for the principal to come and start the film.'"

David Poland on the first box office numbers: "The discussion of 'what happened' will, of course, be misdirected at The Internet by Old Media."

Updates, 8/20: Chuck Tryon: "The involvement of fans in shaping the film, at least in my reading, allows fans to feel at least some stake in a popular culture that seems disconnected from them and their interests and desires."

Vince Keenan: "Unlike most people, I had decent expectations going in for one reason: SoaP was directed by David R Ellis, who made Cellular. Regular readers know the high regard in which that movie is held around Chez K. I still say it's one of the best movies of 2004."

Meanwhile, Snakes on a Blog readers find, post and discuss half a zillion reviews.

Updates, 8/21: Sharon Waxman in the NYT: "Snakes on a Plane, the wildly hyped high-concept movie, turned out to be a Web-only phenomenon this weekend, as that horror-comedy starring Samuel L Jackson took in just $15.2 million at the box office in its opening days."

Online listening tip. Slate's "Spoiler Special."

Tattoos, videos, lingo. Xeni Jardin surveys the aftermath at Boing Boing.

NYFF. Lineup.

IndieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez has the official descriptions of the 28 features to be screened between September 29 and October 15 during the New York Film Festival and a quote or two from Richard Pena, program director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and chair of the NYFF Selection Committee. At the IFC Blog, Alison Willmore's got links for the films and their makers. The Reeler points out a few surprises.

Take a good look at that list, though. These are films we're going to be hearing quite a bit about in the fall and throughout 2007. A glance at the 2005 program will remind you that heavy coverage in New York-based media, both old and new, can do a lot for a film's endurance.

Roundtable. Svankmajer.

"With Lunacy, the latest picture by Jan Svankmajer, opening at the Film Forum last Wednesday, then the Nuart today and Bay Area cinemas next week (and a variety of venues through September, into October and November), we were faced with a challenge," writes Jonathan Marlow. "How do we spread word about this unconventional feature to our regular readers?"

Jonathan's found a way. He presents a Q&A moderated by Simon Field at the International Film Festival Rotterdam last fall. Among the topics: the screenplay as a mere guide to be quickly forgotten, letting a thousand interpretations bloom, a unique approach to actors, music (forwards and backwards) and the new "censorship of money" (as opposed to the old "censorship of thought").

Earlier: "Lunacy.," updated through 8/23.

Update, 8/20: Online viewing tip. Michael Guillen's Svankmajer YouTube gallery.

Interview. Bent Hamer.

For a conversation with Bent Hamer about casting Matt Dillon as Henry Chinaski, alter-ego of Charles Bukowski, in his new film, Factotum, you want someone who hosts a radio show called Drinks with Tony. You want Tony DuShane.

Related: "Like the film itself, Mr Dillon's performance works through understatement," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Factotum is a film about the horrors and occasional comedy of work, as well as gutting through life on your own terms, which in Bukowski's case meant turning both that horror and that comedy into literature.... Subversive might not be the right word with which to characterize his commitment to his art, his muse, his hip flask and the Big No, as in no to the straight and narrow, no to the clean and tidy. But it does have a nice ring."

Updated through 8/24.

"The go-to point of comparison for Hamer's film is [Barbet] Schroeder's 1987 Barfly, from an original screenplay by Bukowski, which likewise attached a contemporary A-list name to the role of Henry Chinaski, alter-ego navigator of Buk's hiccupped autobiographical aggrandizements," writes Nick Pinkerton, opening Reverse Shot's round on the film at indieWIRE. The comparison, he argues, "only serves to remind us how the expectations of what independent film culture can accomplish have diminished through the last 20 years, and highlight the banal superfluity of Hamer's movie." Justin Stewart and Nicolas Rapold follow, and they're far more willing to cut the film some slack.

Melissa Levine in the Voice: "[N]one of it goes anywhere. It's just stylized alcoholism with a tired wink."

Back in June, when he caught it at the Seattle International Film Festival, Sean Axmaker wrote here, "Hamer's sensibility is distinctively not American, and maybe that's what makes this askew look at rumpled dignity in a most undignified existence come through with a subdued, modest grace."

Jennifer Merin also meets Hamer and chats him up for the New York Press.

Online listening tip. Amy Reiter talks with Matt Dillon for Salon.

Updates, 8/19: "Dillon, now 42, has grown up into one of the most resourceful character actors in American movies," writes AO Scott in the NYT.

The Los Angeles Times's Kenneth Turan finds Factotum "a surprisingly satisfying film, true to Bukowski and itself, a work that manages to make the man and his profane world more palatable without compromising on who he was and what he stood for."

Jürgen Fauth: "Factotum Jeremiah Kipp in Slant: "[U]nlike Bukowski's character, who always makes a big deal out of living life to the fullest no matter how much life kicks you in the teeth, the film never really goes for it."

Update, 8/24: Dennis Harvey presents "a rundown on the major features about or derived from Bukowski to date" at SF360.

Shorts, 8/17.

"Black Snake Moan, Craig Brewer's follow-up to last year's Sundance sensation Hustle & Flow, comes as close to exploitation heaven as any studio based film made in the past 20 years," writes Mike D'Angelo for Esquire. "You watch it unfold - detonate, more like - with giddy incredulousness, stunned that somebody actually had the guts to put such supercharged images on the screen. That doesn't automatically make it a great movie, but it does make it a valuable one, especially in a culture given to endless hand-wringing over dull, mealymouthed Ron Howard versions of airport novels."

That's via Bilge Ebiri at Screengrab, where, noting that his piece on Keith Gordon's The Chocolate War has generated lots of reader interest, he follows up with a batch of related links.

Screengrab is now nestled into Nerve's Film Lounge, by the way; here are Laura Davies's first impressions at Filmmaker.

"Despite the unusual visibility of his sumptuous Proust interpretation Time Regained (1999), even DVD representation is lagging far behind in bringing together the pieces of [Raúl] Ruiz's puzzle-in-progress, the oeuvre as single work, alluring in its vast inaccessibility. Yet two new additions to the catalogue, while hardly promising Ruiz broader recognition, serve to illuminate a few shadowy corners in his singular cinema." José Teodoro for Stop Smiling on Three Crowns of the Sailor (1982) and That Day (2003).

Up-n-coming:

• Hou Hsiao-hsien has begun shooting the first of four features to be made commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Musée d'Orsay. Once Olivier Assayas completes his Boarding Gate, he'll shoot the second. Both star Juliette Binoche. And, as Fabien Lemercier reports for Cineuropa, the other two films are to be made by Raúl Ruiz and Jim Jarmusch.

• Tim Burton and Johnny Depp's sixth collaboration will be an adaptation of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd. Chris Gardner and Pamela McClintock report for Variety.

• Ken Loach's Palme d'Or-winning The Wind That Shakes the Barley will be distributed in the US as part of IFC First Take's "day-and-date" program. Gregg Goldstein has quotage in the Hollywood Reporter.

• Variety's Michael Fleming reports that Terry George will direct Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Ruffalo in an adaptation of John Burnham Schwartz's novel Reservation Road.

At Twitch, Todd offers a mighty tantalizing preview of Bong Joon-ho's The Host. More from Richard Brunton, filing from Edinburgh. Oh, and it's doing quite well in Korea. Very well. Grady Hendrix has numbers.

At PopMatters, Marco Lanzagorta offers a brief and useful history of Fangoria, Cinefex and Video Watchdog and, at Cinematical, Scott Weinberg rounds up the latest goings on at various blogs devoted to horror.

"I've been noticing that more and more critics are becoming increasingly distrustful of Almodóvar's talent the more he's co-opted by the mainstream," blogs Ed Gonzalez. "So, Almodóvar uses a condom nowadays, but isn't the sex still good?"

"While lavishly praised by contemporary filmmakers Quentin Tarantino, Michael Mann, Martin Scorsese and John Woo, who has famously declared that the French director was 'God for me,' Melville's legacy is contradictory," according to Richard Phillips at the WSWS. Also, a meaty interview with Fred Breinersdorfer, who wrote the screenplay for Sophie Scholl: The Final Days.

Zach Campbell: "What makes Godard (particularly the immediate post-DVG Godard, the one of Numéro deux and Ici et ailleurs) so interesting to me is that his didacticism is shared with the viewer - as is his ignorance!"

"It is a mistake to privilege any one of Eric Rohmer's Six Moral Tales over another, though the temptation exists and is easily indulged, especially if one takes the disparate, yet complementary viewpoints of this inimitable sextet as entirely representative of its creator's own principles," writes Keith Uhlich. "Strange that auteurism should fail us so completely in the case of one of its founding practitioners, but Rohmer was always something of an odd man out among his contemporaries, if not in the remove of years (a decade older than most of his nouvelle vague brethren) then in the deceptive placidity of his art."

Also in Slant:

• Ed Gonzalez reviews LOL and explains "how a little film thinks bigger." Also, Fraticide's "startling saber-toothed violence and blend of mystic and modern impulses recalls Pasolini's audacious Porcile."

• Nick Schager on Criterion's release of Kicking and Screaming. Plus, Surviving Eden.

Eric Haynes takes another shot over at Reverse Shot: "It doesn't hold much value out of context, but in A Short Film About Love - as in all of Krzysztof Kieslowski's cinema - context is everything."

"Published by Duke University's Center for the Study of the Public Domain, Bound by Law? (Tales From the Public Domain) is a brief history of intellectual property and the public domain in comic-book form, written by Duke law professors Keith Aoki, James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins and available both on the Web and in print from Soft Skull Press." Paul Cullum explains why it matters. Touchstones: Los Angeles Plays Itself, This Film is Not Yet Rated, Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession and many others.

Also in the LA Weekly, Ella Taylor: "Trust the Man emerges a weakling comedy of manners riffing on extramarital nooky... kooky therapy groups, New Yorkers' bad manners in public, the difficulty of finding parking spots and blah, blah, blah." (More from Armond White in the New York Press.) And Tim Grierson on Barry Lyndon and Paul Malcolm on The Hidden Blade.

MS Smith on Miami Vice: "Forms of criticism that consistently measure a film by a prescribed set of functional requirements (plot, characterization) and by the differences between its strengths and weaknesses can overlook the glories in a film such as this; they might even shake one's faith in the potential of criticism to transform the experience of cinema."

Darwin's Nightmare, the "Oscar-nominated documentary highlighting links between fish fillets flown from Lake Victoria to the European Union and the global arms trade has drawn a furious reaction from Tanzania's president and prompted harassment of local people involved in the film," reports Xan Rice. Also in the Guardian: "It was really only after Fassbinder's death... that [Daniel] Schmid became recognised as an artist in his own right," writes Ronald Bergan. Earlier: "Daniel Schmid, 1941 - 2006."

"There is no doubt that I love Mumbai. I love this city more than I love women perhaps," Ram Gopal Varma tells IBN's Anuradha Sengupta. Via Jeff at Cinema Strikes Back.

At Zoom In Online, Annie Frisbie has been talking with producer Ted Hope.

Film Threat's KJ Doughton talks with director Neil Burger about The Illusionist. So does Canfield at Twitch. Related: Bill Gallo in the Voice: "[T]his entertaining tale of wizardry and lost love vaporizes even our most serious doubts." Plus, Sara Schieron at Slant and a "B-" from the AV Club's Scott Tobias, a "C" from Doug Wallen in the Philadelphia Weekly and a "C+" from Nick Schager.

More from Jennifer Merin in the New York Press, where you'll also find Armond White on Step Up and Kari Milchman on The Puffy Chair.

The Austin Chronicle's Marc Savlov calls up Irvine Welsh to talk about Trainspotting ten years on.

Lesley O'Toole talks with Samuel L Jackson for the Independent. And so does Keith Phipps for the AV Club. You know why. Related: The San Francisco Bay Guardian's Cheryl Eddy meets snake handler Jules Sylvester and Phipps talks with director David R Ellis.

Sean Howe looks back: "And then, after launching the careers of a half-dozen young actors (and a half-dozen New Romantic bands), after introducing 'neo-maxi-zoom-dweebie' and 'poozer' and 'eat my shorts' into the lexicon, John Hughes decided to leave the kids behind." Also in the New York Observer, Scott Eyman reviews Simon Callow's Orson Welles: Hello Americans.

David Carr has a backgrounder on Tire Tracks, a 40-minute doc on "a kind of rural car- and truck-made graffiti... one man's folk art is another's rend in the social fabric." Also in the New York Times, Stuart Elliott: "Those consumers who prefer their entertainment unbranded - that is, without the products, logos and other trappings of advertisers embedded in the content - are in for a disappointing decade, according to a new report."

And Nathan Lee on Rocky Road to Dublin: Peter Lennon's "tough-love valentine to the motherland retains interest for its historical perspective, sardonic tone, lively structure and finely etched black-and-white cinematography by the legendary Raoul Coutard." More from R Emmet Sweeney in the Voice.

"Seventeen is without a doubt one of the greatest movies, perhaps the greatest, about teenage life (not to mention American life) ever made," writes Johnny Ray Huston for SF360. "The time seems right to break down seventeen reasons why that's the case."

Anthony Kaufman: "Among the many Iraq docs I've seen over the last few years, Usama Alshaibi's Nice Bombs offers a refreshing new perspective on the quagmire."

A "major strength" of The War Tapes for Chuck Tryon is that stateside interviews, conducted after the soldiers return home from Iraq offer a perspective "unavailable with other embedded documentaries."

"The recent release of the American version of Pulse inspired me to catch up on a couple more films by Kiyoshi Kurosawa." Peter Nellhaus traces influences and associations.

At indieWIRE, Eugene Hernandez checks up on the DIY distribution efforts behind Four Eyed Monsters and Head Trauma. Related: Sujewa Ekanayake.

Ron Silliman takes the makers of Thomas Pynchon: A Journey Into the Mind of [P.] to task and concludes, "Thomas Pynchon has a new novel, Against the Day, forthcoming this November.... At 1060 pages from a novelist who is now 69, it may well be the last big book we ever get from Pynchon, and it's only his sixth one. It would nice to imagine that people will read it for what it is, and not as a cryptogram for deciphering what the author doesn't care to share." Via Ed Champion.

"I know what you are thinking: I am not a friend of me." For the SFBG, Tyler Goodboy braves Orientation: A Scientology Information Film.

"Extracted from its contrived military context, 10th & Wolf is essentially just another story of small-time mobsters, superficially similar to the far-superior Goodfellas," writes Martha Fischer at Cinematical.

"There was a time when WC Fields seemed eternal," writes John McElwee at Greenbriar Picture Shows. "His persona, his philosophy, seemed to embrace succeeding generations long after he'd left the stage in 1946." But "where are those teen-agers and college students of yore that lined up at revival theatres and University campuses to see him? Their numbers have not been replenished - how can they when the films are long since out of general circulation?"

Paul Mooney, "a legendary comic who wrote shit for everyone from Redd Foxx to Eddie Murphy to Richard Pryor," talks racism in the movies with RA the Rugged Man in mass appeal. Via Blank Screen.

At Facets Features, Nathan Hogan anxiously awaits Preston Sturges: The Filmmaker Collection.

"Introduction to Film and Video Analysis." Chris Cagle's syllabus.

Favorite road movies? The cinetrix is wondering, is all.

The AV Club's weekly list: "12 Acceptable Man-Vs-Beast Films."

Congrats, Jeffrey Overstreet!

"No one will be shooting on celluloid in four years." Francis Ford Coppola, as quoted by David Poland.

"In June of this year, [the New York Times] chose the Broder-Webb-Chervin-Silberman Agency, a small but prestigious Beverly Hills firm, to represent the paper in negotiations for film and television rights to its content." In the New York Observer, Jonathan Liu explains that "[o]ptioning human-interest newspaper articles wasn't always such a complicated business."

Late summer reading tip. The Center for Japanese Studies at the University of Michigan is offering Noël Burch's To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema as a free PDF download. Via filmtagebuch, where Thomas Groh notes that this is part of the Center's "Motion Picture Reprint Series."

Online browsing tip. The complete run of Radical Software, "a great 70s MacLuhanite zine about early video art and media activism," writes Wiley Wiggins. "This stuff is like porn for me, vintage video gear with a good dose of pre-internet media theory."

Online listening tip. Peter Sellers's British accents. Via Jason Kottke.

Online viewing tips, 8/17.

Lens on Lebanon is "a grassroots documentary initiative formed in response to the Israeli bombardment," as Anthony Kaufman puts it at the Daily Reel, recommending From Beirut to... those who love us (referred to earlier) and Dead Time. Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay has more.

Keith Olbermann: "The Nexus of Politics and Terror." Via Joe Leydon.

Onnazuri (or Men, Women and Capitalism), a finalist for the 2006 Student Academy Awards, via no fat clips!!!.

John Pilger's New Rulers of the World. Via wood s lot.

At Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow finds some very funny clips from Talking to Americans.

Tom Sutpen places The Town, "the only film directed in its entirety by Josef von Sternberg between 1941's The Shanghai Gesture and 1953's Anatahan,... alongside similarly artful propaganda evocations such as John Ford's Battle of Midway and William Wyler's The Memphis Belle."

Twitch's Todd has found a trailer for Hong Sang-soo's Woman on the Beach.

Credit sequence from Don at ScoreBaby Annex.

At AICN, Merrick points to a Japanese trailer for Clint Eastwood's The Flags of Our Fathers and Red Sun, Black Sand. That's right, two films, one trailer. Jeffrey Wells comments - and finds an English translation.

Lenny Bruce's Thank You Mask Man, via ticklebooth.

The Royal House of Hangover. Related: Thomas Logoreci's interview. In a similar vein, the Lincoln Assassination, as interpreted by "Al Pacino" and "Christopher Walken."

Fests and events, 8/17.

The Residents have issued a call for submissions to The River of Crime (see details there; you've got until September 15); and The Residents: Re-Viewed will survey their video and film work at MoMA (October 19 through 23).

"The Last Movie, the exhilarating cinematic outrage that incinerated Dennis Hopper's career in 1971, might also be known as The Lost Masterpiece," declares J Hoberman in the Voice, and "the 35mm print showing for a week at Anthology Film Archives could be the only complete version in existence." Hoberman tells the film's story and notes that "coincidentally Anthology is screening [Kid Blue] Thursday as part of its Warren Oates retro."

Also in the Voice: Elliott Stein previews The Huston Family: 75 Years on Film (tomorrow through September 22 at MoMA). Related: Jeremiah Kipp at the House Next Door on John Huston's performance in Chinatown: "Knowledge of Huston's filmography and private life complicates an already fascinating character."

"Sound Unseen [through August 24] has been a vital part of the Twin Cities alt-culture landscape ever since entrepreneurial curator-turned-organic farmer and freelance stonemason Nate Johnson planted it here in 2000," writes Rob Nelson in the City Pages. "But I believe this is the first year that the festival of music and film has given its parties equal prominence on the bill. And this is a good thing." Also: Lindsey Thomas on the rock docs, Amy Taubin on Old Joy and Peter S Scholtes on The Monks.

Eugene Hernandez previews the Chicago Underground Film Festival (through August 24) for indieWIRE; also, Brian Brooks breaks down the program for the Palm Springs International Festival of Short Films and Short Film Market (ShortsFest), set for August 24 through 30.

"'We're teaching kids from at–risk communities... to express themselves in a non-formal way,' says [LIFT Project coordinator Chris] Langer. The program culminates on Monday, August 21 with a screening of the teen's creations at Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater. Last summer's screening, Langer says, sold out." Sushil Cheema watches the teens work for the New York Press.

Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian: "The Edinburgh International Film Festival [through August 27] got off to a dull start [Monday] night with its opening film [The Flying Scotsman]: a true-life underdog sports movie about Graeme Obree, the champion cyclist from Scotland." Meanwhile, Richard Brunton is all over the festival.

Charlotte Cripps previews the Zone Horror Frightfest (August 25 through 28) for the Independent.

Robert Abele for the Los Angeles Times: "The International Documentary Assn's DocuWeek returns to the ArcLight on Friday, and the selection of films this year - 12 features and four shorts - is especially strong (if mostly chilling) in the stories they tell and the issues they lay open, from the struggle to get a fair price for poverty-stricken coffee growers (Black Gold) to the efforts of fundamentalist Christians to mold young evangelists (Jesus Camp)."

At Slant, Fernando F Croce previews a week's worth of Frank Tashlin movies at the Film Forum (September 1 through 7).

Wiley Wiggins will be on the jury at this year's Fantastic Fest (September 21 through 28 in Austin).

The Salzburg Festival and the American Friends of the Salzburg Festival are at odds over Tony Palmer's documentary, The Salzburg Festival: A Short History, reports Anthony Tommasini: "The festival has disavowed the film, partly because of what festival directors consider Mr Palmer's overemphasized and sometimes inaccurate account of the festival's intertwined relationship with the Nazis."

Stephen Holt submits his Viva Pedro recommendations at Movie City News.

Matt Riviera wraps the Brisbane and Melbourne International Film Festivals.

Mitch Davis is the Director of International Programming for Montreal's Fantasia Film Festival and Film Threat's Jeremy Knox highly recommends the DVD collection of shorts Davis has hand-picked, Small Gauge Trauma.

István Szabó will head up the jury of the 11th Pusan International Film Festival (October 12 through 20), reports the Chosun Ilbo.

Online listening tip. The Ottawa International Animation Festival (September 20 through 24) is podcasting. Via Kino Kid at fps.

The Pusher Trilogy.

"Your first impression of this five-hour-plus underworld trilogy is that director Nicolas Winding Refn is an engineer of epic scale and structural ambition, and that the tiny kingdom of Denmark is apparently a snake pit of narcotic squalor and homicidal chaos," writes Michael Atkinson in the Voice. "But the Pusher movies play less like features than like the nastiest hit TV series HBO never made."

Martha Fischer launches Cinematical's trilogy of reviews by calling Refn's debut feature "an enthralling combination of the shocking, the sensational and the matter-of-fact.... Refn directs his film with a remarkably assured hand, exercising self-control that will drive the legion of state-side Tarantino devotees mad. Instead of pumping up colors, violence and personalities, Refn takes the opposite approach, rendering his most tension-filled moments so subdued they're almost deadpan." And here's II. III (III's best, argues Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog).

"Yes, we've been talking about these films forever, but let me say it again anyway: Nicholas Winding Refn's Pusher films may just be the best trilogy of crime films ever made." At Twitch, Todd points to a new trailer. Todd's Toronto reviews from last September: I, II and III.

Updated through 8/21.

Daniel Robert Epstein interviews Refn for SuicideGirls.

Earlier: Stuart Klawans in the Nation.

Updates, 8/17: Salon's Andrew O'Hehir has a good, long talk with Refn. More from KJ Doughton in Filmmaker.

The Reeler introduces his talk with Refn: "That a half-dozen or so of Pusher's characters come and go between films inclines it not toward some finite, Godfather-style mythos, but rather a TV-style tableau. In other words, don't think of it as a franchise - think of it as a parallel universe, and a visceral, compelling one at that."

Among the questions Aaron Hillis asks for IFC News: "The hell you went through to get the two sequels made is chronicled in a 2006 documentary, currently playing on the international festival circuit. What's the story behind Gambler?"

Update, 8/18: "[Y]ou can almost taste the hate and smell the stomach wounds. Given an appetite for grisly crime flicks, they make for a delectably nasty epic," writes Nathan Lee in the New York Times. "The Pusher films pull no punch. They’re a knockout."

Update, 8/21: Brad Westcott has a long talk with Refn for Reverse Shot.

Critics (again).

"If we don't champion our critics, who will?" asks Patrick Goldstein in the Los Angeles Times. "We need to reinvent their roles to combat the $40-million mass-hypnosis marketing that occurs every weekend a big movie opens." As Anne Thompson notes on her must-read Risky Biz Blog, Goldstein breathes new life into a dead horse (the "are critics relevant?" question) by suggesting what might be done about critics' widely perceived waning influence. It's a suggestion she "heartily endorse[s]: major news outlets should give their critics blogs and encourage them to weigh in before the official studio review dates."

She then takes it another step further by explaining how "various influential movie sites like Movie City News and Hollywood Elsewhere" are already part of Hollywood's marketing cycle (David Poland responds; Jeffrey Wells is thinking about it). This, she feels, could be short-circuited by shifting the moment long-established print and broadcast media critics weigh in on a film far earlier than when they do now, "on opening day. Which admittedly now seems very late in the day. I love this idea! And it will drive the studios nuts."

But will it?

Updated through 8/19.

Media companies know what they're facing; they've read The Long Tail. They've proven themselves to be faster on the uptake than many major newspapers and magazines. As Katrina Longworth, former Cinematical editor and now a Lead Anchor at Netscape.com, explains in an entry at her new blog, the studios rewire those cycles pretty quickly now.

New Line, for example, which, with Snakes on a Plane, has produced what Matt Dentler calls "a first of its kind, a 'user-generated movie' in the age of a 'user-generated' media revolution," now has, as Karina notes, "an internet marketing division, which first came out in full force earlier this year during the promotion of Take the Lead. On the one hand, New Line were rightly commended for reaching out to teens by inviting them to create online mashups of footage and music from the film; on the other hand, eyebrows were definitely raised when their publicists started sending out invites to a 'blogger junket' - an all-expense paid trip to Los Angeles, where attendees were shown the film and given 'face time' with the stars."

In short, as that vague nebula known as critical consensus spreads wider and thinner, studios are laying on the bribes wider and thicker.

Above and beyond all that is an entirely different set of questions. Should every critic blog? What makes a great critic isn't necessarily what makes a great blogger, and lord knows, vice versa. Then there's the question of how many critics even want to blog. Do they want a closer relationship with their readers? Do we, the readers, want them stealing from time they usually invest in their reviews so they can tend to yet another movie blog?

Don't get me wrong. If, say, Manohla Dargis were to launch a blog, that'd be the first feed I'd read each morning (and anyone who remembers the "Ask Manohla" columns for the LAT and the Cannes Journal of 2005 for the NYT will certainly understand). And there are plenty of other critics I'd love to read more often; I'd be intrigued to know what their voices sound like when they relax a little. But we should be careful what we wish for. First, because blogs won't throw a wrench into the works of the "$40-million mass-hypnosis marketing"; instead, they're only likely to feed it. And second, because, with 50 million blogs already out there - and counting - no one should be forced to add to the noise.

Updates, 8/19: DK Holm's modest proposal: "I for one think that the studios should drop all critics and not screen their films for any of them. Let the critics pay and see the films the first weekend like everyone else. Ban Snider, and all the rest of us, too."

In the Los Angeles Times, Carina Chocano surveys "the smoldering landscape of the critics-versus-audiences wars."

Sight & Sound. 09/06.

The Edinburgh International Film Festival is off and running through August 27 and Sight & Sound spotlights ten top events while noting that the "jewel in the crown" of the fest's 60th anniversary is They Might Be Giants: Other Voices From the New American Cinema, "a fulsome program of great but now overlooked US films of the 1970s."

David Thomson scans the program: "You may realise already - even if your personal sense of cinema began in 1977 with the disastrous Star Wars - that there were fascinating things coming out nearly every month in the years beforehand. I'm not sure that anyone in Edinburgh wants that many masterpieces, but among the films that have impressed the selectors are Save the Tiger (1972), Hal Ashby's The Last Detail (1973), Karel Reisz's The Gambler (1974, screenplay by [James] Toback), Monte Hellman's Cockfighter (1974) and many others including one that does stand a chance in the masterpiece game: Arthur Penn's Night Moves (1975)."

Reviews:

• Tim Lucas: "Equal parts head and heart, densely textured with history, politics and love of cinema, Electric Shadows is perhaps most surprising in the right it earns to be approached simply as an endearing piece of popular entertainment."

• Peter Matthews: "Though it may seem churlish to knock a film-maker whose only crime has been a naked desire to please audiences, Volver really is one of Pedro Almodóvar's weaker efforts."

• Amy Taubin: "Like recent break-out documentaries such as Fahrenheit 9/11 or Super Size Me, An Inconvenient Truth ties a life-or-death social/political issue to a single crusading personality. The strategy has enormous audience appeal," but: "Only someone who wants to divert attention from the issue of global warming would tar An Inconvenient Truth as a presidential campaign film."

• Mark Sinker: "Somewhere in the unresolved spaces between its best ingredients, Tideland pokes at the bogeys mired deep in any adult recreation of the child mind. Lewis Carroll unnerves us today far more than Hitchcock, but plenty of viewers won't thank Gilliam for going there."

Bruno Kirby, 1949 - 2006.

Bruno Kirby, a veteran character actor known for playing the best friend in two of Billy Crystal's biggest comedies When Harry Met Sally and City Slickers, has died. He was 57.

Jeremiah Marquez for the AP.

[M]y favorite Kirby performance, I must admit, is one of his more obscure credits, a 1993 episode of the noirish Showtime cable series Fallen Angels. In "I'll Be Waiting," adapted by scripter C Gaby Mitchell from a short story by Raymond Chandler, he was shrewdly cast against type (by director Tom Hanks) as a seemingly stolid hotel detective who is underestimated by just about everybody... "When I was casting this role," Hanks told me years later, "I wanted someone who looked like he was a shoe salesman - but who could break your thumbs if he had to."

Joe Leydon.

Updated through 8/19.

[I]t's his film work that most people, including myself will recall. From his appearance as one of the students in the supremely goofy and dated The Harrad Experiment in 1973 to his role as the young Clemenza opposite Robert DeNiro's young Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II.

[...]

For me, my favorite film role of Kirby's is as Marlon Brando's nephew in the great comedy The Freshman, so in a way you can say Kirby played opposite both Vito Corleones.

Edward Copeland.

Update, 8/17: An appreciation from Barbara Serrano in the Los Angeles Times, where Dennis McLellan writes the paper's obit.

Update, 8/19: A 1990 interview on Fresh Air.

ATTN: Wes Anderson.

"The muse is a fickle mistress at best, and to leave her high and dry, with just a 'lick and a promise' of the greatness of which one is capable - well, sir, it's just plain wrong. It is an Art Crime© of the first magnitude and a great sin against your talent and your Self. We just don't want to see it go down that way." And so, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker - yes, Steely Dan - offer Wes Anderson two alternative strategies aimed at a fuller realization of the filmmaker's talents.

Via Coudal Partners, naturally.

Update, 8/16: Fox Searchlight has picked up Anderson's next, The Darleeling Limited, note Nicole Sperling and Borys Kit in the Hollywood Reporter.

Update, 8/17: Looker: "Aside from being the funniest thing I've read since Mel Gibson's apology, it's also the finest critique of Anderson's oeuvre I've seen anywhere."

Update, 8/21: David Poland reads the Darjeeling screenplay.

DVDs, 8/15.

The big releases this week are Criterion's splendid six-disc Eric Rohmer set and a not-quite-definitive but almost-there re-release of Apocalypse Now. DK Holm listens in on the critical reaction.

Each week, there are the few self-evidently "important" DVDs released, and then below them a whole bunch of others, the films maudits of commercial entertainment: nostalgic revivals as studios ransack their catalog, actor- or other-themed packages, straight-to-video entries that no one has ever heard of, vids for kids and discs for exercise nuts, music junkies, smut hounds (sometimes all at once) and so forth. I'd be curious to know which end of the taste scale sells more, the two or three DVDs that everyone reviews, or the kid videos, exercise tapes, etc., that get ignored.

The self-evidently important discs this week are led by Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. This Paramount package is the studio's third iteration of the title, but you can't call it a triple dip. The first release was the 1979 version of the movie. The second was Apocalypse Now Redux, Coppola and Walter Murch's more surreal 2001 re-edit. Now, Paramount has paired them in Apocalypse Now: The Complete Dossier, but with the addition of an audio commentary track by Coppola and some deleted scenes, among other supplements.

Ty Burr at Entertainment Weekly struck the mainstream note by complaining that the new set's title is "a misnomer, actually, since this two-disc set doesn't include Hearts of Darkness, the essential 1991 documentary about the filming of Coppola's surreal 1979 Vietnam War epic."

At the other end of the journalistic scale is Ain't it Cool News's Moriarty, who, in his multi-DVD round-up, put AN at the top of his list: "Is there anything coming out this week that's even close to the greatness of Francis Ford Coppola's hallucinatory masterpiece? I. Think. Not." Moriarty went against conventional wisdom by adding, "I'm glad Hearts of Darkness isn't here, because that starts to bleed into this film when I watch them together. It's like they're one big movie at this point. That's why I love the option of being able to simply put on the 1979 version of the film, crank it up, and have it look better than it has ever looked in any home video format before. A marked improvement from the original release of the theatrical cut and a step up from the remastered Redux a few years later."

"Is this what Vietnam was truly like?," wonders Jon Danziger of Digitally Obsessed. "Almost certainly not, but the movie is about a whole lot more than verisimilitude, and ultimately it's a reminder that what matters is not the destination, but the journey." Danziger then reminds us yet again that the "most glaring absence is of course Hearts of Darkness, George Hickenlooper's documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now, one of the great portraits of a filmmaker at work in crisis."

Preston Jones of DVD Talk gives the most thorough account of AN and of The Complete Dossier's supplemental material. "One of the most discussed, dissected and debated films of the last 25 years, Coppola's surreal, vivid meditation on the Vietnam War is as impenetrable and masterful in 2006 as it was upon its initial release, when Coppola infamously declared his film not merely about Vietnam, but, in fact, the very celluloid incarnation of that conflict." Jones then goes on to note the differences between the extras then and now, noting that "this third release, The Complete Dossier, does not include the compound destruction footage, the theatrical trailer or the re-release trailer, so Apocalypse Now completists will want to hang onto those first two DVDs. But what is here? Plenty, all of which was lovingly assembled by producer Kim Aubry - the main objective of the supplemental material seems to be two-fold: demystify one of Hollywood's most legendarily mythic creations and also rightfully trumpet Apocalypse Now as a cinematic technological watershed, with its dense, complicated sound design and reliance upon multi-channel stereo sound." Jones is the only reviewer who attempts to explain why Hearts of Darkness isn't on the set, quoting Aubry, who appears to have written Jones after his review first appeared. Writes Aubry, "The story with inclusion of Hearts is complex and legal. When the rights situation gets straightened out (with that wonderful film), I am sure it will become available again as it must. It just couldn't happen in this time window for our set."

Warner Home Video has issued a big box of Jimmy Stewart movies, of which DVD Journal chooses to review only a couple, one of them being Billy Wilder's The Spirit of St Louis. Writer JJB concludes that "neither the film nor [Stewart's] performance rank with, say, Vertigo or It's a Wonderful Life, though Stewart "turned out to be a durable choice - the sort of Hollywood icon who could portray a historical legend.... The somber proceedings leading up to the flight itself, with its nail-biting takeoff, are offset by Wilder's mischievous sense of humor in other scenes, particularly with Lindbergh's flashbacks to his early days in aviation."

Glenn Erickson, the DVD Savant, also likes the film's "convincing period atmosphere and a true sense of the spirit of aviation," and links it to other Wilder films: "Lindbergh undergoes a personal ordeal not unlike Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend," and observes that Wilder recreates a scene he originally wrote for Hold Back the Dawn. Finally, "the telltale mirror from The Apartment makes an early appearance when an anonymous young woman in the crowd of well-wishers (Patricia Smith) offers it to Lindbergh just before he leaves."

Meanwhile, Moriarty corrects himself. "I said there was nothing even close to Apocalypse Now on the list this week. Of course, I forgot about... this exceptional collection from Criterion, six films from Eric Rohmer. This is as big a deal as when they released all the Antoine Doinel films together last year. These films aren't directly related like they're sequels to one another, but what Rohmer does is explore variations on themes and ideas over the course of many different films."

The DVD Journal chose to review two films from the box, Claire's Knee and Love in the Afternoon. Regarding Claire, DSH notes that, "In other episodes of the Moral Tales, the idea of infidelity is a fine line for the characters to walk, but perhaps because the subject matter here revolves around younger women and older men, the sexuality is staid, and the tone is lightly comic. Nonetheless, as an insight into imaginary relationships, it's unparalleled." On Love, DSH finds "the details are what sets it apart. Frederic is much like his other brethren in the 'moral' cycle - they all have a wandering eye, but are mostly moral people.... But when the film (and the cycle) concludes, it's on a brilliant emotional note that suggests that the moment this character re-enters the reality of his life, he has no choice but to be true to his character."

Jeff Ulmer of Digitally Obsessed gives a detailed summary of Rohmer's career and of the six films and the set's supplementary material, concluding that "fans should be thrilled with the wealth of supplements found in this set, which do a superb job of illuminating the many talents of this exquisite filmmaker."

Finally, Dave Kehr at the New York Times passed on Apocalypse Now to savor the Rohmer Films, harking back to a time 40 years ago when an "austere little comedy about a Roman Catholic intellectual (Jean-Louis Trintignant) struggling with the temptation represented by a sensual divorcée (Françoise Fabian) became a success on the art-house circuit. That film, My Night at Maud's, seemed to represent something new: an unabashedly conversational cinema, in which the action was largely confined to a single, snowbound apartment. The camera work had a classical invisibility, and the dialogue emerged in fully wrought phrases, impeccably enunciated by stage-trained actors who seemed never to have heard of the mumblings of the Method." Of the set as a whole, Kehr asserts that "the movies themselves, of course, remain as seductive as ever: elegant minuets of mind and matter, spirit and body, love and sex, in which language itself, by the end of the series, carries an erotic charge."

Interview. David Zucker.

"You could argue that David Zucker is one of the most influential movie comedy directors of the past few decades," writes Sean Axmaker, introducing his interview with the writer, director and producer who, often in collaboration with his brother, Jerry Zucker, and Jim Abrahams, has ensured the movies keep a sense of humor about themselves, from the 1980 landmark comedy Airplane! to the latest to hit DVD, Scary Movie 4.

Fests and shorts.

The Reeler: "The folks at the Film Society of Lincoln Center just kicked a note under the door naming Volver, Pan's Labyrinth and Reds as the Centerpiece, Closing Night and Retrospective selections of the 44th New York Film Festival starting Sept 29." That means we'll be seeing quite a lot of cogitation on these films and their makers this coming season (you might want to catch the recent updates to the "Viva Pedro" entry now), but why wait.

Volver is "not unlike Talk to Her" in that it's "an exceptionally well-crafted work that never threatens to fabulously and spontaneously combust before our eyes like his transgressive masterpiece Law of Desire," writes Ed Gonzalez. Still: "This is clearly the performance of [Penélope] Cruz's young career." Also, Black Gold is "a startling story of a continent excluded from world trade and wanting to wean itself off foreign aid." And Rocky Road to Dublin: "The sardonic eloquence of the film may be a kindred spirit of the French New Wave but it also shares roots with the electric humanism of Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon's films, which similarly evinced the capacity of art to document life."

Also in Slant:

• "Dissecting the current film ratings system with amusing impertinence, Kirby Dick's This Film Is Not Yet Rated proves to be a Molotov cocktail leveled against the Jack Valenti-led Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and their protocol of secretive, hypocritical, arbitrary, and moralizing censorship of 'mature' material," writes Nick Schager.

• Gonzelez on DVDs: Friends With Money, Silent Hill, Poseidon, Saving Shiloh, Methadonia, Do You Like Hitchcock?.

• Dan Callahan's most recent addition to Flesh and Desire: The Films of Frank Borzage.

Hal Hartley will be the Official Juror for the 2007 season of Independent Exposure.

Grady Hendrix has found news of one Berlinale 2007 entry already: E-J Young's Dasepo Naughty Girls.

"The relationship between noir and giallo has yet to be fully explored," submits Peter Nellhaus. "It would be facile to say that giallo is a less polite version of noir, a more obvious display of noir's sex and violence. Neither of the Preminger films that I saw could be defined as giallo, but some of the more lurid aspects to Whirlpool and especially Bunny Lake is Missing suggest these films could be viewed as transitional links."

Tim Robey presents "a recap of what's been particularly good (and awful) over the past six months or so. List time!"

And here's another one: at Edward Copeland's site, Josh R lists "the 20 most (to borrow a phrase from Dame Julie Andrews) egregiously overlooked performances in the history of the Academy Awards - the kind of omissions that just make you scratch your head, if not bang it against the wall out of sheer frustration." Generously annotated.

David Thomson tells the story of John Huston's wild life in the Independent. Also, after recounting her life story, Thomson has some advise for Charlize Theron: "Somehow or other, Theron has to do something similar to Nicole Kidman's achievement after the latter's marriage to Tom Cruise ended. She has to seize parts that say, I chose these, I found them, I told them I could do it, and look, it works."

"This is the story of how I spent 24 hours as a junket whore," writes Eric D Snider. And this is the story of how that story got him banned from all Paramount junkets and screenings. Via MaryAnn Johanson at Cinemarati.

Worth mentioning again: Julie Delpy has written and will direct 2 Days in Paris. Sheigh Crabtree has a few more details. Also in the Hollywood Reporter. Borys Kit notes that Darren Aronofsky is attached to an adaptation of Shannon Burke's novel Black Flies.

Cinematical's Martha Fischer finds news that Simon Pegg will star in an adaptation of Toby Young's How to Lose Friends and Alienate People.

Ryan Gilbey meets Helen Mirren, star of The Queen, which'll be opening the NYFF, as she prepares to return "as the snappy, hard-as-nails, chain-smoking DCS (formerly DCI) Jane Tennison" in a "two-part, four-hour Prime Suspect 7." Also in the Guardian: Leo Benedictus notes that the British Board of Film Classification's little words of warning in movie ads have "become increasingly colourful."

Matthew Clayfield: "In its pure form - and this image [from Mary] comes very, very close to being just that - the Ferrarian image is an image that refuses to actualise any one possibility, any one meaning or function, but rather opens out onto the virtual, forcing the viewer to consider and deal with its manifold potential."

Nick Rombes conducts an experiment: "My theory is that we don't see the beauty and artistry of these CGI films because we have never really learned how to appreciate them. Watching them with random music frees us from the prison-house of narrative compulsion; we see them with new eyes. With open eyes."

"If Seijun Suzuki deserves mention as a truly major director rather than likable curio, I don't see much evidence of that in these, his free-for-all independent productions." For Stop Smiling, Nick Pinkerton reviews Zigeunerweisen, Kagero-za and Yumeji.

Vince Keenan: "Army of Shadows is not just the best movie I've seen this year, it's the best I've seen in ages." Ted Cogswell offers another hearty recommendation.

Craig Phillips on Little Miss Sunshine: "[I]t ain't perfect but neither is the family depicted here. It has just enough of a subversive streak and an inherent screwiness to win me over."

For Rumsey Taylor, writing at Not Coming to a Theater Near You, Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is "an absolute masterpiece of subversion," while 8½ is "a statement of acknowledged failure that is itself a unique success."

"Anthony Hope's 1893 tale of romance and swordplay, The Prisoner of Zenda has seen no less than eight adaptations produced for the big screen," and, writing for the Siffblog, David Jeffers recommends Rex Ingram's 1922 version.

At Flickhead, Christine Young enjoys The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, the film and the book.

Movie producers are generally cast by their own industry as philistines or cokeheads - usually both - but they are compensated by all that glamour and, well, all that money," writes David Carr in the New York Times. But: "For decades, journalists, whose pay is generally as low as the regard they are held in, have been largely depicted as moral and ethical eunuchs." Also: Neil Genzlinger on Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna ("only in Bollywood would the standard-issue marital-infidelity tale include disco-style musical numbers and clock in at almost three and a half hours"), Nathan Lee on Pulse and Jeannette Catsoulis on Zoom.

Twitch's Todd sees signs of a new horror wave - from Turkey.

Reuters: "China unveiled plans to make a movie about the 1937 Rape of Nanjing in an announcement on Monday, a day before Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi is expected to visit a controversial shrine honoring war dead."

"Berlin is in Brecht fever." Today marks the 50th anniversary of his death, and Deutsche Welle gathers its coverage in one dossier. Further exploration: the International Brecht Society.

That Little Round-Headed Boy "remember[s] the most maligned part of the myth: Elvis Presley, movie star."

Film Threat's Chris Gore imagines a world without movie theaters - and asks for your thoughts.

Online viewing tip. Wiley Wiggins has found an interview of Philip K Dick (and others) talking about A Scanner Darkly.

Early fall previews.

Entertainment Weekly's already got a big, browsable fall preview. Via Movie City News.

Richard Corliss and Richard Schickel write up Time's.

Via Anne Thompson, David Katz's piece for Esquire on Daniel Craig: "Spend some time in London and you realize that the new James Bond is debated here not as a simple casting choice but as a matter of national pride."

"Borat is unsettling not because his opinions are outlandish but because he reveals how many ordinary people share them," writes Naomi Alderman in the Guardian in advance of the November 3 release of Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.

Jeffrey Wells wants to know, "Hey, how come Toronto Star critic Peter Howell didn't include The History Boys among his top 12 fall films? Does he know something?"

Hitchcock.

Yesterday was Alfred Hitchcock's birthday; he would have been 107. As it happens, the last two "summertime" entries are, among other things, appreciations of films by Hitchcock: Dennis Cozzalio on Notorious and Michael Guillen on Vertigo. The two titles pop up quite a few times in answers to Anne Thompson's "Hitchcock birthday quiz." She posted her ten questions just today, but already, just look at those terrific answers.

"Do you think he may have seen a little bit of himself in you?" That's one of the questions Joe Leydon asked Anthony Perkins back in 1985. Later in the interview, Perkins remarks, "Actually, it's an honor to be associated with a movie that has lasted and gone on through a generation, and is still able to quicken the pulse." Earlier: "Hitch."

Online listening tip. Tom Sutpen introduces "The Hitchcock/Truffaut Tapes #10" at If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger...: "[T]he recording bears every sign of a man trying very hard to restrain himself as his ego tries to digest what is to it an undigestible morsel. And what better way to push it through than finding in the moment occasion to bring forth... God help us, but it was inevitable... The MacGuffen."

Update: Tim Lucas.

Update, 8/16: At Zoom In Online, Annie Frisbie's answers for Anne Thompson's quiz.

Spike Lee's Requiem.

"Spike Lee is not the warmest guy in the world," decides Ariel Levy in a long profile for New York. "He cares about people, but it's unclear how much he likes them." The piece delves into aspects of Lee's life we rarely glimpse: his wealth, his wife, the "Blackistocracy." And then, finally, a visit to New Orleans:

It's all so insane, so bad, so unsubtle. Black people waiting on their roofs in the liquefying heat for rescue that never comes. Children drowning in the streets. Old women left to rot on the steps of the Convention Center while the director of FEMA announces on national television that he's somehow unaware of the 25,000 people waiting there for help. Condi at Ferragamo. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police showing up on horseback in New Orleans before the National Guard. Massive crowds herded into the Superdome and left for days on end without food or water or sewage. And the fat, rich, white mother of the president saying - actually saying! - "This is working very well for them."

It's all so over-the-top. It's like a Spike Lee movie.

When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts premieres on HBO on August 21 and 22, and Allison Samuels has a backgrounder in Newsweek: "In Lee's devastating film, [Phyllis] LeBlanc is a frequent, and frequently hilarious, presence, a fuming Greek chorus of one who still can't believe that, for nearly a week, her country left her and her neighbors for dead."

Earlier: Felicia R Lee in the New York Times.

Update, 8/15: Larry Blumenfeld in the Voice: "Lee's film deftly tells a story on a personal level: We grasp the human cost of this crisis in ways simply not conveyed through headlines and soundbites. And beyond analysis of government inaction and faulty levee policy, Lee forcefully reminds us that the culture of New Orleans - the music and food, patois and attitude we celebrate as our nation's soul - is imperiled."

Updates, 8/17: For the Times-Picayune, Michelle Kruppa reports on last night's screening in New Orleans. More from the AP's Stacey Plaisance and, in the Houston Chronicle, Eric Harrison reports on how Lee is responding to some critics claiming "that the movie focuses too much on black people in the Ninth Ward and not enough on other ethnic groups in other parts of the city."

Belinda Acosta in the Austin Chronicle: "I'm not sure if this could be called the definitive documentary on the subject, but if not, it comes very close.... [T]he film - like the disaster itself - becomes a bellwether, confirming what had been suspected but not fully visible: that an underclass is alive and not so well in the US. In New Orleans, at least, it seems that underclass is kicking."

Robert Abele in the LA Weekly: "[I]f you think the first two hours - the hurricane, the floods, the convention center, the absent FEMA - is the disturbing part, brace yourself for the stories in the last two hours: dispersed families, stagnant rebuilding efforts, people finding the dead bodies of their loved ones in houses that were carelessly marked by search teams as having no corpses, the special hell of dealing with insurance companies, etc."

Updates, 8/20: Cynthia Joyce was at the screening in New Orleans and evocatively conjures the scene for Salon. As for the film, it's "a sort of Cliffs Notes to Hurricane Katrina, Volume 1, and though the subject is dense, the conclusions drawn are as simple and straightforward as Kanye West's 'George Bush doesn't like black people' comment (which also gets full treatment here): Louisiana needs to stop being an oil colony for the rest of the country. And, oh yeah - somebody ought to go to jail over this."

Joe Leydon in Variety: "Spike Lee's extraordinary When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts renders the worst natural disaster in US history... as a perfect storm of catastrophic weather, human error, socioeconomic inequity and bureaucratic dysfunction.... [T]he real 'stars' of the documentary are the locals who witnessed, reported and/or endured the devastation." And at his movingpictureblog, he adds, "In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that I am a New Orleans native. I should also add that if I have offended anyone with my remarks about the Bush Administration's response to the devastation of New Orleans - well, as Edward R Murrow once said in a completely different context, I'm not the least bit sorry."

Updates, 8/21: Nicholas Kulish: "There are two Spike Lees. One is an artist capable of directing exceptional films, the other a public personality who suffers from flare-ups of foot-in-mouth disease and a fondness for conspiracy theories. Both sides of Mr Lee's personality express themselves in his new HBO documentary about Hurricane Katrina and the destruction of New Orleans, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. As a result it is by turns powerful and frustrating."

Also in the NYT, Stephen Holden: "What breaks your heart is the film’s accumulated firsthand stories of New Orleans residents who lost everything in the flood after Hurricane Katrina, and the dismaying conclusion that a year after the disaster, the broken city has been largely abandoned to fend for itself."

"[T]he film has a warmth and affection that leavens the many heartbreaking images of dead, bloated bodies and immense destruction," writes Patrick Goldstein, who talks with Lee for the Los Angeles Times.

John Rogers: "And keep telling yourself, when a loose nuke goes off in your city, that the government response will be much faster. It will."

For Matt Zoller Seitz, writing in the Star-Ledger, it's "one of Lee's greatest and most deeply personal works."

A "monument of oral history," writes Troy Patterson in Slate. "Without fanfare, Lee orchestrates a multivoiced blues for the common man."

Updates, 8/22: "[A]n essential new chapter in the unfinished story of the struggle for civil rights in America," writes Sheerly Avni at Alternet and Truthdig: "Lee's team devotes a great deal of time and craft to the argument that the devastation resulted from an event in political history - not an event in weather."

Alex P Kellogg makes a vital point in the American Prospect:

[E]ven given the film's critique of the Bush administration, blame can be placed at everyone's feet. Though Lee's film doesn't address this, the nation's Democratic leadership stood on the sidelines and said little other than inconsequential niceties. What's more, Governor Blanco, a Democrat, appeared hardly up to the task throughout the ordeal. Where were Al Gore and John Kerry, John Edwards and Hillary Clinton when it was clearly time to criticize the Bush administration's response? By the official count, over 1,300 people lost their lives. More than 500,000 people were displaced. An entire city was nearly wiped off the face of the earth. Yet Lee seems to have heard more outrage from the Reverend Al Sharpton and Harry Belafonte than I've ever heard from prominent Democrats. And we wonder why race is invoked when the birthplace of jazz and the hometown of Mardi Gras felt abandoned by the nation.

Updates, 8/23: Edward Copeland on Acts I and II and on Acts III and IV.

A "moving, righteously upsetting, heart-afire experience," writes Tim Lucas.

Locarno. Awards.

Andrea Staka's debut feature, Das Fräulein (Cineuropa special), won the Golden Leopard at the Locarno International Film Festival this weekend. As Thomas Stephens reports for swissinfo, it was a dramatic fest both on screen and off. Two members of the jury stepped down: Barbara Albert, who co-wrote Das Fräulein with Staka "and hadn't considered it necessary to alert anyone to the fact," and Emmanuelle Devos, who "stood down citing personal reasons." The capper: "Frédéric Maire, the festival's artistic director, was watching the [awards] ceremony from his hospital bed, having collapsed on stage in front of 8,000 people on Friday night."

Other awards:

• Best direction: Laurent Achard for Le Dernier des Fous (The Last of the Madmen).

• The Special Jury Prize: Half Nelson.

• Best Actor: Burghart Klaussner for Der Mann von der Botschaft (The Man from the Embassy).

• Best Actress: Amber Tamblyn for Stephanie Daley.

The full list can be downloaded as a PDF.

A summertime question for Michael Guillen.

As you may have guessed, I asked a lot more questions that I ever hoped to see replies to a few weeks ago. Again, I'm overwhelmed and deeply grateful for the responses. I leave it to Michael Guillen, whose Evening Class has, in a phenomenally short period of time, become an outstanding font of views, reviews and interviews, to wrap the series and, for GreenCine, to bring it all back home: "What film, more than any other, says, 'San Francisco'?"

There's a good reason why the Vertigo tour offered by the San Francisco International Film Festival to press and visiting filmmakers is so popular. That reason is San Francisco itself, which for my money is as central a character in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo as Scottie Ferguson and Madeleine Elster. It doesn't surprise me in the least that visitors and residents alike will pass on seeing some scheduled film at the festival in order to seek out this particular film - indisputably one of Hitchcock's finest - among the city's streets and avenues.

San Francisco is the perfect setting for Hitchcock's gem of suspense and identity intrigues and is quintessentially San Franciscan precisely for how identities are sought, constructed and forfeited, either for politics or for dreams, out of need or obsession, generation after generation. From its Pacific Heights locations, to its suicide attempt beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, to the cemetery at Mission Dolores, to the bouquets of Podesta Baldocchi, to the reflections of red-flocked wallpaper at Ernie's, to meditations upon a painting at the Legion of Honor, San Francisco reminds us that how we live in a city, how we move between its neighborhoods, how we find and lose love, is part and parcel of how we create and identify ourselves.

Like Jenni Olsen's paean to place, Joy of Life, Vertigo explores the fear of falling, not just from heights, but in love, aware that there is no greater threat to the subjectivity of identity than the vertigo of love, and no city that approximates love's ups and downs so succinctly as San Francisco... where little cable cars climb halfway to the stars.

A summertime question for Dennis Cozzalio.

Dennis Cozzalio has considered changing the name of his blog, Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, but last I saw (and I hope it's true), he's sticking with it after all. An advocate for the drive-in experience, Dennis is also seeped in Hollywood lore, so I started pondering a question... "Actually, it's hard to think of one as good as any of the 30 in Professor Julius Kelp's Endless Summer Chemistry Test [and since contacting him a couple of weeks ago, Dennis has offered up his own set of answers]. But speaking of chemistry. When you think onscreen chemistry, you think of..."

The first person I think of is Cary Grant, the leading man of all leading men, one to whose standard I'd bet even Paul Giamatti aspires deep in some dark, secret recess of his character actor's heart. But "chemistry" implies two or more elements mixed together to create a unique or unexpected force - Grant may be the leading man, but without a leading lady to play off of, to become intermingled with, and with whom to create a memorable and distinct aura, he might as well just be plain old Archie Leach.

Grant's effortless charm, physical grace (and knack for slapstick) and cool sophistication (which often, in romantic films, masked a much warmer, often smoldering intensity) allowed him to match up well with an awe-inspiring variety of Hollywood ingénues and veteran leading ladies, and they were often never quite as beguiling, or at least were beguiling in a completely different sense, apart from what happened when they shared the screen with Grant. Can any other leading man in Hollywood boast of sharing so much time and space with so many unique and talented actresses to such memorable effect? (Of course, the notable exception in Grant's chemistry set was Mae West, who hired him twice - for She Done Him Wrong and I'm No Angel. The actors were not well-matched, either in temperament, acting style or presence - on screen, West steamrolled Grant, who had yet to make a major impression in Hollywood, as if he were just another stock player, and the actors' disregard for each other once the cameras stopped rolling was no secret.)

But of all the women who exchanged loving glances, warm kisses, hearty laughter and profound pain with Cary Grant on the silver screen, of all the women who could be said to have had unusual chemistry with him, none merged with his palette of responses as an actor, or into our collective memories as viewers, with more sensuousness, grace and radiant sexuality (as well as an accompanying insecurity about the ends to which that sexuality might play) than Ingrid Bergman in Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious. This is probably the Hitchcock film I hold in the highest regard, without so much as a moment's reservation concerning its greatness, largely because it seems to me it is the Hitchcock film that is as dependent on the depth and sensitivity and subtlety of the actor's responses - not only to the melodrama of the material, but to each other scene by scene - as it is to the director's undeniable personality and technical mastery.

I can think of no sexier sequence in Hitchcock's filmography - indeed, it's one of the most erotic in all of cinema - than that celebrated kiss, which lasts several minutes, between Grant and Bergman as their mutual attraction is finally given full rein. But that rein is to be pulled back soon enough as Bergman begins employment by the agency for whom Grant works as a mole in order to insinuate herself into the life of suspected Nazi agent Claude Rains - she must rekindle an old relationship and eventually marry him. As soon as the assignment commences, Bergman finds herself navigating an intense struggle to keep her connection with Grant - and her sense of her self - while attempting to preserve the elaborate and dangerous charade under which she lives. All the while, through suspicious, and then outright hateful, glances and outbursts whenever they clandestinely meet, Grant comes to think she's enjoying the ruse and that she's little more than the whore he once suspected her of being, and perhaps even a Nazi sympathizer herself. (Her father was once intimately connected with Rains in just such a capacity.)

The path from mutual suspicion and disdain to tentative regard to erotic attraction to subjugated romantic impulses to muffled, and soon enflamed, hatred that these two take through the course of the film, culminating in Bergman's ever-weakening physical state and the horror that dawns on Grant of her true situation and the degree to which her life truly is in danger, is an astonishing one to follow. It plays out in an electrifying feature-length procession of stolen glances, malicious stares and desperate moments of failed emotional expression that fire between these two like a very personal thunder and lightning storm. And it's a testament to the palpable connection these two actors, through two brilliantly drawn characters, make with each other that even in the time spent apart on screen, time which takes up a major portion of the middle of the film, we're still haunted by the passion that remains unresolved between them. It is the silent drama that plays out whenever we gaze into either Grant's or Bergman's eyes when they are separated and slip into a reverie of what it was that the one saw in the other, and make that connection between the two of them for ourselves, even as we wonder with increasing desperation if they'll ever actually gaze into each other's eyes again. It's a haunting, haunted emotional empathy that Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman engender in Notorious, and it is the gold standard of what I think of when I think of chemistry in the movies.

Weekend shorts.

"[F]or three sweltering days, in a stuffy gymnasium and stifling heat, kids who live in and around a Nashville housing project had one of the hottest new directors in Hollywood all to themselves. And while he might have been the shot-caller on set, the words, the performances and the story were theirs." For the Nashville Scene, Jim Ridley watches Craig Brewer work them out.

"Portland director Gus Van Sant has almost everything he needs to make his next movie: a plot, a setting, a hip subculture," writes the Oregonian's Shawn Levy in a piece on Paranoid Park. "Now all he needs is the actors. And he's asking Portland to provide them."

Meanwhile, Mindsplinters Films is looking for zombies.

"[M]y story and my journey started like any other Ethiopian Jew. I started to walk from my village with my family to the capital city of Ethiopia. Our journey lasted one year." Michael Guillen has "one of the most engaging conversations I have had with anyone anywhere" with actor Sirak M Sabahat.

"[E]normous, derelict ships, whose twisted metal parts and oxidized colors feel like a sci-fi director's conception of life on another planet," are the setting of both the allegorical narrative Iron Island and a segment of Michael Glawogger's Workingman's Death, notes Nathan Hogan at Facets Features.'

"Who would win: Ripley or Columbo?" asks Mark Fisher. "The question is not an idle one, since there is a perfect structural symmetry between the two characters: Ripley, the leisure elite fake, who outwits all the cops who suspect him but who can prove nothing; and Columbo, the implacable hunter/haunter of the wealthy and privileged, who uses the very arrogance of his prey to trap them."

"[T]hroughout his life, Hitchcock never tired of manipulating our ambivalent responses to violent death," writes Joe Leydon. "In doing so, he shamelessly pandered to our baser instincts, implicating us in the machinations of his characters by exploiting our voyeuristic impulses. "Still, diehard Hitchcockians (and I count myself among that number) will want to set aside several hours this weekend to watch the Encore Mystery cable network during its ongoing marathon of Hitchcock classics, timed to celebrate the master's Aug 13, 1899 birth date."

At the Whine Colored Sea, Ben previews Billy Ray's Breach: "If you've seen Ray's previous film, Shattered Glass, you have an idea of what you're in for: a competently shot, impeccably edited, precisely written, perfectly acted piece of entertainment." Also, a key to Mulholland Drive.

Kathy Fennessy talks with Brothers of the Head co-director Keith Fulton. Also at the Siffblog, David Jeffers isn't particularly impressed with Hollywoodland.

Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay found news some time back of Joe Swanberg's latest project: "In Hannah Takes the Stairs, he's cast folks like Mark Duplass, Andrew Bujalski, Todd Rohal, and Ry Russo-Young who are known for their own indie films (The Puffy Chair, Mutual Appreciation, The Guatemalan Handshake, and Orphans, respectively) as actors. The film has a MySpace site and on it's own website, Swanberg is running a production journal/photo blog." Where you'll see they've just wrapped today.

Darcy Paquet at Koreanfilm.org: "For me, The Host will not displace Memories of Murder as my favorite Korean film of this decade. Every scene of the latter work is golden, and the more you watch it, the more it resonates as a haunting, brilliantly-shaped composition. The Host is more of a spectacle film, a sensual burst of inspiration that picks us up and carries us along on a harrowing ride (this must be seen in the theater if at all possible). It is perhaps unfair to expect Bong [Joon-ho] to come up aces two films in a row; what is surprising is that he came so close to doing just that." Also, Duncan Mitchel reviews Shin Sang-ok's 1964 film Red Muffler.

"Fresh off the massive success of the Infernal Affairs trilogy and his adaptation of popular anime Initial D director Andrew Lau was arguably one of the hottest properties in all of Asia and poised to make a major impact worldwide. His chosen vehicle to make that move was Daisy, an action romance with an all star Korean cast and set - somewhat inexplicably - in Amsterdam." And according to Todd at Twitch, it just doesn't work.

"Whereas a few years ago [Chinese filmmakers] might have compared censorship to a stone in a river and film to the water that finds its way around it, today they will say that much has changed within the censorship authority, and that the two sides have started to talk." For signandsight, Toby Axelrod translates Susanne Messmer's piece for die taz.

"Few Indian films have sparked more controversy than the recent Rang De Basanti, directed by Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra. As a cultural phenomenon, as well as a cautionary tale, the film deserves some critical attention." And so, Emanuele Saccarelli at the WSWS.

"Sam Peckinpah's love for hard liquor, especially vodka, gin and mescal, carried right into his movies and, more importantly, into his directorial philosophy," writes Rich English in Modern Drunkard, adding, "I wish I could travel back a few decades and tie one on with Sam." Via Coudal Partners, where Nathan Rabin reviews The Devil's Candy: "[Julie] Salamon's book is part of a peculiar literary sub-genre I like to call 'anatomies of a failure,' literary autopsies of notorious flops that include such notable tomes as Steven Bach's The Final Cut, (about Heaven's Gate), and Lillian Ross' Picture, (about Red Badge of Courage)."

"Seattle is more than just a backdrop to Police Beat," writes Steven Shaviro, "it's one of several superimposed layers whose juxtaposition drives the film."

Ed Gonzalez on Jean Epstein's The Fall of the House of Usher: "Epstein treats celluloid not unlike Usher's canvas - a delicate, fragile thing to draw on (slow or fast, sometimes twice, thrice, four times over) - and to look at the screen of this film is to witness a portal into a complex, heretofore unknown dimension of cinematic representation."

"In presenting the contradictions intrinsic in the perception of images," writes acquarello, Adynata diverges from the immediate theme of orientalism and alterity towards a broader examination on the nature of human imagination, where the very process itself becomes an engaged, interpretive act of complicity towards the perpetuation of the perception of otherness."

"Fabrice du Welz's debut feature Calvaire (The Ordeal) marks the high point so far of Eurohorror, the recent effort to adapt the most fundamentally American of movie genres to the peculiar circumstances of contemporary Europe," proposes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon. More from Manohla Dargis in the NYT, Michael Atkinson in the Voice, Jeremiah Kipp in Slant and Ryan Stewart at Cinematical.

At indieWIRE, Jason Guerrasio checks in on five indies in production.

ST VanAirsdale, known to most of us as The Reeler, reports on "the growing cinema of the New York street kid. A far cry from the days when the director William Wyler plucked the famous Dead End Kids out of their Broadway-stage milieu, a wave of contemporary films - including Half Nelson, A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints and [Ramin] Bahrani's Iron Triangle... - frame unknown actors against the urban backdrop of their youth."

Also in the New York Times:

• The story of The Puffy Chair is "slight enough to make Raymond Carver read like Dostoyevsky," writes AO Scott, and "its fidelity to its characters' view of the world - although they are presumably college graduates, they seem never to have read a book or expressed an opinion - is more a liability than a virtue." Also: "Miami Vice is an action picture for people who dig experimental art films, and vice versa." Coupla weeks ago now, Scott Foundas profiled Michael Mann and reviewed Miami Vice for the LA Weekly: "In a career marked by an obsession with the intricacies of law enforcement and criminal activity, this may be Mann's most brutally efficient policier yet: The characters scarcely have personalities; they are nearly soulless nocturnal warriors. But watching them go about their deadly serious business nevertheless puts you in a state of high anxiety."

• Manohla Dargis: "In Scoop, his not especially funny yet oddly appealing new comedy, Woody Allen manages to act his age and prove there's life in those old jokes yet." More from Joanne Laurier at WSWS.

• Despite the "dead-on accuracy" of the dialogue, The Trouble With Men and Women is little more than "a comfortable armchair to come back to: too comfortable," writes Stephen Holden. Also: "Once you've accepted that Boynton Beach Club is a rose-colored fantasy of aging, you can relax and enjoy the bittersweet comic performances."

• Charles Lyons talks with Robin Hardy, director of the original Wicker Man, and Neil LaBute, who's directed a remake. Related: the original "is a strange film and it is heralded for precisely that reason," finds Rumsey Taylor at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. "Its success is that its subjective religion is displayed so believably that it transcends the campy stride of other horror films from the same era. Notice, incidentally, that the film is only labeled horror by default, when in truth it is less a horror film than it is a Sunday school lesson." And: For the Guardian, Will Hodgkinson assembles "a handful of Wicker Man-obsessed musicians" to discuss the original's influence with Hardy.

• "A successful Grey Gardens musical is jumping to Broadway. A movie based on the Beales starring Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange is in the works. And now Albert, the surviving Maysles brother, is contributing to (or perhaps capitalizing on) this resurgence with The Beales of Grey Gardens, a new assemblage of outtakes from their archive." Nathan Lee finds that "the film supplements but nowhere surpasses the funky charm and moldy glamour of the original."

• Ed Leibowitz rifles through a list of past, present and future biopics in an attempt to determine whether it's "better to mimic or transcend," that is, to note which filmmakers and actors have gone for replication and which for the gist of the character. "Mimics seemed to have carried the day, at least until this year," he decides.

• Robert Ito visits the set of Justin Lin's Finishing the Game and sees "50 Guys, All Trying to Look Like Bruce Lee."

• With The Illusionist coming up, Sarah Lyall profiles Rufus Sewell.

• Laura M Holson reports that the studios are counting on foreign box office now more than ever.

DVD reviews in the Voice: Michael Atkinson on Eric Rohmer's Six Moral Tales, Dark Passage and the Prisoner megaset, Dennis Lim on Cavite and J Hoberman on L'Enfant.

A book review roundup from Stop Smiling: Patrick Sisson on Josh Horowitz's The Mind of the Modern Moviemaker: 20 Conversations with the New Generation of Filmmakers, José Teodoro on Taschen's Roman Polanski (more from Josef Braun in the Vue Weekly) and Michael Joshua Rowin on Colin McGinn's The Power of Movies: How Screen and Mind Interact.

For the Nation's Stuart Klawans, Little Miss Sunshine is "the best American comedy since Bad Santa." Also, the Pusher trilogy: "They involve drug deals gone bad in Copenhagen's underworld, where cameras are stylishly hand-held, the dialogue loquacious, the sex filthy and the violence extreme. The movies are all different: They introduce you to men from whom you'd flee in real life, then draw you deeply into their varying moral dilemmas."

Jeremiah Kipp talks with Jeff Winner about his film, Satellite (Kipp's review). More from Stephen Holden in the NYT: "Satellite could be described as a yuppie Bonnie and Clyde in which alienated corporate climbers break the rules, but instead of robbing banks, they commit petty crimes. If its stars didn't have combustible chemistry, the fantasy would evaporate."

Also in Slant:

• Ed Gonzalez on Hoot: "The most goodhearted children's film of 2006 barely made a blip at the box office, but you can save it now that it's on DVD." More DVDs: Apocalypse Now: The Complete Dossier, Brick, CSA: The Confederate States of America and Don't Come Knocking. Also, Step Up "has better dance moves—and a more valuable, clear-cut sensibility—than any video nominated for a VMA this year, including Madonna's 'Hung Up.'" More on that one from Jeannette Catsoulis in the NYT, Jette Kernion at Cinematical and the Chicago Tribune's Jessica Reaves; and Susan King profiles director Anne Fletcher.

• Nick Schager on Keeping Mum: "In the competition for cinema's worst genre, the Quirky British Comedy About Eccentric Countryfolk Learning Valuable Lessons In Outrageous Circumstances truly has no rival." Also, Accepted, 10th & Wolf, Princesas and Haven.

• "Hamilton understands the real struggles as well as the real heroism of working-class America," writes Paul Schrodt. Even so, director Matthew Porterfield "finds the rhythms of everyday life well enough, but he rarely grasps the key moments that make them art."

• Rob Humanick dooms Zoom.

• Fernando F Croce: " As with most [Frank] Tashlin films, The Girl Can't Help It functions as both an exultant example of American vulgarity and a leveling thrashing of it, with jokes that cut surprisingly deep." And Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? becomes one of Slant's "100 Essential Films." Croce does the honors. Related: Jonathan Rosenbaum in the Chicago Reader.

Charles Taylor in the New York Observer: "If part of Hollywood's appeal is the lure of the artificial - not the entirety of its appeal, but some - then Jayne Mansfield is irresistible. For everything unbelievable, garish, overdone, over-everything about her, there's also something beguiling, funny, even touching."

David Thomson on Bette Davis: "The National Film Theatre is running a season of her work, concentrating on the films from the 1930s, and it's dazzling to see her again. I said she was not beautiful, but she held her own when it came to being sexy, from Cabin in the Cotton where her Southern belle had the line, 'I'd love to kiss you, but I just washed my hair,' to The Letter, where the film opens with her emptying a revolver into her faithless lover."

Also in the Independent, Thomson recalls the great drunks of Hollywood, Gill Pringle meets Winona Ryder, John Walsh revisits the Fatty Arbuckle scandal - because Johnny Depp's bought the rights to the story - and James Mottram on Kirby Dick's "incendiary exposé," This Film is Not Yet Rated. More from John Patterson in the Guardian: "The [ratings] system is rotten and corrupt to the core, and thanks to Kirby Dick, we can all now see it plain." In the New Statesman, Tom Teodorczuk talks with Dick and compares the ratings systems in the US and the UK.

"That was the one that did it, that made me aware of the power of movie-making." Ang Lee talks with the Telegraph's David Gritten about The Virgin Spring.

For Edward Copeland, "Quintet stands alone in the Altman filmography as something that simply defies description."

Steven Yates for Kamera on A Lion in the House: "[T]his is cinema at its most engaging." He then talks to directors Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar.

"In their new book, Disaster Movies, authors Glenn Kay and Michael Rose take a humorous gander at 'a genre in which a lack of subtlety and an exploitative nature are almost required elements.'" It is, writes Ray Young, "a volume perfect for light reading." Also at Flickhead, Nelhydrea Paupér finds Electric Edwardians: The Lost Films of Mitchell & Kenyon "indispensable to anyone who loves the great and simple revelations of early cinema."

David Ehrenstein talks with François Ozon for the LA CityBeat.

"[Gregg] Araki, to me, is one of the most misunderstood filmmakers of the 90s," writes Bradford Nordeen as he launches into a week-long consideration of Araki's films.

John Rogers picks his favorite movies of 2006 - so far, of course.

Matt Dentler: "It's rather early, and I'm sure the Toronto Film Festival will offer a few challenges to this, but my favorite film of the year so far is Babel."

Richard Hawley: "Zulu has become one of my favorites over the years, not only for the stunning cinematography (Stephen Dade), directing (Cy Endfield), screenplay (John Prebble, Cy Endfield), acting the cast, including Michael Caine, is awesome and soundtrack (John Barry) but for the warning it gives us about the dangers of colonialism."

Also in the Guardian:

• Stephen Applebaum meets Luis Mandoki, who "has become something of a Mexican Michael Moore in his country's presidential election, sticking his lens where it is not wanted."

• We may be entering a "golden age" of "grown-up animation," proposes Steve Rose. Somewhat related: Wagstaff at the House Next Door and Emru Townsend at fps.

• John Patterson chats with Gretchen Mol and Emine Saner meets Shah Rukh Khan.

• Dennis Barker remembers Patrick Allen, 1927 - 2006.

At Cinema Strikes Back, Jeff finds a copy of Ajooba, "a Bollywood movie filmed in the Soviet Union and starring the great Amitabh Bachchan as a masked superhero."

"Bollywood is set to take a big leap this week with the opening of a blockbuster set around marital tensions, a brave departure by an industry known more for showcasing marriage as the heart of Indian family values," writes Krittivas Mukherjee for Reuters. "Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna (Never Say Goodbye), an extra-marital potboiler which opens on Friday, is one of the most eagerly awaited releases of the year." Grady Hendrix notes that it'll be screening in Toronto.

At Cineuropa, Fabien Lemercier looks ahead to the fall season in France. Parts 1 and 2.

Quick takes from David Pratt-Robson, round 1: Gabrielle, 13 Tzameti and District 13. Round 2: A Scanner Darkly, Clerks II and Monster House.

In the San Francisco Bay Guardian, K Tighe talks with John Byrum about making The Razor's Edge, Bill Murray's early 80s dramatic debut.

Annie Frisbie at Zoom In Online on the recently announced adaptation of The Prisoner: "Imagine turning Lost into a movie. Now times that level of difficulty by twelve. That's what Christopher Nolan and screenwriters Janet and David Peoples are facing."

Production Weekly is reporting that Charlie Kaufman will make his directorial debut with Synecdoche, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Michelle Williams. Via Erik Davis at Cinematical, where he also looks ahead to Hollywood's lineup for Summer 2007.

Wiley Wiggins discovers "a remake of Herschell Gordon Lewis's classic B-horror film The Wizard of Gore, which offhand would just sound like another in a string of horror remakes, but check out the cast - Crispin Glover, Jeffrey Combs, Brad Dourif!"

Gwynne Watkins presents "The Hollywood Guide to Infidelity" at Nerve. Very fun.

The AV Club's list of the week: "11 Films That Responded Well To National Crises."

Peter Nellhaus considers the themes and influences running through three films by Daniel Burman.

That Little Round-Headed Boy catches "a deeply humanistic, fully realized performance by... I bet you were expecting Sean Penn. No, the great performance in this movie is by Michael J Fox. How did I miss it when Casualties of War was first released?"

"From a marketing standpoint, the film's appeal is clear: If you want to scare teenagers, you gotta hit them where they live. That no longer means summer camps and baby-sitting gigs but online chat rooms and video Web sites." But Rafer Guzman is underwhelmed by Pulse, the American remake of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Kairo; more from the Stranger's Andrew Wright and Slant's Nick Schager. Also in the LAT, Mark Olsen on The LA Riot Spectacular, "a lifeless series of sketch-comedy ideas that presumably would make even the Wayans brothers blanch at their broadness."

Above and beyond the standard "official site," some movies are promoted with online games, faux company or organization sites, etc., etc. Ahead of the release of The Science of Sleep, Michel Gondry, RES and imeem have set up a community, asking, "How Do You Dream?"

Referencing Warhol, Network and Videodrome, Adario Strange considers in a New York Press cover story what impact online video might be having on, well, everything.

Paul Boutin at Slate: "In theory, TVs and PCs were supposed to converge and spawn one hybrid media device. In practice, they touch on the couch without breeding."

David McCourt in the Financial Times: "While most US companies are undergoing a revolution in innovation, Hollywood still largely operates on the guild system and centralised decision-making established by the big studios in the 1930s. Technology and a global market for entertainment have made that model obsolete."

Volume 4 of the Journal of Short Film is out and about.

Richard Gibson and If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger... are celebrating what would have been Sam Fuller's 94th birthday.

Zoom In Online's Annie Frisbie talks with our own Jonathan Marlow.

Online browsing tip #1. A Clockwork Orange bubblegum cards at Bubblegumfink. Via Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing.

Online browsing tip #2. Not exactly film-related, but this is one of the greatest entries in some time at one of the greatest blogs out there, period, BibliOdyssey. Earlier: Peacay can write as well.

Online listening tip #1. Matt Dillon, Lili Taylor and Bent Hamer talk about Factotum on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Online listening tip #2. A 1989 edition of Fresh Air featuring Alan Arkin.

Online listening tip #3. A panel on men in Australian film on Australia Talks Movies.

Online viewing tip. Chuck Jones's classic What's Opera, Doc? at no fat clips!!!.

Online viewing tips round 1. Todd at Twitch has a trailer for It's Hard To Be A Rock'n Roller, another for the indie Norwegian film Sønner and another for Ole Christian Madsen's Prag, with Mads Mikkelsen.

Online viewing tips, round 2. SF360's Susan Gerhard passes along ten from Eva "Deadbeat" Sollberger.

Weekend fests and events.

Jean-Pierre Gorin has joined the Telluride Film Festival (September 1 through 4) as the 33rd Guest Director, a perfect opportunity to point to Matthew Clayfield's recent entries on Gorin: 1 and 2. Telluride's Special Medallion this year goes to David Thomson, weekly columnist for the Independent and author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film and The Whole Equation. And the fest will dedicate Telluride's latest handcrafted theater to producer, director, distributor and fest advisory council member Pierre Rissient.

"Among the many films competing for attention at next month's Toronto International Film Festival [September 7 through 16] will be one whose subject, the charismatic salsa singer Héctor Lavoe, all but demanded big screen treatment." Lewis Beale talks with Marc Anthony and Jennifer Lopez about El Cantante (The Singer) for the New York Times. More on the Toronto lineup from Etan Vlessing in the Hollywood Reporter. One spot to watch continually for news is tiffreviews.com.

Shane Danielson, departing artistic director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival (Monday through August 27), has a fine piece in the London Times in which he recalls the highs and lows of five years on the job.

Matt Riviera has been posting dispatches from the Melbourne International Film Festival, which wraps tomorrow.

"Shocked by the arrogance and brutality of the current US-backed Israeli assault on Lebanon, myself and Gabe Klinger have hammered out a screening of two films by Lebanese filmmakers whose work is of great interest." Andy Rector has details and dates, and if you're in Chicago next weekend, it's something you might consider.

Lance Weiler, co-director of The Last Broadcast, is taking his new one, Head Trauma, on the road. It'll be screening in 15 cities between August 18 and September 22. Check that terrific site for dates and locations.

The Machinima Festival, slated for November 4 and 5, is accepting submissions. Via Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing.

Ten curators and 150 artists from around the world will take part in Too Much Freedom?, the 10th biennial festival of film, video and experimental new media taking placing throughout LA and on the Web: Freewaves.

Rhizome is ten and will be celebrating throughout the fall.

Tribeca and the Rome Film Festival have announced a partnership. Cinematical's Martha Fischer has details.

Conversations With Other Women.

AO Scott presents the set-up in the New York Times: "In Conversations With Other Women, his debut feature, Hans Canosa splits the screen in two as he observes a man and a woman - their names are never supplied - talking themselves and each other into a one-night stand." Ultimately, he decides, "the film is too studied, too forward in its conceits to be entirely satisfying - but [Aaron] Eckhart and [Helena] Bonham Carter approach their roles with intelligence and conviction."

But Michelle Devereaux, writing in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, finds the film "surprisingly effective," adding, "if you want to pick sides - jerky corn-fed schmo or beautifully bruised cynical sophisticate - place your bets on Bonham Carter."

For the LA Weekly's Ella Taylor, "though the movie is occasionally too clever-talky for its own good, it has the authentic ring of an elegy for love lost when one partner grows up while the other runs in place."

Gary Dretzka scopes the film's chances and talks with Eckhart and Canosa: "Turns out, the story of Canosa's personal journey from a missionary posting in Singapore, to New York and Hollywood, is every bit as fascinating as any picture released in the months since the last limousine carrying a freeloading celebrity rolled out of Park City, Utah. It would make a terrific movie... that is, if anyone would believe it."

Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times: "It's sad and funny, satisfying and frustrating, totally familiar. What their sly teasing and gentle baiting reveals, aside from an arch understanding of the self-imposed but still seemingly unpassable romantic roadblocks we throw in our path as we age, is a yearning for a time before accumulated experience completely obscures the view."

"Ordinarily, I might be disinclined to like a film that relies on no less than three gimmicks to carry its weight, but when gimmicks actually work as well as they do in Conversations With Other Women, I'll cut it some slack," writes Cinematical's Kim Voynar.

It's "smart, sexy," writes Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle, so "enjoy it, because this is not a trend that's about to catch on."

indieWIRE sends its questions to Canosa.

Candice Rialson, 1952 - 2006.

Ted Cogswell was among the first within virtual reach to spot the news at the Code Red DVD Blog: "Candice Rialson's been dead for over four months and no one in Hollywood seemed to notice."

Word spread fast and Dennis Cozzalio began gathering what info he could find; Ted Cogswell stayed in contact with Code Red to get the full story.

Tim Lucas gathered remembrances from Allan Arkush and Joe Dante, who directed Rialson in Hollywood Boulevard. Dante: "Though out of the public zeitgeist for over two decades, it should be remembered that Candice was a very hot personality in the drive-in movie world.... [S]he set many an ozoner heart aflutter."

Tideland.

"Tideland, with its gleeful nastiness, recovers a little of the spirit of the earlier TV genius," writes Peter Bradshaw, who has not been a fan of the post-Python work: "For the first time in ages, Terry Gilliam has shown he can deliver the snakebite."

Also in the Guardian: Stuart Jeffries talks with Gilliam, and from the same page you can download Gilliam's chat with Mitch Cullin, author of the novel on which the film is based. Philip French profiles Jeff Bridges.

After calling the critical faculties of the BBC's David Mattin into question, Brendon Connelly takes Nina Caplan to task for her review for This is London. Connelly reports that Gilliam's next film will be The Owl in Daylight, "blending a biopic of Philip K Dick with an adaptation of his last, unfinished work." As it happens, Philip Purser-Hallard has a piece in the Guardian on the writer's later visions.

More talk with Gilliam from Wendy Ide in the London Times (plus a brief review) and SF Said in the Telegraph, where Tim Robey writes, "Gilliam's ghoulish provocations and long passages of inertia can make the whole thing feel like an overextended asylum visit: however unique and strange the surroundings, eventually you just want to leave."

Update, 8/16: Mark Sinker in Sight & Sound.

A summertime question for Greg Allen.

Greg Allen's greg.org is one of the original "Bloggish" links in that right-hand column over there, and I still look forward to each and every entry. True, Greg's got a lot more on his mind than movies these days, but I've always shared his interests and enjoyed his finds (such as this one).

I couldn't resist asking...

The artist. But the catch is actually calling yourself an artist. I find that if they're any good, artists usually call themselves painters or say they "make videos" or whatever. The prerogative is theirs, but they know when to exercise it. For films especially, though, declaring your own work art is too often an attempt to inoculate it against criticism or to rationalize some kind of known shortcoming.

NCTATNY. Chick Flicks.

The first thing that'll hit you about Not Coming to a Theater Near You's new feature, "Chick Flicks," is the exquisite design. Not only does it look scrumptious, it actually works. Click the corner of the cover and the book opens. Click a title and the pages breeze past and stop at the article you've requested. Wonderful work, so I'd hate for you to access the following pages via the links below - unless you're in a hurry, in which case, you have to promise to return to the virtual book and browse through it over the weekend.

Introducing the feature, Beth Gilligan and Jenny Jediny naturally trace the history of the term "chick flick" and where its "derogatory connotation" came from, listing exemplary films along the way, and then noting that "more contemporary chick flicks remain largely ignored. This is not an uncommon trend with the 'women's picture'; an inordinate number of films now lauded within cinematic study and criticism, particularly those within feminist and queer studies, only found recognition through such revisionist study and new generations of filmgoers." This feature aims, then, to push things along, to reveal in recent candidates a "substance beneath an often romantic, sentimental surface."

"Single city girl doesn't want a relationship with a stable and sturdy man, she wants to wander the streets free, in couture outfits, only to realize she really does want him." Jediny cracks open the myth at the center of Breakfast at Tiffany's. Also: