Michelangelo Antonioni, 1912 - 2007.

Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni, whose depiction of alienation made him a symbol of art-house cinema with movies such as Blow-Up and L'Avventura, has died, officials and news reports said Tuesday. He was 94....

Antonioni depicted alienation in the modern world through sparse dialogue and long takes. Along with Federico Fellini, he helped turn post-war Italian film away from the Neorealism movement and toward a personal cinema of imagination....

"In the empty, silent spaces of the world, he has found metaphors that illuminate the silent places our hearts, and found in them, too, a strange and terrible beauty: austere, elegant, enigmatic, haunting," Jack Nicholson said in presenting Antonioni with the career Oscar. Nicholson starred in the director's 1975 film The Passenger.

The AP.

See also: Acquarello, James Brown's profile for Senses of Cinema, Dennis Yuen's Antonioni archive and the Wikipedia entry.

"'With Antonioni dies not only one of the greatest directors but also a master of modernity,' said Rome mayor Walter Veltroni this morning. A quiet funeral is planned in Ferrara, his birthplace in northern Italy, this Thursday," reports Xan Brooks in the Guardian.

Also, Penelope Houston recalls L'Avventura's tumultuous reception at Cannes in 1960: "Affronted critics leapt to the director's defence. In 1962, L'Avventura was runner-up in Sight and Sound's poll of the top ten films of all time, coming closer than anything else in four runnings of the event to toppling Citizen Kane from its decennial perch. In 1972 L'Avventura held fifth place, in 1982 it was seventh, but by 1992 and 2002 it was out of the money. This seemed a fair enough reflection of altered attitudes, the eclipse of the European art-house cinema which Antonioni's work exemplified."

Further down that same page, John Francis Lane writes, "In the years following his stroke, in addition to making Beyond the Clouds, though impaired in speech and with a paralysed right arm, Antonioni enjoyed travelling and accepted most of the invitations that poured in, attending festivals and cultural events in Italy and around the world, with his wife Enrica always at his side.... Among Antonioni's nostalgic trips, the most moving was his visit to the Taormina film festival in 2000. He stayed at the San Domenico Hotel where he had shot the last scenes of L'Avventura (in which I had a cameo role)."

"Ingmar Bergman left in the early hours of yesterday morning. Within a few hours, Michelangelo Antonioni had followed him through the exit door," blogs Xan Brooks:

It remains to be seen whether this signals the onset of some art-house apocalypse - some Biblical purge of revered European auteurs - but the omens are hardly encouraging. How are Godard, Resnais and Rohmer bearing up?...

If Bergman was the great high priest of the European art-house, then Antonioni was its puckish intellectual. His films were at once more playful and more spare than Bergman's. L'Avventura and L'Eclisse are cerebral, teasing puzzle pictures. Blowup is a roguish, vogueish mystery play. Zabriskie Point offered a freewheeling, anthropological tour of an American counter-culture that - one suspects - never really existed outside of Antonioni's head to begin with.

I also feel that Antonioni has aged less well than Bergman. Perhaps it is the fate of all "modernists" to eventually turn antique, or even retro, and through no fault of his own Antonioni seems finally to have been too fashionable, too much an index of his age, so that his cool inquiries can now look a little mannered and arch.

Heavens. I couldn't disagree more. Now as we head into the late 00's, the almost standardized "festival film" bears the mark of no other director more than Antonioni's.

At any rate, the Guardian has now set up a special section for Antonioni as well.

Initial reactions in the German-language papers: Andreas Kilb in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Bernd Graff in the Süddeutsche Zeitung and Tomas Fitzel in Die Welt.

"In a generation of rule-breakers, Mr Antonioni was one of the most subversive and venerated," writes Rick Lyman in the New York Times. "He challenged moviegoers with an intense focus on intentionally vague characters and a disdain for such mainstream conventions as plot, pacing and clarity. He would raise questions and never answer them, have his characters act in self-destructive ways and fail to explain why, and hold his shots so long that the actors sometimes slipped out of character.... 'What is impressive about Antonioni's films is not that they are good,' the film scholar Seymour Chatman wrote. 'But that they have been made at all.'"

Coudal Partners points to Charles Thomas Samuels's 1969 interview with Antonioni; that's at EuroScreenwriters, which has another that ran in Cahiers du cinéma in 1960.

A few clicks over, you'll find Bergman on Antonioni (in an excerpt from an interview with the Sydsvenska Dagbladet):

He's done two masterpieces, you don't have to bother with the rest. One is Blow-Up, which I've seen many times, and the other is La Notte, also a wonderful film, although that's mostly because of the young Jeanne Moreau. In my collection I have a copy of Il Grido, and damn what a boring movie it is. So devilishly sad, I mean. You know, Antonioni never really learned the trade. He concentrated on single images, never realising that film is a rhythmic flow of images, a movement. Sure, there are brilliant moments in his films. But I don't feel anything for L'Avventura, for example. Only indifference. I never understood why Antonioni was so incredibly applauded. And I thought his muse Monica Vitti was a terrible actress.

Not one for junket niceties, that Ingmar Bergman.

Pix and discussion at the House Next Door.

"Last year, BAMcinématek ran a series called The Vision That Changed Cinema: Michelangelo Antonioni, a three-week retrospective in which they screened most of the filmmakers work," recalls Aaron Dobbs. "It gave me an opportunity to see one of his earlier films - Chronicle of a Love, an interesting mixture of Neorealism and American noir. The film is particularly interesting as an artifact of Antonioni's artistic development, showing the glimmers of many of his later themes within the more standard story structure one might expect from a younger filmmaker."

"As much as Antonioni's films bemoaned the state of man in the modern world, they never were whiny about it. And as precise a picture-maker as Antonioni was, he was never clinical or antiseptic." Glenn Kenny on why Antonioni's is not a cinema of "alienation": "I don't know if it's objectively better, but my preferred word is 'disengagement.'"

I'm posting this in both the Bergman and Antonioni entries: Do read all Glenn Kenny's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at Ingmar Bergman," which he posted yesterday; here's "XIII," addressing some of what we're talking about in the comments:

"Today, we are aswarm with Antonioni imitators, but no one seems to want to be the new Bergman," Michael Atkinson notes. That's partly because nobody can be the new Bergman. And not just for the obvious reason.

Unlike a lot of younger filmmakers today, Bergman was a highly, richly cultured individual. He knew the Bible backward and forward, Shakespeare too; fine art, music, and so on. All of his knowledge did more than inform his work - his work is suffused with it, it gains much of its texture and heft from it. Of course, Antonioni is similarly cultured, but his depth in this area doesn't play so much upon the surface of his work; it motivates the form, rather than thickens it. Today's young filmmakers aren't, for the most part, as polyglot. For a lot of them, all the culture they've got is film. And Antonioni's got a signature style that's accessible to them, and seems imitable: shoot some architecture and negative space, have characters disaffectedly utter banalities, and you think you've got it. To emulate Bergman, you've got to know what he knew, and knowing that... go on to be yourself.

Dennis Cozzalio on Bergman and Antonioni: "L'Avventura remains for me a mournful, rich and exquisitely moody canvas of sun-baked despair, but in general I'm afraid I value the Italian director's movies more for the influence they have had on directors I revere (Robert Altman, Brian De Palma) and respect (Gus Van Sant, Peter Weir) than for the films themselves."

"Some admirers feel that Antonioni didn't have much more to say than he said back in L'Avventura. But nobody ever pretended that he didn't say it beautifully." Phil Nugent at ScreenGrab.

An online listening tip from the Shamus: "The great Brazilian performer Caetano Veloso wrote a song called 'Michelangelo Antonioni' for the title sequence and breaks between [Eros'] three segments, and it remains one of the most haunting, absorbing pieces of music I've ever heard."

"When watching his films, whether it's the first time or the 58th viewing, there always seems to be something new popping up, some moment or detail you had missed before," writes Blake Ethridge.

Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay:

If I had to name a single favorite film, it would most likely be his The Passenger, in which Jack Nicholson plays a reporter who impulsively assumes the identity of a similarly featured dead man - a gun runner - and allows that man's appointment book to dictate his drift through North Africa and Europe. The film was re-released last year by Sony Pictures Classics, and I hadn't seen it in years. My memory of the film was solid, but when I screened it at 20 years old I was compelled by its thinking about the ways in which the Western media represents the third world. The theorist and filmmaker Peter Wollen had co-written the screenplay, and embedded within its story and Antonioni's compositions was an essay on the ideologies of the narratives we create for ourselves. When I watched it again, so many years later, these ideas were all still there, of course. But I hadn't remembered how purely beautiful, emotional, and finally devastating the film is, from its carefree moments of abandon with Maria Schneider in a convertible to Nicholson's concluding, crushing monologue in which, clearly consumed by depression, he recounts the story of a blind man who, after suddenly regaining his sight, becomes disenchanted with the world around him. At the end of this film, Antonioni staged perhaps his most famous shot in which the camera departs the film's deceased protagonist, melts through a wall and, like our world, lives on.

Jim Emerson points to a letter written to Roger Ebert in 1999 by Ronan O'Casey. Here's how it begins:

A friend recently sent me your column in the Nov 8, 1998 Denver Post about the movie Blow-Up. As I actually played the blow-up in that fine movie, I thought you might enjoy knowing the behind-the-scenes story of how the film was made (or not made, in fact). Your column proclaims it to be a great film, and I am not trying to discredit that opinion. But it is nonetheless an unfinished work, and it raises the fascinating question of how much of the "art" of a final film is intentional - or accidental.

Updates, 8/1: "As I watched the attractive aristocrats and climbers in his films mope through their empty lives, a part of me wanted to be just like those people: self-absorbed and miserable, perhaps, but also fashionable and sexy," recalls Stephen Holden. "The ever-acute critic Pauline Kael recognized this contradiction in a famous essay, 'Come-Dressed-as-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties,' which aroused the ire of Antonioni devotees like me. More than four decades later, that contradiction remains unresolved in popular culture." Then: "For all their differences of temperament, Mr Bergman and Mr Antonioni were staunch moralists.... If both had bleak apprehensions of the decline and fall of Western civilization in an increasingly secularized age, Mr Antonioni's vision was more urbane and cosmopolitan."

The NYT's also posted a piece by AO Scott on Bergman and Antonioni that'll be running in Sunday's paper: "The two of them upheld, as filmmakers, TS Eliot's observation that 'poets, in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult.'... There was, among certain filmgoers in the 1960s, an appetite for difficulty, a conviction that symbolic obscurity and psychological alienation were authentic responses to the state of the world. More than that, the idea that a difficult work had special value - that being challenged was a distinct form of pleasure - enjoyed a prestige, at the time, that is almost unimaginable today. We would rather be teased than troubled, and the measure of artistic sophistication is cleverness rather than seriousness."

"Unlike Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni is poorly represented on DVD," writes Dave Kehr. "He did not have the good luck to make most of his films for a single, state-subsidized production company, and as a result rights to his films are spread around the world and are often difficult to track down."

"There's no point in comparing Antonioni and Bergman," argues David Thomson in the Guardian. "There's every reason to wonder whether the climate and culture of film - I mean the extent to which we and film-makers need it, desperately - is likely to go on producing masterpieces. In any comparison between film and the novel, Antonioni may have made films as subtle, as nuanced, as filled with doubt and certainty as the best modern writing. In 1960, or so, I think there's no doubt that the world craved such work, even if they booed it when they saw it. Now? I'm not so sure."

For the Los Angeles Times obituary, Dennis McLellan talks with Jack Nicholson, who tells him "Antonioni was in a ranking 'by himself. I don't know how to put this, he's just a maestro, and everybody loved him,' Nicholson told The Times, emotionally searching for words to describe his longtime friend. Describing Antonioni as 'a father figure to me as a few other people I've worked with somehow became,' Nicholson said they had great affection for one another. 'He was a man of joy and impeccable taste,' he said. 'His whole life was dedicated to modestly being a brilliant artist.'"

"Unlike his fellow countryman Federico Fellini, who believed in imbuing his movies with as much life as possible, Antonioni was often quoted as believing all existence was meaningless and human interaction a futile joke," writes Bill Gibron at PopMatters. "Many found his abstractions more demanding than delightful, and in a new millennial dialectic where all expression - good, bad, naïve, ill-conceived - is outwardly championed, it's easy to see how Antonioni would be ignored. He wasn't flamboyant or foolish. Instead, he was fastidious and arcane - personality quirks often associated with philosophers and fools. And true to his all-encompassing aesthetic, Michelangelo Antonioni was often both."

Mathieu Lindon opens today's cover package in Libération.

More in the German papers: Christina Nord in die taz, Daniel Kothenschulte in the Frankfurter Rundschau and Christina Tillman in Der Tagesspiegel.

"Bergman once staged a memorable chess game with Death, of course, in The Seventh Seal - one of the few films whose every image is invested with such power and inevitability that they seem to preexist the film itself, like carvings in ancient wood or stone - but it was Antonioni who was truly the chessmaster, one of cinema's rare geometric thinkers, possibly its first and without question its most definitive," argues Tim Lucas.

"A significant number of today's most acclaimed art-house filmmakers, from Béla Tarr in Hungary to Abbas Kiarostami in Iran to Carlos Reygadas in Mexico to Jia Zhangke in China, owe an enormous debt to the languorous style that critic Andrew Sarris once evocatively termed 'Antoniennui,'" writes Dennis Lim at Slate. "If Bergman was, as Slate's Dana Stevens noted, a master of faces, Antonioni was a poet of landscape."

"It has become a cliche to say that buildings and landscapes are as much characters in Antonioni's films as the isolated nomads who inhabit them, but if we are taking cliches to be the contrail of an artist's influence, traceable across the works who kindred spirits who followed, then Antonioni irrevocably changed the way film looked at and used urban and natural space," writes Matt Sussman at Pixel Vision. "Tsai Ming Liang, Pedro Costa, Ridley Scott (specifically Alien), Wong Kar Wai, Stanley Kubrick and Dario Argento are some of the directors who come to mind, who conscious or not, are indebted to the way in which Antonioni foregrounded landscape - never letting us forget the topography of the chess board on which he orchestrated his sublime stalemates, again and again."

"Blowup is Antonioni's masterpiece," argues Flickhead. "There isn't a bum frame in the entire film."

"After a while, life and work and a few laughs turn us all into Mary Wilke (Diane Keaton) in Woody Allen's Manhattan," writes Dan Callahan at the House Next Door:

"I mean, the silence, God's silence... OK, OK... I mean, I loved it at Radcliffe, but alright, you outgrow it!" Surely Allen means us to reject the self-loathing, brittle Wilke, who churns out novelizations of popular movies instead of trying to create serious art. But her comments nail the Bergman/Antonioni pretensions and the mindset that would most appreciate them. She also sees Bergman's "fashionable pessimism" as "adolescent." This hits even closer to the bone. Wilke has a point. Several points, actually. She is also evil. Her pop mindset rules today, and we have to do everything we can to topple it. Paying attention to the virtues of Bergman and Antonioni is definitely a step in the right direction.

"I know that Antonioni is often described as a filmmaker who explored alienation, and whose techniques reinforced this," writes Nick Rombes. "But there is such a brightness to films like The Passenger, such a flooding of light, like that you might get right before an eclipse, right before it all starts - as it always does - to go very, very dark."

Updates, 8/2: "Goodbye Maestro." Wim Wenders writes a poem in Sicily.

WSWS revives Richard Phillips's 2004 assessment of Antonioni's "flawed legacy."

"I hate Antonioni films," admits Spencer Parsons in the Austin Chronicle. But: "I can remember scenes and sequences and images by Antonioni better, more precisely, and viscerally than I can recall anything from numerous films I supposedly enjoy."

Signandsight translates Arno Widmann's response to Stephen Holden's NYT piece in the Frankfurter Rundschau: "The quick succession of the deaths of Bergman and Antonioni seemed to fill him with a sense of relief. No obituary of the filmmakers makes it so clear how necessary they were - and how bitterly we will miss them - as this attempt to portray them as spectres of a morose, gloomy old Europe, unable to accept the lightness of being."

"Of course, 'Antoniennui' always risks bloated inanity, and no one threw darts better than critic Manny Farber," blogs Max Goldberg at Pixel Vision:

Antonioni gets his odd, clarity-is-all effects from his taste for chic mannerist art that results in a screen that is glassy, has a side-sliding motion, the feeling of people plastered against stripes or divided by verticals and horizontals; his incapacity with interpersonal relationships turns crowds into stiff waves, lovers into lonely appendages, hanging stiffly from each other, occasionally coming together like clanking sheets of metal but seldom giving the effect of being in communion... Antonioni's aspiration is to pin the viewer to the wall and slug him with wet towels of artiness and significance.

Goldberg: "I find nothing to disagree with in Farber's barrage, though it still takes nothing away from my absolute pleasure in something like Red Desert, a film in which all elements - color, score, composition - align to bring Vitti's lost woman well past the verge of a nervous breakdown." At any rate, "both Antonioni and Bergman were monumentalized long ago. More than anything, their deaths make one wonder if the pantheon itself is passing in today's increasingly fragmented film culture."

"Many people I respect feel passionately about Antonioni's pictures, and one could definitely argue that his influence is more evident and more widespread in contemporary culture than Bergman's," writes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon:

I've always felt similar reservations about Antonioni's work as I do about Alfred Hitchcock's; in both cases, an extraordinary technical facility seems to put form ahead of content, style ahead of substance. Perhaps it's more accurate to say that for both directors form was content, and that this idea flowed from their most basic understanding of the world. In both cases, my problem is not so much with Antonioni or Hitchcock's movies (which I find powerful and impressive, though hardly ever moving) but with what I see as their baleful influence on later generations.

"In Michelangelo's Gaze, the director enters a church and contemplates the statue of Moses by Michelangelo - the other one," writes Sheila Johnston in the Telegraph. "Everything is here: the breathtaking use of space, the interlocking looks between man and statue, the subtle soundtrack. The immodest comparison of himself with the Old Master; the poignant physical contrast between the frail filmmaker and the mighty prophet. And, above all, a defiant, almost decadent elegance. The closing credits note that the director was dressed by Giorgio Armani. Naturalmente."

The BBC reports on the funeral.

Another online listening tip. "Like Antonioni, Scanner is a student of the urban - a realm of aesthetic scholarship that is exemplified by his nightjam.org.uk project." Marc Weidenbaum offer two samples.

"I felt a bittersweet shock of recognition while considering [Jim] Cheng's observation [in USA Today] that '[e]ven for those who were not intimately familiar with his work, Michelangelo Antonioni's name was synonymous with art-house cinema of the 1960s and 70s,'" writes Joe Leydon. "Yes. Quite so. Thinking of Antonioni and Bergman reminds me of a bygone era - a time when I came of age as a lover of film - when campus film societies programmed subtitled imports out of the Janus Films catalogue, book stores prominently displayed anthologies of serious film criticism (Pauline Kael, Stanley Kauffmann, Judith Crist and Andrew Sarris, etc) and art houses that routinely booked 'the new Truffaut' or 'the latest by Fellini' served free coffee in the lobby to encourage interaction, conversation and an overall sense of a 'film community.'"

"Maybe I have a thing for impending mortality, but I find the last works by Bergman and Antonioni to be among the most chilling, compelling and enthralling works that either made," writes Kevin Lee. Of Michelangelo's Gaze, he adds, "The film's nearly silent soundtrack is the polar opposite of the typically chatty Bergman, but in actually it expresses itself in much the same way as Bergman's films do - in gazes. And Antonioni's gaze in this film is without equal."

Brandon Harris on Zabriskie Point:

In making a film that deliberately jettisoned any notion of fulfilling its audiences' expectations, Antonioni doomed his projects commercial and critical prospects, while leaving a film that merits much greater attention than anyone, including Mr Antonioni's fiercest supporters, has been willing to give it.

Zabriskie Point is ostensibly about the highly ambiguous road toward liberative struggle. Its climax, one in which Daria Halprin's character appears to blow up a beautiful cliff bound home, one in which her boss and his partners are discussing their plans for developing the area, before the curtain is pulled back and we understand that she has only imagined the destruction, is both a self-reflexive nod to the crassness of American popular cinema and an earnest indictment of its culture. Mrs Halprin gets back in her car and drives off into the sunset mourning an ephemeral cause that she never truly grasped, much like almost every baby boomer I know....

Since this liberative struggle is something that real life new left groups like the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground could never fully articulate into a coherent ideology and subsequent post Civil Rights films like The Spook Who Sat by the Door or The Final Comedown, both earnest and flawed films made by Black Americans that failed to give much credence to revolutionary action or depict such an uprising with some semblance of verisimilitude, its no surprise that Zabriskie Point fails, both in the conversations between committed, poorly dubbed young people or the larger, highly ambiguous thematic mission of the picture, to sell its vision of a truly radicalized American youth scene to the audience....

What is so ironic about this is that Zabriskie Point became a grand failure commercially and critically at a cultural moment when middle class Americans, entering a new decade that would be rife with scandal and national malaise, had tired of liberative struggle, were moving to the suburbs (Sunnydunes!) in droves and taking up arms, not to rid the country of Nixon or Hoover, but for personal protection from barely perceived, media generated threats (urban crime). Perhaps, Antonioni's greatest "failure" was his most prescient film.

Liz Helfgott at Criterion's On Five blog:

Working on [the history of Janus Films] with Peter [Cowie] and my colleagues here was incredibly enriching, full of surprises, and one of the most touching was a story told by Janus cofounder Cy Harvey about Antonioni coming to New York with Monica Vitti in 1960 for the premiere of L'avventura, and the director's first encounter with the endlessly dim-witted New York Times critic Bosley Crowther. "Antonioni was very different from either Truffaut or Bergman," Harvey recounted. "He was extremely shy, very emotional. So at ten thirty at night, we walked to the corner, bought the New York Times, and, of course, it was clear that [Crowther] didn't understand it." Crowther's review began, "Watching L'avventura... is like trying to follow a showing of a picture at which several reels have got lost." Harvey, who was distributing the film, remembered, "Antonioni starts to sob, Monica Vitti starts to cry, and the tears are streaming down their faces, and they don't quite understand what's going on." Happily, Crowther's critical influence was more limited than his stupidity, and L'avventura enjoyed a healthy first run.

"Who are the heirs to those esteemed filmmakers - some living (such as Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer), most dead (Bergman, Antonioni, Francois Truffaut, Federico Fellini, Akira Kurosawa, many others) - who came to prominence during the post-WWII era, who I would label The Art House Elders?" Joe Leydon offers a "modest proposal."

Online viewing tip. Tribeca's artistic director Peter Scarlet reminisces about Bergman and Antonioni.

Updates, 8/3: "It was said that Antonioni could be as difficult as his films. Yet on a drizzling January day - perfect Antonioni weather - during production in 1969 on Zabriskie Point, his only film shot in the US, he proved to be unfailingly gracious, open and friendly, and remained so over the years to me even though a 1985 stroke impaired his speech." Kevin Thomas reminisces in the LAT.

"So to commemorate the passing of those monolithic, for-so-long-seemingly-immortal titans of 1960's European cinema I pulled out my DVD of... Before Sunset. What?" You'll find an explanation at Memories of the Future. Works for me.

"The old-style 'auteurs' are fast disappearing," sighs Geoffrey Macnab in the Independent. "Their impact was once enormous. The British filmmaker Mike Leigh has talked about his experience of arriving in London from Salford in the autumn of 1960 and immediately being 'blasted from here to eternity by the French cinema, the Italian cinema, the Russian cinema, the Japanese cinema, the cinema of Satyajit Ray, etc.' In other words, the cinema of auteurs. His experience was far from unique."

"Both directors were old men, and so grief is bested by appreciation," writes Nathan Kosub at Stop Smiling. "Beyond themselves, there is nothing to compare the accomplishments of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni to: not literature, not music. Quite simply, there is nothing that compares to the joy of movies."

Richard Phillips, WSWS, part 2.

Gerhard Midding remembers Antonioni in Freitag (and in German).

"In Europe, when I first came upon Bergman and Antonioni, we called their work films, not movies, and we honoured them as among the great artists of the century," writes Derek Malcolm in the Evening Standard. "This is a difficult concept for us Brits, with our literary and theatrical traditions to contemplate. We tend to find it difficult to admit that filmmakers such as Bergman, Buñuel and John Ford should be accounted along with the best writers, artists and composers of the century." But "long live cinematic art. And long live movie entertainment, too. It is perfectly possible to love Antonioni's L'Avventura and the Carry On movies as well. Or Bergman's Wild Strawberries and Creature from the Black Lagoon."

"I've always felt that the people who describe Antonioni's movies as being about ennui, anomie, and alienation are... not wrong, exactly, but largely missing the point," writes Steven Shaviro. "The point being that Antonioni's movies, above all, are about seeing and feeling the world, about the look of things - including when those things seem to look back, or when they seem to look through us, to ignore us." Notes on endings, time and the body follow, and then: "In all these ways, Antonioni gives us his own, highly original and unusual, inflection of modernism. The combination of ravishing (if severe) visual beauty and an underlying despair is, of course, very much a familiar modernist stance or trope. But Antonioni gives it a particular inflection, through the ways his characters are absorbed into a landscape (usually not a 'natural' one) that changes them even as it reflects them: both expresses them and absorbs and digests them."

And then, of course, politics:

Antonioni's films work as critiques of class relations, and of gender relations, precisely because they don't at all moralize (and also because they don't portray any working class alternatives to the lives of the bourgeoisie, in the manner of the neorealist films that Antonioni was reacting against). Rather, these films draw us into a paralysis, which we as viewers share with the characters whom we are watching on screen. This paralysis is the absurd consequence of what happens when class domination and gender stratification are pushed to the extreme points that they are in a certain sort of (medium-late) capitalist society. The characters' neuroticism, their narcissism, their sterility, is the rigorous 'subjective' consequence of an 'objective' regime of accumulation for its own sake.

And then, he gets to his favorite Antonioni film. Must reading.

Filmbrain stumbles across a quote that has him muttering, "Oh, Orson..."

"[F]ew films yield as much satisfaction upon repeated viewings as... L'Avventura." Walt Opie at the Guru.

"Making movies seems to depend on a distinct sort of unstated psychic carnage. I've seen variations of this several times since. Lots of invisible geometries in play. A transfer of unwitting energies to the last man standing. Antonioni, damaged but resolute, would always be that last man." That's John Foxx, just a clip of a generous and thoughtful reminiscence he sent along to Glenn Kenny; Foxx (you may remember Metamatic) composed music for Identification of a Woman.

Updates, 8/5: "Of all the other great Italian directors, probably none were so unremittingly secular as Antonioni," writes Peter Steinfels in the New York Times. "His world is severely postreligious, a circumstance that made reflective believers intensely interested in his work, too. For Antonioni, however, the passage from religion was simply a fact; for Bergman it was a struggle.... [W]ere believers, and again Christians foremost, drawn to these directors as powerful witnesses to what happened when God was declared dead? No doubt some religious defenders wanted to employ these bleak visions in a smug apologetic for faith, a greater temptation perhaps in the case of Antonioni, a post-Christian Italian, than of Bergman, an ex-Christian Swede. But for the most part, religious admirers of these directors treated them and their films not as object lessons for nonbelievers about the consequences of nonbelief but rather as revelations for believers about the true challenges of faith."

For the Observer's Philip French, Antonioni's "final masterpiece" is The Passenger: "It's an enthralling, demanding movie with a final seven-minute take that is among the most remarkable in film history. Antonioni may have rejected neat conclusions, but his films end memorably - in the case of Zabriskie Point, with one of the cinema's greatest bangs." Then:

I met Antonioni only once, at a film festival in Delhi in 1976. He was short, handsome, quietly authoritative. One day I attended a discussion, arranged by Indian TV, for which he was joined on stage by Satyajit Ray, Akira Kurosawa and Elia Kazan. The two Asians towered over the diminutive Occidentals. It was a civilised occasion and the four ended up agreeing that in their different ways they were all humanists. I felt I was observing a moment in history, just as this past week can be seen as the end of an era.

Short interviews with Sarah Miles and Peter Bowles follow.

"[W]hat I've been mourning these past few days is not so much the passing of these difficult, masterful old men but of the cinematic era they dominated - which sputtered out, its passing largely unremarked, well over 30 years ago," writes Richard Schickel in the Los Angeles Times. "[T]o an unprecedented degree, we redefined the nation's high and middlebrow culture. In this era, collegiate film studies burgeoned, publishers flooded the market with books about movies and, when I began my career as a movie reviewer at Life, which had the biggest weekly circulation among American magazines, I wrote regularly, without objection from editors or readers, about all the great directors listed above." And they are: "Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica, Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu, Federico Fellini and Satyajit Ray, the entire French New Wave (Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Melville) and, lest we forget, the cheeky Czechs of the Prague Spring." Anyway, get this: "At one point, the competition from foreign films grew so intense that the Los Angeles Times, no less, called for a protective tariff on cinematic imports."

"Things always look nearer and dearer in pop culture's rear-view mirror," writes the Toronto Star's Peter Howell. Yes, last week was a sad one, he concedes, but come on: "In many ways, there has never been a better time to be a lover of intelligent film, especially if you live in a city as fortunate as Toronto." Via Movie City News.

"A glacial anatomist of love, despair and the alienating tropes of modern life, he seemed to come from another country and culture than the one inhabited by Fellini, De Sica, Visconti, Pasolini and Bertolucci," writes Nigel Andrews in the Financial Times. "In his most creative decade, the 1960s, Antonioni's sensibility as an artist seemed closer to a northern European heritage - Camus, Sartre, existentialism - than to anything Mediterranean."

"Michelangelo Antonioni was, if nothing else, a director of moments," writes Tom Sutpen at If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger...:

This is not to say that he excelled at individual sequences at the expense of the whole, or even that he had an abiding gift for dramatic, carefully constructed epiphanies. His unique gift, his genius (to use a word pressed into backbreaking service this week) lay in depicting with immense precision the most agonizing hours of inner torment, documenting on film that which cannot be documented so directly: The moment when an artist begins to know the limits of art; the moment when a marriage can no longer go on; the moment when a man's inanition of will finally reduces every personal illusion to dust; the moment when a revolutionary impulse dies; the moment when loss becomes irretrievable. It was something no other filmmaker, then or now, was capable of. It was literally like photographing heartbreak.

Also, an online viewing tip. Antonioni's 1949 documentary, Sette Canne, un vestito.

"[H]e seemed to follow fashion as much as set it, particularly in the English-language phase of his career," writes Variety's Todd McCarthy. "Blowup started this, and Zabriskie Point, his one American studio venture, confirmed it; I remember vividly his hobnobbing with Bay Area radical chic types before and during production, and their desperation to be accepted by him." Via Scott Macaulay at Filmmaker.

Online viewing tip. Facets Features has a short clip from an interview with Bergman in which he references Antonioni.

Antonioni "was the first true modernist in commercial cinema," argues Time's Richard Corliss. "Pro or con, a filmgoer had to be diverted by the beautiful people in an Antonioni cast: stunners like Marcello Mastroianni, Jeanne Moreau, Alain Delon and especially Monica Vitti, the director's mistress and muse for five crucial films. These stars helped Antonioni make anxiety glamorous, passivity photogenic, entropy entertaining. You could say he made 'boring' interesting."

"The mystery of L'avventura is not an unresolved disappearance but the unresolved continued existence of everything, of form and of void," writes Chris Stangl. "The puzzle of Blow-Up is not a beguiling amateur sleuth story, but a genre implosion, demolishing the entrance and exit points of detection drama. Not anti-mystery: ur-Mystery."

Updates, 8/6: Online listening tip. David Denby for the New Yorker.

"It's important to remember that Bergman and his fellow Euro-titan Michelangelo Antonioni, who both died on the same day last week, were big-name commercial directors - who also helped moviegoers worldwide see the relatively young, originally low-brow, populist medium in a new light: as a (potential) art form," Jim Emerson reminds us. "(The Beatles, who in 1964-65 were the most popular youth phenomenon on the planet, even wanted Antonioni to direct their second feature, after A Hard Day's Night!) And if they hadn't been so popular and famous, they would not have been so influential. These guys won plenty of high-falutin' awards at film festivals, but they were also nominated for Oscars in glitzy Hollywood."

Updates, 8/7: A little something from me at the Reeler: "[I]f we're to peg Antonioni and Bergman as modernists... there's something missing: the city."

"Near the end of the last millennium, I decided to do something difficult and convoluted and thoroughly silly," confesses Jim Emerson. "On this particular occasion I determined to figure out which 100 movies were the most highly regarded at the close of the century.... came up with some complex point scale for rating the movies by the awards and honors they had received, using a mixture of domestic and international, popular and critical sources.... Point of interest: Bergman had three films on the list: Persona (22), Wild Strawberries (66), and Fanny and Alexander (84). Antonioni had one: L'Avventura (8)."

The staff at IFC News lists "ten (and more) songs, shorts, movies, shows and novels that pay tribute to the [Bergman and Antonioni's] work."

Continued here.

Sight & Sound. August 07.

The August issue marks Sight & Sound's 75th anniversary; to celebrate, the editors have asked "critics from around the world to nominate their favourite overlooked masterpiece. The result: 75 lost films you just have to track down." But first, you'll have to track down the print version of this issue; this feature's not online.

What is online: Amy Taubin's conversation with Gus Van Sant about Andy Warhol and Andrew Roberts arguing that the "Harry Potter films are the most commercially successful entries in the time-honoured British boarding-school genre."

Reviews:

• "A study of loss and disorientation, filled with silences, ambiguities and unspoken affinities, Daratt (Dry Season) is shot in a carefully composed style and communicates through small gestures and physical interactions rather than striking visual effects," writes Roy Armes. "How can the people of Chad move forward after the horrors they have endured? How can a new generation cope with the burden of the past?"

• Kim Newman on Die Hard 4.0, known only in the States, naturally, as Live Free or Die Hard: "This latest Die Hard movie is undecided as to whether it is a reboot for its 1980s-spawned franchise or a last hurrah for shaven-headed, unbreakable Bruce Willis as an action hero."

• Hannah Patterson on Sherrybaby: "[Director Laurie] Collyer's ace in the hole is the skill of lead actress Maggie Gyllenhaal, whose extraordinarily vital performance powers the film, and is reason above all to see it."

Hopefully, Tim Lucas's review of Psychopathia Sexualis will make it online as soon as some minor glitch is fixed.

The Bourne Ultimatum + summer movies.

"Summing up the first two films, Manohla Dargis (then at the Los Angeles Times) said that the drama of [The Bourne Identity] was existential (Who am I?), and the drama of [The Bourne Supremacy] was moral (What did I do?)," recalls David Denby in the New Yorker. "I would say that the drama of [The Bourne Ultimatum] is redemptive: How can I escape what I am?... The material is formulaic, but, of all the current action franchises, this one is the most enjoyable."

"If they could bottle what gives The Bourne Ultimatum its rush, it would probably be illegal," gushes Variety's Todd McCarthy. "The third and purportedly final installment in the mountingly exciting series is a pounding, pulsating thriller that provides an almost constant adrenaline surge for nearly two hours."

"Robert Ludlum died six years ago, but that has done nothing to slow the release of books published under the name of the actor-turned-novelist who specialized in thrillers built on a foundation of paranoia," writes Richard Sandomir in the New York Times. "The business is deployed now as a kind of film studio, presenting books completed by others or new ones written using his name."

Updates, 7/31: "The Bourne Ultimatum opens at a dead sprint, and doesn't much slow down; even its quiet, contemplative moments have a sense of unease and their own careening forward momentum," writes Brent Simon for Screen Daily. "Anchoring the movie in resolute fashion, [Matt] Damon delivers another intense performance, absorbing information at a high rate of speed and translating that into both rapid analysis and breathless action. The combination of massive raw intelligence and swallowed grief and self-torture that inform Bourne is captured as much in Damon's clenched jaw and hard-set eyes as any dialogue (after all, who is left for Bourne to really open up to?), and he feels every bit the chariot driver here."

"The punches are quick, brutal, and relentless," grants Paul Schrodt at Slant. "In one memorable set piece, Bourne and another vacant-eyed secret agent rip each other apart inside a Tangiers apartment, stripping away the home's décor as the shots literally shatter into tiny fragments. It may be the most breathless action sequence of the year, but, put together, the film's stunts seem as empty as Bourne's head - a globetrotting exercise in urban combat punctuated with control-room zingers like 'Sir, he drove off the roof!'... If the film's glowing early reviews are any indication, what [Paul] Greengrass lacks in soul he more than makes up for in artifice."

A "chase movie of breathtaking purity," declares Jürgen Fauth. It "makes the 'seriousness' of Casino Royale look sentimental. Speaking of Bond: The Bourne Ultimatum shows just how slack and self-satisfied the much-praised Casino Royale really was. Bond has the glossier locations, juicier women and flashier cars, but in a fight, Bourne would slit 007's throat and make off with the suitcase nuke before Bond had time to put down his martini."

In the Voice, Nathan Lee draws the comparison as well: "[W]here Bond movies are juiced by a conflict of egos, the Bourne adventures are all about competing intelligence systems - as manifested through action set-pieces. In the case of Ultimatum, make that flabbergasting, mind-boggling, next-level action set-pieces." And get this: "This is director Paul Greengrass's second Bourne picture after Supremacy, but it's also a stealth sequel to his last film, United 93."

Updates, 8/1: "This trim, efficient, preposterously entertaining popcorn picture isn't just a model of craftsmanship, it's also a rousing rebuke to the idiotically widespread notion that turning off your brain is a requirement for enjoying an action movie," writes Sean Burns in the Philadelphia Weekly. "This is whip-smart genre filmmaking with a seething political undercurrent keyed directly into the here and now. Who says blockbusters can't be art?"

But in the L Magazine, Benjamin Strong asks, "How did the thinking man's blockbuster get here?" For him, Ultimatum is just "Bruckheimer-Bay gunplay with prestige acting."

With Supremacy, "Greengrass stayed true to his leftish politics in the big-budget potboiler, but he grafted them on awkwardly and strayed from the taut action, concise characterizations, and nuanced relationships of the first film in the franchise, Doug Lyman's The Bourne Identity," writes Peter Keough in the Boston Phoenix. "He's learned a lot since then, however. His United 93 was one of the best films of 2006. And his The Bourne Ultimatum is the best action film so far this summer." Also: "Matt Damon has argued that his Jason Bourne has supplanted James Bond as the hero of our time. 'Bond is an imperialist and a misogynist,' Damon said, sounding not a little like his mentor, lefty historian Howard Zinn. 'Bourne's not the government. The government is after him... He's the opposite of James Bond.'... Action heroes aren't the only ones confronting the institutions and ideals they always believed in. In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the boy wizard contends not just with puberty but also with the realization that the he and hierarchy at the Ministry of Magic might not be on the same page.... Maybe the fundamentalist groups demanding a ban on JK Rowling's novels are onto something. Harry might not be seducing kids into the black arts, but he sure is suggesting that they challenge authority. Those same religious groups are going to be even more pissed off at Chris Weitz's upcoming adaptation of The Golden Compass, the first volume in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy."

Updates, 8/2: "Everything but the enchanted kitchen sink shows up in the sprawling fairy tale Stardust," writes Vareity's John Anderson, "including evil witches, airborne pirate ships, double-parked unicorns and Robert De Niro as a cross-dressing sea captain. Sprinkled with tongue-in-cheek humor, fairly adult jokes and some well-known faces acting very silly, this adventure story should have particular appeal to fans of The Princess Bride, but in any event will never be mistaken for a strictly-for-kids movie."

"Brett Ratner, The Popcorn King" is the title of Scott Foundas's cover story in this week's LA Weekly, though as it opens, it's all about Chris Tucker. It's "language - specifically, the acrobatic juggling of it - that has established Tucker as the most verbally dexterous screen comic since the young Eddie Murphy. On the Rush Hour 3 set, he rarely says a line the same way twice, and the more he improvises, the better things tend to get.... Meanwhile, despite a decade of actively working in Hollywood, [Jackie] Chan's English remains spotty." As for the movie, it's costing around $120 million, so New Line seems a little nervous. "Ultimately, the person most responsible for making sure people see and like Rush Hour 3 is the director whose seven feature films have generated more than $1 billion in global ticket sales, putting him in the elite company of Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis, M Night Shyamalan and a select few others who have reached that milestone before their 40th birthdays.... [T]he curious thing about Ratner is the uniquely vicious tenor of the criticism he engenders, as if he didn't deserve his success and the perks that come with it; as if to be seen in the same room with Paris Hilton were an unforgivable sin; as if, quite frankly, he were enjoying his life too much."

Also in the LAW, Ella Taylor on this week's popcorner: "Greengrass treats us to an escalating collection of exquisitely choreographed car chases, blowups and - Bourne being the do-it-yourself, one-man-against-the-system fellow that he is - hand-to-hand combat and the use of common electric fans as nifty decoys. With every twist of the final pileup on the streets of Manhattan - a sequence of unbelievable technical chutzpah - the man next to me rose in his seat, grunted happily and gently resettled. In other words, The Bourne Ultimatum is fully critic-proof."

"As pointed an indictment of Bush's War is Ultimatum's depiction of the metastasizing of the covert Bush-era intelligence apparatus," notes Neil Morris in the Independent Weekly. This batch of CIA operatives "operate in a netherworld where contract assassins are code-named 'assets' and the combatants of power joust among the nameless, faceless masses. 'You start down this path and where does it end?' asks agent Pamela Landy (Joan Allen, reprising her role from Supremacy). 'It ends when we've won,' retorts [Noah] Vosen [David Strathairn]. That themes this weighty could fit within the confines of what is essentially an extended adrenaline rush bears continuing testament to the talent of director Paul Greengrass, who can amass a mountain of import by training his handheld camera on a single sidelong glance."

But for Eric Kohn, writing in the New York Press, "There's nothing remotely political about the exploits of Jason Bourne; his god-like ability to eradicate imminent danger is so far removed from our sense of reality that those nasty CIA folks chasing after him look like MacGuffins in suits."

"Much is being made of the large-scale, smash-'em-up Big Apple climax, for which the production managed to shut down Manhattan's Seventh Avenue," notes Drew Lazor in the Philadelphia City Paper. "But for the money, it doesn't get much better - or more Bourne - than the utterly enjoyable gambit set in Tangier, where the hero tears through streets on a dirtbike, hops from roof to roof and engages in one hell of a washroom scuffle with silent operative Desh (Joey Ansah)."

"It's not often that nearly 2,000 people burst into spontaneous applause at the sight of four men being brutally pulverised on the backstairs of Waterloo station," reports Kevin Maher in the Times of London. "But such was the euphoria created by a recent West End screening of Paul Greengrass's shamelessly propulsive The Bourne Ultimatum that those gathered, all well-heeled culturati, could not help but whoop loudly with delight when the first-act pursuit of the action-man protagonist Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) culminated in an unforgettably visceral bout of five-way fisticuffs in the bowels of the station."

Via Keith Uhlich at the House Next Door, Andrew Dignan: "The thing fucking cooks; even when it's unclear what direction we're heading in there's no downtime to get worked up over it. Plus (and this is a big one) it certainly compares favorable to most of the summer's big event films."

Cinematical's James Rocchi finds "a blunt metaphor for what's happening in the real world, as troops have tours of duty extended in Iraq, and soldiers and civilians both suffer and die so that the dignity of our leaders might be maintained, so that all the death and pain that's come before won't be seen as a failure or an embarrassment for the people who demanded it. But these thoughts come to you later on; in the theater, The Bourne Ultimatum holds you in a fierce grip that gleams with the sheen of sweat and effort, dragging you across the globe from hazy winter shades to sun-drenched streets."

"What may disappoint viewers is that all of this is familiar stuff if you've already seen the previous films," writes Jeremiah Kipp at the House Next Door. "Granted, anyone interested in checking out this latest entry will want some more of the same, but even the Harry Potter series has been able to find ways of breathing fresh life into its formulaic trappings through the strength of its great cast of character actors and imaginative directors."

"[T]he movies, even more than the Ludlum books (which long ago I consumed with equal velocity and voraciousness), are themselves machines: beautifully constructed, splendid to behold," writes Time's Richard Corliss. "And in this third and possibly final episode... the series has come close to attaining a kinetic perfection. If Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down was the all-war war movie - nearly two hours of nonstop battles - The Bourne Ultimatum is the all-action action movie. A pounding of the eyes and ears (John Powell's score is all urgent percussion), the movie is one continuous, exhausting, exhilarating chase."

"Six years after their last adventure, Lee and Carter, one of the movies' oddest crime-fighting tandems, are slowing down a bit in Rush Hour 3," writes Variety's Robert Koehler. "Though late summer timing is just right for the franchise, Rush Hour 3 opens just a week after The Bourne Ultimatum, and while auds may take some relief in the bouncy comic rapport between Chan and Chris Tucker, they're bound to find the action mild if not downright tame by comparison."

Back to Bourne: "I found United 93 almost too skillful for its own good, surer of how to wring a cold sweat from its audience than of what it wanted to say," writes Slate's Dana Stevens. "But when the source material is a Robert Ludlum spy thriller rather than one of the worst days in our country's history, that level of directorial calculation is more than welcome." And this is nice: "He may not be able to remember his own name, but he can't forget Marie (and given that she was played by Franka Potente, possibly the coolest moll in the history of spy thrillers, who can blame him?)."

"The Bourne Supremacy was a passable time-waster, but three years later I can't remember anything about it, aside from wondering why the world's dullest spy was getting his own franchise," writes Vadim Rizov at the Reeler. "Fortunately, The Bourne Ultimatum is an improvement on its predecessor - more concerned with the soothing sounds of screeching metal than the irritating chirping of one vacant character to another."

Updates, 8/3: "For Bourne, who rises and rises again in this fantastically kinetic, propulsive film, resurrection is the name of the game, just as it is for franchises. This is the passion of Jason Bourne, with a bullet," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Death becomes the Bourne series, which, in contrast to most big-studio action movies, insists that we pay attention and respect to all the flying, back-flipping and failing bodies. There's no shortage of pop pleasure here, but the fun of these films never comes from watching men die. It's easy to make people watch — just blow up a car, slit someone's throat. The hard part is making them watch while also making them think about what exactly it is that they're watching."

"Jason Bourne emerges as the kind of troubled but resolute hero we most need these days, a figure who insists on peering through the murk rather than letting it block the truth," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. "Jason Bourne, clawing his way out of madness, still has a conscience even though he has lost most of his mind. The Bourne Ultimatum is a great action movie, exhilarating and neatly crafted, the kind of picture that will still look good 20 or 30 years from now. And while it isn't a cheerful picture, I found it to be an oddly comforting one, perhaps more so than its two predecessors."

"[T]he profusion of frantic shots never feels like showboating, and the closeness never feels claustrophobic," writes Carina Chocano. "This is also saying something, considering how thoroughly action films have used similar techniques to come out resembling steroidal video games. Greengrass is not out to 'entertain' in the dismal, specious sense. He can be trusted to never dangle a shiny Tom Cruise object in front of us and expect us to sit back in brain-dead amazement as it flies across a green screen just out of singe range of an exploding CGI fireball. Greengrass's camera may scurry and dart like a rabbit trapped in a mall, but he keeps the tone grounded, the effects in-camera and the acting low-key and real."

Also in the Los Angeles Times, Sheigh Crabtree talks with stunt coordinator Dan Bradley who, speaking from experience with all these flicks, is sure Bourne could beat the shit out of Indiana Jones, James Bond and Spider-Man.

A "clear winner in the three-peat paradigm," blogs Bill Gibron at PopMatters.

"Frenetic to the point of crazy while achieving a mark that barely exceeds the mediocre, The Bourne Ultimatum does have a few nice touches," allows Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post. "But I reached my pain threshold halfway through the opening credits, so the rest was pure hell."

"A fairy tale based on Neil Gaiman's four-part DC Comics book from 1997, Stardust is an ambitious high-concept adventure which is one of the few non-sequels, non-toy or non-TV adaptations to arrive in theatres this summer," writes Mike Goodridge. "British director Matthew Vaughn has certainly crafted an energetic, handsome film, but it's a tough sell. On the one hand, it's a romance for teenage girls with a handsome leading man in Charlie Cox and a feisty lead female character played by Claire Danes; on the other hand, it's a comic adventure for nerdy comic-loving teenage boys along the lines of classic Gilliam like Time Bandits and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Whether the girls will respond to the adventure and the boys to the romance is questionable... Likewise it's not a sure thing for smaller children, who prefer the more simple, less smart-ass mythology of Narnia, while adults might think it looks too childish to commit to sans kids."

Also at Screen Daily: "No matter how fast Chris Tucker shoots his mouth or Jackie Chan flashes his fists, they can't recapture the charm of the original Rush Hour in this third installment," writes Tim Grierson, who also reviews Underdog: "This live-action reinvention of the 1960s cartoon works best when lightly spoofing the conventions of superhero cinema, but the film goes to the dogs thanks to a drab story and frequent stabs at heartwarming bromides."

And back again: "The Bourne Ultimatum continues to refine the stripped-down, built-for-speed approach of its predecessors," writes Andrew Wright in the Stranger. "For two solid hours, it moves relentlessly, intelligently forward, as everything extraneous gets chucked over the side."

"Set into motion with a brilliantly choreographed sequence at London's Waterloo Station - the filmmaking logistics hurt the brain - The Bourne Ultimatum essentially amounts to one long chase scene, yet the tension never really flags," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club. What's more, "the Bourne movies have left behind perhaps the strongest residue of mainstream anti-government paranoia since 70s thrillers like The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor. And all while kicking ass, of course."

"What actually happens to Jason Bourne is essentially immaterial," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. "What matters is that something must happen, so he can run away from it or toward it." 3½ stars.

"The peculiar achievement of The Bourne Ultimatum is conveying a sense of genuine resolution to its story while dispensing for the most part with, well, its story," writes Bilge Ebiri at Nerve. "Indeed, one can talk about character and plot all day long and still not get to the essence of what makes The Bourne Ultimatum so ruthlessly effective. The real intelligence at work here is that Greengrass and co. know not to gummy up the works with extraneous plot or exposition. Call it what you will, but the correct word is 'awesome.'"

"[I]t might be best to watch the movie as Greengrass' second 9/11 statement," suggests the San Francisco Chronicle's Mick LaSalle. "If United 93 showed the tragedy, The Bourne Ultimatum shows an America living with the aftermath.... This is a movie about fear - a government's fear of its citizens and citizens' fear of their government. It's a movie about surveillance, with people being watched at virtually every moment. Finally, it's about philosophies in collision, about how much safety can be bought at the price of freedom and about the kinds of personalities that gravitate toward the totalitarian mind-set."

"I find it hard to express how welcome a movie like this feels right now, coming as it is like a big meaty dinner after three straight months of sugar-laden desserts," writes Scott Weinberg at Cinematical.

Updates, 8/5: "The Bourne movies are perfect thrillers for our slippery, uncertain times: globe-spanning, technocratic, cool-temperature epics of high-speed information and fractured identity," writes Sight & Sound editor Nick James in the new Observer Film Magazine. "They enjoy the frisson of Cold War nostalgia, yet they also revel in the moral chaos of the now, as much as in their signature car chases. They are the perfect revision of James Bond as if by John le Carré. And conversely, they are also the most obvious influence on Daniel Craig's new James Bond in Casino Royale, a less far-fetched creation than of old. But there's one particular aspect of the Bourne movies that tells us more about ourselves, and about the way Hollywood sees the world now, than anything else, and that is their idea of the enemy." Related: Dan Bradley on coordinating the stunts.

Rebecca Winters Keegan talks with Greengrass and Damon for Time.

Mick Brown talks with Greengrass for the Telegraph.

Online listening tip. Greengrass on All Things Considered.

"What Greengrass excels at in his recent movies is sustaining moment and momentum," writes Ray Pride.

"The Bourne Ultimatum is a sensationally entertaining rush of wall-to-wall, wire-to-wire, pedal-to-metal excitement, an uncommonly satisfying mix of pulp-fiction plotting, dead-serious emotion, steel-trap intelligence and razzle-dazzle technique," writes Joe Leydon:

For me, the most powerful image in the entire trilogy is in a scene that appears early in The Bourne Supremacy (and is reprised, briefly, in Ultimatum), as Jason Bourne sees the woman he loves literally floating out of sight, becoming a mere memory even as he helpless watches. (It's an image I suspect Jean Cocteau would have been proud to include in his Orpheus.) These days, it's not uncommon for an action movie to post a three-digit body count, and make a joke about it. But this scene in Supremacy puts the sting back into death, and none-too-gently reminds us that such carnage is something we blithely take for granted, and usually accept unthinkingly, in films of this sort.

"I'd like to use The Bourne Ultimatum as a stick with which to beat modern American movies," blogs Michael Atkinson, "which may not be completely fair to Paul Greengrass's movie, mildly mature and refreshingly nitty-gritty summer-actioner that it is. But there's something wrong on display here, something essentially amiss with the basic syntax of contemporary moviemaking as it has evolved in Hollywood - and, yes, I'm talking about camera style, which in this case (as in The Bourne Supremacy and countless other new films) suggests nothing so much as what a movie would look like if it were shot from inside of a high-speed clothes dryer."

"The Bourne Ultimatum gets, as of the moment of this posting, a 94 percent positive rating over at Rotten Tomatoes, which makes it, if my calculations are correct, only second to Ratatouille in the best-reviewed-movies-of-the-summer contest," notes Premiere's Glenn Kenny. "I liked it fine myself, but looking at some of the writeups I wonder if I shouldn't have been harder on it, just to counter the near-ridiculous rapturousness."

Updates, 8/6: "In this day and age where it seems like more and more things that would normally be considered evil are being allowed in order to supposedly bring about good, Ultimatum feels especially relevant and charged," writes Jason Morehead, who also points to Steven Greydanus's review. "But here’s the thing that makes Ultimatum so great: Greengrass never brings up these thoughts and comments at the expense of the film’s story and characters."

Ultimatum's pulled in $70.2 million in the US, "giving Universal Pictures one of the strongest openings in its history," reports Brooks Barnes in the NYT.

John Patterson talks with Greengrass for the Guardian.

"The film has such an assured, documentary-style texture (and Damon brings such effortless gravitas to the Bourne character) that you barely register that every aspect of the plot, from its amnesiac superpowered hero to the miraculously preserved clue Bourne retrieves from a car explosion, is utterly ludicrous," writes Paul Matwychuk. "The Bourne Ultimatum is a hot mug of moviegoing adrenaline (yeah, that's right: moviegoing adrenaline. It tastes a little like cinnamon); I wanted to run out of the theatre, then run back in and see it again. But I didn't. I'm not Jason Bourne, and I was too afraid the ushers would catch me."

Michel Serrault, 1928 - 2007.

French actor Michel Serrault, whose performance as a transvestite in the film and screen versions of La cage aux folles (The Birdcage) catapulted him to international stardom, has died, his priest said Monday. He was 79.... Serrault appeared in more than 130 films during a career that spanned half a century. After debuting as a comic actor, Serrault became one of France's most versatile stars, playing a serial killer, a grizzled farmer, a crooked banker and accused rapist.... French President Nicolas Sarkozy paid homage to Serrault's "impressive filmography," calling the actor a "monument of the world of the theater, the cinema and the television."

The AP.

Updates, 7/31: "Mr Serrault, who appeared in more than 130 films, worked with some of the most celebrated directors in French cinema, among them Claude Chabrol," writes Margalit Fox in the New York Times. His films shown in this country include The Butterfly, The Girl From Paris, Artemisia, The Swindle and Beaumarchais: The Scoundrel."

In the German-language papers: Verena Leuken in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Daniel Kothenschulte in the Frankfurter Rundschau and Alexandra Stäheli in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

Ingmar Bergman, 1918 - 2007.

Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, an iconoclastic filmmaker widely regarded as one of the great masters of modern cinema, died Monday, local media reported. He was 89 years old....

He was "probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera," Woody Allen said in a 70th birthday tribute in 1988. Bergman first gained international attention with 1955's Smiles of a Summer Night... The Seventh Seal, released in 1957, riveted critics and audiences. An allegorical tale of the medieval Black Plague years, it contains one of cinema's most famous scenes - a knight playing chess with the shrouded figure of Death....

Though best known internationally for his films, Bergman was also a prominent stage director.... The influence of Strindberg's grueling and precise psychological dissections could be seen in the production that brought Bergman an even-wider audience: 1973's Scenes From a Marriage. First produced as a six-part series for television, then released in a theater version, it is an intense detailing of the disintegration of a marriage. Bergman showed his lighter side in the following year's The Magic Flute, again first produced for TV.

The AP.

See also: Ingmar Bergman Face to Face, the official site; Acquarello, Books and Writers, Hamish Ford's profile for Senses of Cinema and, of course, the Wikipedia entry.

"Mr Bergman dealt with pain and torment, desire and religion, evil and love; in Mr Bergman's films, 'this world is a place where faith is tenuous; communication, elusive; and self-knowledge, illusory,' Michiko Kakutani wrote in the New York Times Magazine in a profile of the director. God is either silent or malevolent; men and women are creatures and prisoners of their desires," writes Mervyn Rothstein in the NYT. "For many filmgoers and critics, it was Mr Bergman more than any other director who in the 1950's brought a new seriousness to film making. 'Bergman was the first to bring metaphysics - religion, death, existentialism - to the screen,' Bertrand Tavernier, the French film director, once said. 'But the best of Bergman is the way he speaks of women, of the relationship between men and women. He's like a miner digging in search of purity.'"

"What worries me is how his stock has fallen over the years and how many younger film buffs have little exposure to his works," writes Edward Copeland. "Sadly, not one of his many remarkable films made the final 100 on the list put together by The Online Film Community announced yesterday.... Even though Bergman began making films as far back as 1944, the first feature that grabbed me and one of my very favorites, even though it's somewhat uncharacteristic of his later works, is 1955's Smiles of a Summer Night."

Brendon Connelly offers a modest proposal for a web-wide tribute.

"In Europe, movie directors such as Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut helped break visual and narrative rules, but Mr Bergman stood out for dreamy and often disturbingly psychological films that expressed emotional isolation and modern spiritual crisis," writes Adam Bernstein in the Washington Post.

"He is often mentioned as one of the three most influential directors in the world next to Fellini and Ozu, whom he has now joined," notes Boyd van Hoeij at european-films.net.

"With his death a reassessment of his impressive output positions him among such talents as Antonioni, Kurosawa, Ray, Wilder, Visconti," writes Brian Baxter in the Guardian, which has opened a special section devoted to Bergman. "These second rung, but never second rate, directors hover fitfully behind the handful of geniuses - Bresson, Dreyer, Ozu, Renoir, Rossellini - where poetry and originality transcend matter and realism. What Bergman and the others lack is the (seeming) simplicity of expression that belies inspiration: an inspiration which makes true what would not otherwise have been apparent. In short there is an over-emphasis, an over-weaning power of expression, that obscures the counter currents of emotion lying beneath the surface of the work of those five pantheon directors, in such of their masterpieces as Voyage to Italy (Rossellini), Gertrud (Dreyer), or Lancelot du Lac (Bresson) which are truly beyond criticism." The "final phase of his career as director is notable for the magnificent Fanny and Alexander (1982), shown worldwide in two versions - at 312 and 197 minutes. The period is 1907, and the setting is a Swedish university city. Arguably the most optimistic of his works, it proved an international success and received four Oscars, including one for best foreign film in 1983. It was the culmination of a cinema career that has few equals in terms of quality, volume and integrity."

"Bergman, dead at last, I think," writes Spurious. "Did his demons subside as he grew older? Was he calmer? Some kennels keep old dogs apart from young ones, housing them in a 'contemplation room.' Did Bergman contemplate at the end of his life? Was he more content, less fiery? What was his last wife like? He found happiness with her, didn't he? or did he? Happiness - and for Bergman?" Via wood s lot.

Michael Atkinson thinks back on Bergman, "at once a dinosaur, a one-man New Wave, a mammoth formal influence, a pioneering pop existentialist, a despot in his own nation of cinematic currency, an unexploitable navel-focused artiste who did not bow to the world's entertainment will but instead made it bow to him, an unestimable provider of cultural fuel to the rise of college-educated counter culture between 1959 and 1980, and, let's face it, an astonishingly adventurous sensibility that embraced virtually every stripe of expression available to him, from melodrama to the world's most overt symbolism to gritty realism to epic pageant, farce and avant-garde psycho-obscurism.... Today, we are aswarm with Antonioni imitators, but no one seems to want to be the new Bergman.... Still, as cinephiles with memories know, fashion will not win in the end, and Bergman, a classical giant with modernist ordnance, will eventually reemerge as essential for all ages.... When will he reenter the pantheon?"

Senior editor Dwight Garner quotes liberally from Woody Allen's 1988 review for the NYT Book Review of Bergman's autobiography, The Magic Lantern:

In addition to all else - and perhaps most important - Bergman is a great entertainer; a storyteller who never loses sight of the fact that no matter what ideas he's chosen to communicate, films are for exciting an audience. His theatricality is inspired. Such imaginative use of old-fashioned Gothic lighting and stylish compositions. The flamboyant surrealism of the dreams and symbols. The opening montage of Persona, the dinner in Hour of the Wolf and, in The Passion of Anna, the chutzpah to stop the engrossing story at intervals and let the actors explain to the audience what they are trying to do with their portrayals, are moments of showmanship at its best.

Time's Richard Corliss recalls that "good quarter century" in which "Bergman defined serious cinema":

At the time, the foreign films that made an impact with the cognoscenti were mainly from France, Italy and Japan. Bergman, though, was a one-man film movement; his instant eminence created a cottage industry of Bergmania. Janus Films, with US rights to most of his pictures, ran Ingmar Bergman festivals in theaters around the country. Full-length studies of his work appeared in English, French, Swedish. In 1960 Simon & Schuster published a book of four of his screenplays (Smiles of a Summer Night, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, The Magician). For a generation of budding cinephiles, that settled it. Film was literature. Movies were art. And Bergman was the Shakespeare of the cinema.

They certainly launched a generation of film critics, this one included. Dozens of us have the same story of teenage revelation: of seeing a Bergman movie, usually The Seventh Seal, and saying, "This is what I want to study, devote my life to."

Online listening tips. NPR has an excerpt from a 1979 interview; also Terry Gross spoke with Liv Ullmann in 1993.

"Speaking for myself, it wasn't the first time that I saw The Seventh Seal, an admittedly impressive film that nevertheless was unfortunately tagged as the ultimate art-house (and thusly overanalyzed within an inch of its life), that made me appreciate the genius of Ingmar Bergman," writes Chris Barsanti. "It was seeing Persona, his tightly-wound, avant-garde riff on madness, the dissolution of personality, and Strindberg-ian power plays, that really illustrated his mastery of the artform, and showed that his films could be more than bleak meditations on death and God. If you haven't seen, rent it this week. You won't be disappointed."

"If Ingmar Bergman can make his peace with death, then there's hope for the rest of us." Bryant Frazer explains.

"While I have been thinking about some of Bergman's films, especially Persona, I have also been reflecting on the act of seeing Bergman's films." Peter Nellhaus recalls a secret language.

"Throughout the years I've found myself jaded and not as attracted to Bergman as I once was," admits Flickhead. "But make no mistake, there is much to be mined, from the adult themes to his innate grasp of the human condition; the captivating cinematography of Sven Nykvist; and those wonderful casts of actors. He made me fall in love with Bibi Andersson, Harriet Andersson and Ingrid Thulin, and I still marvel at their performances in that raft of films that were once in constant demand in theaters: Sawdust and Tinsel (1953), Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, The Magician (1958), The Devil's Eye (1960), Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Winter Light (1962), The Silence, Persona (1966). There isn't one filmmaker working today who could come anywhere near that output of sheer quality."

"Even Mr Bergman's comedies have a powerful undertow of sadness, of time rushing by and of dark shadows gathering," writes Stephen Holden in the NYT:

An existential dread runs through the entire Bergman oeuvre. Among the major directors who spearheaded the international art film movement after 1950, he was the one most closely in touch with the intellectual currents of the day. Freud and Sartre were riding high, and Time magazine wondered in a cover story if God were dead. Attendance at Mr Bergman's films was a lot like going to church. Though many of those films are steeped in church imagery, God is usually absent from the sanctuary.

As a college student and avid art-film goer in the early 1960s, I was overwhelmed by Mr Bergman's films, with their heavy-duty metaphysical speculation and intellectual seriousness. In those days, you would no more argue with Mr Bergman's stature than you would question the greatness of the modern Western literary canon; like Mann, Joyce, Kafka, Faulkner, et al, Mr Bergman was an intellectual god whose work could reward a lifetime of analytical study.

Updates, 7/31: "Perhaps the European filmmaker best known to American audiences, Ingmar Bergman is abundantly represented on DVD." Dave Kehr presents a guide in the NYT.

"This sad day may be even sadder for its ultimate revelation that an artist who cornered the market on gravity - a Lutheran minister's son who sprinkled rape, mutilation, disease, mental illness and incest into his oeuvre like Michael Bay invokes product placements - could be remembered so glowingly for his signature brand of existential horror," writes ST VanAirsdale at the Huffington Post. "The talky crises of Persona, Scenes From a Marriage or Autumn Sonata are your crises. The sexual frustrations fueling Monika and sent up in Smiles of a Summer Night are your frustrations. You don't choose sides in a war; nevertheless, just like in Shame and The Silence, you are implicated.... It took me a few years in my early 20s to understand the scope of his artistry. Once I did, I finally realized that the key to really enjoying Bergman is to acknowledge your culpability in the devastation onscreen."

"Bergman's passing is a reminder that serious cinema will only have a place in the artistic world as long as film-makers lay claim to one," reads a lead editorial in the Guardian. "When Bergman's career was at its height, between 1955 and 1980, European art cinema was beyond doubt a central part of the global movie industry. Today that is a questionable claim.... "Bergman's career is a reminder that artists are not judged solely by their technique or their ability to shock but by their inner moral honesty and by their inspiration.... Like Mozart, whom he revered, he knew how to say profound things with great simplicity."

Also, commentary from Rick Moody, Beeban Kidron, Thomas Vinterberg, Hari Kunzru, Michael Winner, Sheila Reid and David Thomson.

"If he is regarded as one of the true greats of cinema, it is because he understood the power of the symbol and the possibility of the close-up in a manner no one has ever been able to equal," writes the Independent in a lead editorial. "To see a Bergman film is to feel that you have seen behind the curtain by looking straight at it."

Also:

• "I would not have made any of my films or written scripts such as Taxi Driver had it not been for Ingmar Bergman," writes Paul Schrader. "[W]hat he has left is a legacy greater than any other director.... I think the extraordinary thing that Bergman will be remembered for, other than his body of work, was that he probably did more than anyone to make cinema a medium of personal and introspective value. Movies by nature are, of course, very commercially driven and very accessible. No one really used cinema as private personal expression in that way. Bergman showed that you could actually do movies that were personal introspections and have them seen by general audiences."

• "It may be prurient and reductive to pore over the messy private lives of artists. In Bergman's case, it is unavoidable," writes Geoffrey Macnab. "He drew so heavily from his private life in his work that some knowledge of the former can't help but elucidate the latter." For example: "There is one central paradox - how could someone who wrote so creatively and attentively about childhood be so uninterested in his own children's lives?"

"Bergman - despite the high-toned metaphysics that overlays many, though not all, of his greatest films - was a showman first and a Deep Thinker second," writes Peter Rainer. "His philosophical odysseys might have been epoxied to matters of Life and Death, of God and Man, but this most sophisticated of filmmakers had an inherently childlike core. He wanted to startle us as he himself had been startled. He wanted us to feel his terrors in our bones. A case could be made that Bergman was, in the most voluminous sense, the greatest of all horror movie directors."

Also in the Los Angeles Times:

• "'Bergman was the epitome of a director's director - creating beautiful, complex and smart films that imprinted permanently into the psyche - inspiring filmmakers all over the world to create their own movies with similar passion and brio,; Michael Apted, president of the Directors Guild of America, said in a statement." From the LAT's official obit, by Myrna Oliver.

• Theater critic Charles McNulty reminds us that Bergman "will also go down in history as one of the greatest stage directors of the second half of the 20th century, a figure comparable to Britain's Peter Brook, Italy's Giorgio Strehler, France's Ariane Mnouchkine and Germany's Peter Stein. He was certainly the best I have ever seen, a blazing interpretive talent whose productions offered the most thrilling X-rays of world classics. Bergman had a genius for illuminating the subtextual DNA of a drama, the psychosexual forces driving protagonists to their tragic clashes and crescendos. He may not have made a significant theoretical contribution to the art of stage directing, as Artaud, Brecht, Grotowski and Brook all have done, but as a practitioner there were few who could hypnotize with such lightning insight into the conundrums of dramatic existence."

• "Bergman's ideas trickled down into the popular consciousness in all kinds of ways." A slide show by Deborah Netburn and Rebecca Snavely.

• "The term 'Bergmanesque' describes a specific worldview - a bleak psychological chronicle of people living in a world that God has abandoned - evidenced in films the director never even made." In another slide show, Deborah Netburn and Patrick Day present "some of our own director-derived adjectives that we think should be added to the film criticism books."

In a special dossier, euro|topics translates reactions from the European press.

In the German-language papers: Fritz Göttler and Bernd Graff in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Arno Widmann in the Frankfurter Rundschau (photos), Jörg Sundermeier in the taz, Gerhard R Koch in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (lots of photos there), Christiane Peitz in Der Tagesspiegel, Fritz Joachim Sauer in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Georg Rodek in Die Welt and David Kleingers for Spiegel Online.

Michael Koresky at indieWIRE:

Looking back on my life, there have been distinct stages to my growing awareness of film as something more than entertainment, more than narrative, more than itself - in childhood, Fantasia clued me in to the essentials: sound plus image; in preadolescence, 2001: A Space Odyssey forced me to acknowledge that storytelling needn't be cinema's ultimate goal, and that the unknown is far more pleasurable than what's understood; and in adolescence, when I began to crave even stronger stuff, there was Ingmar Bergman, whose provocatively titled, in-every-way foreign films lined the shelves of my local public library....

There's simply not enough room here to properly pay tribute to the wonders of Bergman's cinema, the ways in which he was able to capture a human face in close-up and make it seem like the most fascinatingly multivalent landscape on earth; how, along with his discerning cinematographers like Sven Nykvist or Gunnar Fischer, he could make the interior of a hotel room or a summer cottage seemingly pulsate like the walls of a living forest; how he so thoroughly created a unique cinematic mind space that filmmakers like Woody Allen and Robert Altman were able to borrow and rearrange its components into its own form, and as a result expand the boundaries of American cinema.

For Owen Hatherley, Saraband "exemplified quite why I love Bergman - its unrelenting cantankerousness and emotional barbarity conflicting and aligning with crystalline, harsh beauty."

Salon's Andrew O'Hehir recalls how Persona changed his life, and then:

Most obviously, his work borrowed from the Scandinavian theatrical tradition of Ibsen and Strindberg, from various northern European strains of painting and sculpture, from Freudian psychology and severe Lutheran theology and the tormented philosophy of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. On the other hand, Bergman was certainly not immune to popular culture; his sense of craft was shaped by the classic Hollywood films of his youth, especially those of George Cukor, a personal favorite. (One can certainly see, in several early Bergman pictures, the influence of Cukor films like Dinner at Eight, The Women or The Philadelphia Story.)...

By focusing on Bergman as a great artist and deep thinker who grappled with God and existentialism and boiled the soul of the post-Holocaust world in his crucible, critics like [John] Simon have done much to drive audiences away from his work, and have distorted Bergman's own conception of his art. Entirely too much emphasis has been placed on the ideas that allegedly lie behind Bergman's movies; those who haven't seen them are often startled to discover that those ideas are delivered as memorably intimate images and as affecting human stories.

The BBC collects more tributes from other filmmakers.

Interviews with Bergman at EuroScreenwriters: Stig Björkman (American Cinematographer, 1972), the "Legendary Playboy Interview" (1964), excerpts from one that ran in the Sydsvenska Dagbladet, an oft-quote fax from Fårö and Daniel Shaw's psychoanalytic dissection of Persona.

Several pix and lots of discussion going on at the House Next Door, also pointing to an online viewing tip, the Bergman parody, De Düva (The Dove).

"One of the best film bloggers the Siren has ever read was the late George Fasel of A Girl and a Gun. His family, in what constitutes a very large service to the film-blogging community, has left his archives up at his old blog. In July 2005, a little more than a month before his own death, George posted a piece on Ingmar Bergman, and summed up the director, and what we have lost with his passing, far better than the Siren can."

Roger Ebert passes along an amazing collection of comments he's received from filmmakers, critics and others via email. Thanks, Ray! And yesterday, he wrote, "In 1975 I visited the Bergman set for Face to Face. He took a break and invited me to his 'cell' in Film House: A small, narrow room, filled with an army cot, a desk, two chairs, and on the desk an apple and a bar of chocolate. He said he'd been watching an interview with Antonioni the night before: 'I hardly heard what he said. I could not take my attention away from his face. For me, the human face is the most important subject of the cinema.'"

"Perhaps fittingly, I will always associate him with my childhood and, most particularly, with my father." A terrific appreciation from Lylee via MS Smith.

I'm posting this in both the Bergman and Antonioni entries: Do read all Glenn Kenny's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at Ingmar Bergman," which he posted yesterday; here's "XIII," addressing some of what we're talking about in the comments following the Antonioni entry:

"Today, we are aswarm with Antonioni imitators, but no one seems to want to be the new Bergman," Michael Atkinson notes. That's partly because nobody can be the new Bergman. And not just for the obsious reason.

Unlike a lot of younger filmmakers today, Bergman was a highly, richly cultured individual. He knew the Bible backward and forward, Shakespeare too; fine art, music, and so on. All of his knowledge did more than inform his work - his work is suffused with it, it gains much of its texture and heft from it. Of course, Antonioni is similarly cultured, but his depth in this area doesn't play so much upon the surface of his work; it motivates the form, rather than thickens it. Today's young filmmakers aren't, for the most part, as polyglot. For a lot of them, all the culture they've got is film. And Antonioni's got a signature style that's accessible to them, and seems imitable: shoot some architecture and negative space, have characters disaffectedly utter banalities, and you think you've got it. To emulate Bergman, you've got to know what he knew, and knowing that... go on to be yourself.

Dennis Cozzalio on Bergman and Antonioni: "I'd dare say the concerns of Bergman's films seem far more in tune with my own concerns as an adult, and an adult filmmaker, than do Antonioni's. I remain interested in Bergman's grappling with his own sense of God, the pervasive influence of religion as a form and manifestation of psychological behavior, and the influence of a deity who may or may not be, shall we say, as interactive as even believers would prefer him to be."

The Shamus may have watched From the Life of the Marionettes with Woody Allen. But he's not 100 percent sure.

At long last, someone mentions this one: "Ingmar Bergman's masterpiece Cries and Whispers is the film that drove me to writing about film as a profession," writes Phil Morehart at Facets Features. "Its screening in an 'Existentialism in Literature and Film' course in college and the subsequent, required post-film paper deconstructing its many layers and emotions were stunning revelations. To put it simply, I figured it out: Digging into cinema was what I wanted (and needed) to do. Thank you, Ingmar."

Updates, 8/1: The NYT's posted a piece by AO Scott on Bergman and Antonioni that'll be running in Sunday's paper: "The two of them upheld, as filmmakers, TS Eliot's observation that 'poets, in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult.'... There was, among certain filmgoers in the 1960s, an appetite for difficulty, a conviction that symbolic obscurity and psychological alienation were authentic responses to the state of the world. More than that, the idea that a difficult work had special value - that being challenged was a distinct form of pleasure - enjoyed a prestige, at the time, that is almost unimaginable today. We would rather be teased than troubled, and the measure of artistic sophistication is cleverness rather than seriousness."

"In 1974, I got a job interviewing movie directors with films premiering in New York for a magazine called Millimeter. Over two years, I got to interview around two dozen active Hollywood pros - some great ones like Altman, Polanski, Rafelson and Frankenheimer and some mediocre ones. When I asked them, 'Who's your favorite director?' about ninety-nine percent instantly replied, 'Ingmar Bergman.'" From the first of Larry Gross's "Five Ways To Think About Bergman As A Genius" at Movie City News.

"Of the great filmmakers of the high-art period - Kubrick, Fellini, Kurosawa - it was Bergman who worked on the smallest and most intimate scale," writes Slate's Dana Stevens. "'I'm passionately interested in human beings, the human face, the human soul,' he told Dick Cavett in an interview. When screening a mental clip reel of my most memorable Bergman moments, I find that nearly all of them involve faces."

"My attitude towards Bergman has really changed a lot over the years," writes Steven Shaviro. "When I was in college and graduate school, in the 1970s, I worshipped him - he was second only to Godard in revealing to me the potentialities of film, the heights of artistry of which it was capable." But: "Sometime during or after Scenes from a Marriage (1973), Bergman's artistry seemed to me to have lost its edge." The pendulum swings on, then: "All in all, Bergman still does not emotionally move me, or intellectually engage me, as profoundly as Godard, Fassbinder, and Antonioni do. But I think that now I am more able than I was for a long time to appreciate the considerable beauties and virtues of his art."

"If you put aside the infinite variety of pleasures afforded by his Magic Flute, Bergman's greatest gift to movies was his work with actors," writes Steve Vineberg for the Boston Phoenix. "As I reflect back on his movies in the wake of his death, most of the moments I call up are indelible acting moments."

"After a while, life and work and a few laughs turn us all into Mary Wilke (Diane Keaton) in Woody Allen's Manhattan," writes Dan Callahan at the House Next Door:

"I mean, the silence, God's silence... OK, OK... I mean, I loved it at Radcliffe, but alright, you outgrow it!" Surely Allen means us to reject the self-loathing, brittle Wilke, who churns out novelizations of popular movies instead of trying to create serious art. But her comments nail the Bergman/Antonioni pretensions and the mindset that would most appreciate them. She also sees Bergman's "fashionable pessimism" as "adolescent." This hits even closer to the bone. Wilke has a point. Several points, actually. She is also evil. Her pop mindset rules today, and we have to do everything we can to topple it. Paying attention to the virtues of Bergman and Antonioni is definitely a step in the right direction.

Meanwhile, Time's Richard Corliss talks with Woody Allen himself:

RC: You knew he was Ingmar Bergman, but maybe he didn't. He didn't get to view his reputation from the outside.

WA: Exactly. The world saw him as a genius, and he was worrying about the weekend grosses. Yet he was plain and colloquial in speech, not full of profound pronunicamentos about life. Sven Nykvist told me that when they were doing all those scenes about death and dying, they'd be cracking jokes and gossiping about the actors' sex lives.

Update, 8/2: "It would obviously be a crude-minded injustice to reduce Bergman to an unintentional cautionary tale against atheism," writes Victor Morton. "Among other reasons, his films are far more complicated than that - partly because hell-on-earth cannot literally exist and partly because even though Bergman became an atheist, he was serious enough that he could never live happily with that thought." Do not be put off by the title of the blog, "Rightwing film geek." This is an excellent appreciation, culminating in a hopeful take on Cries and Whispers. Thanks, Michael!

"When I laugh and gasp and shudder and try to hide under my chair during the interview that opens Bergman's Scenes From a Marriage, I'm struck by how much I need this kind of experience from a film," writes Spencer Parsons in the Austin Chronicle.

"Persona remains one of my favorite and most dreaded cinema experiences," writes Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat:

Ironically, while it is, arguably, the 'artsiest' of Bergman's creations, it's also one of the greatest horror films ever made.... Persona may not have all the trappings of the genre - it has almost nothing that resembles the more explicitly blood-soaked horror films of the last 20 years - but its influence is still apparent in the best of them. As in Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now (1973), Cronenberg's The Fly (1985), Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1965) and Rosemary's Baby (1968), it's identity - one's very sense of self - that is under attack. You can always fight an external attacker. But Bergman knew that no mutant lizard or robotic boogieman could rival the terror of a corrupted or disappearing sense of self.

"Maybe I have a thing for impending mortality, but I find the last works by Bergman and Antonioni to be among the most chilling, compelling and enthralling works that either made," writes Kevin Lee. "Saraband looks like a Bergman movie transmitted from the afterworld. If this is true, it's oddly reassuring that Ingmar the Grouch is still carping about the human race in the great beyond. I wouldn't have it any other way."

Johanna Schiller, who's produced several Bergman DVDs for Criterion, is currently working on Sawdust and Tinsel and tells a few stories at On Five. Liv Ullmann "spoke to me so eloquently about Bergman that she brought tears to my eyes.... Looking back now, I don't think I really learned about Bergman through the interviews I conducted with his actors and crew, or even through his autobiography or the interviews he gave over the years. Truly, I feel like I knew him through watching his films. I can't think of another filmmaker who managed to be both so personal and so universal at the same time."

Online browsing tip. A collection of original Swedish posters. Thanks, Jim!

Online viewing tip. Tribeca's artistic director Peter Scarlet reminisces about Bergman and Antonioni.

"He did not quite belong here and had to work in a headwind of opposition," writes Leif Zern for the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter. "But what became apparent is that he managed his best work in headwinds. He was not welcomed by the establishment in the 1940s, the film world was not always refined enough, and the theatre was a 'half world.' His own plays and scripts were too conventional, or immature as they were often labelled with intellectual contempt. In the end he became, with his beret, leather jacket, ulcers and actresses, 'Bergman' - the great director he was destined to be. All of the films and productions that came from his hands are marked by these difficulties, as if the discipline he strived for and in the end conquered was what it took to keep his demons and explosive powers in check."

Also, a longish piece by Bergman biographer Maaret Koskinen: "His peer and fellow filmmaker Vilgot Sjöman referred to him as 'Berget' ('The Mountain') in one of his autobiographic novels. A suitable pseudonym indeed."

Take it or leave it: BergmanBits.

Updates, 8/3: "So to commemorate the passing of those monolithic, for-so-long-seemingly-immortal titans of 1960's European cinema I pulled out my DVD of... Before Sunset. What?" You'll find an explanation at Memories of the Future. Works for me.

"The old-style 'auteurs' are fast disappearing," sighs Geoffrey Macnab in the Independent. "Their impact was once enormous. The British filmmaker Mike Leigh has talked about his experience of arriving in London from Salford in the autumn of 1960 and immediately being 'blasted from here to eternity by the French cinema, the Italian cinema, the Russian cinema, the Japanese cinema, the cinema of Satyajit Ray, etc.' In other words, the cinema of auteurs. His experience was far from unique."

"Both directors were old men, and so grief is bested by appreciation," writes Nathan Kosub at Stop Smiling. "Beyond themselves, there is nothing to compare the accomplishments of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni to: not literature, not music. Quite simply, there is nothing that compares to the joy of movies."

Barbara Schweizerhof remembers Bergman in Freitag (and in German).

"In Europe, when I first came upon Bergman and Antonioni, we called their work films, not movies, and we honoured them as among the great artists of the century," writes Derek Malcolm in the Evening Standard. "This is a difficult concept for us Brits, with our literary and theatrical traditions to contemplate. We tend to find it difficult to admit that filmmakers such as Bergman, Buñuel and John Ford should be accounted along with the best writers, artists and composers of the century." But "long live cinematic art. And long live movie entertainment, too. It is perfectly possible to love Antonioni's L'Avventura and the Carry On movies as well. Or Bergman's Wild Strawberries and Creature from the Black Lagoon."

Filmbrain stumbles across a quote that has him muttering, "Oh, Orson..."

Update, 8/4: "The hard fact is, Mr Bergman isn't being taught in film courses or debated by film buffs with the same intensity as Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles and Jean-Luc Godard," writes Jonathan Rosenbaum in the New York Times:

His works are seen less often in retrospectives and on DVD than those of Carl Dreyer and Robert Bresson - two master filmmakers widely scorned as boring and pretentious during Mr Bergman's heyday.... [F]or younger cinephiles like myself, watching Mr. Bergman's films at the same time I was first encountering directors like Mr. Godard and Alain Resnais, it was tempting to regard him as a kindred spirit, the vanguard of a Swedish New Wave. It was a seductive error, but an error nevertheless....

Mr Bergman simply used film (and later, video) to translate shadow-plays staged in his mind — relatively private psychodramas about his own relationships with his cast members, and metaphysical speculations that at best condensed the thoughts of a few philosophers rather than expanded them. Riddled with wounds inflicted by Mr Bergman's strict Lutheran upbringing and diverse spiritual doubts, these films are at times too self-absorbed to say much about the larger world, limiting the relevance that his champions often claim for them.

Updates, 8/5: "It is an interesting question why so many people serious about religion, believers in particular, feel such a loss at the death of Bergman," writes Peter Steinfels in the New York Times. "[W]ere believers, and again Christians foremost, drawn to [Bergman and Antonioni] as powerful witnesses to what happened when God was declared dead? No doubt some religious defenders wanted to employ these bleak visions in a smug apologetic for faith, a greater temptation perhaps in the case of Antonioni, a post-Christian Italian, than of Bergman, an ex-Christian Swede. But for the most part, religious admirers of these directors treated them and their films not as object lessons for nonbelievers about the consequences of nonbelief but rather as revelations for believers about the true challenges of faith."

"Last Tuesday the Guardian, the Times and the Independent had near identical cartoons depicting President Bush as Death and Gordon Brown as a medieval knight confronting each other on a beach," notes the Observer's Philip French. "It was both an apposite idea for the Camp David meeting and an appropriate tribute to Ingmar Bergman, who had created this iconic image 50 years ago in his most famous movie, The Seventh Seal, and had died the previous day.... Bergman did not spring from nowhere, though that is the way it seemed in the late 1950s... Setting the pace politically, morally and philosophically, Sweden had begun to confront the questions of spiritual emptiness and the meaning of life that arise when material comforts have been satisfied and traditional beliefs, restraints and standards set aside. Though working in a language few outside Sweden understood, Bergman had the freedom to explore these ideas with intense seriousness, and he developed stylistically, influenced first by French poetic realism and Italian neo-realism, before discovering German Expressionism." Further down that page are reminiscences from Gunnel Lindblom and Erland Josephson.

James Meek reports in the Guardian on struggling - and failing - to get Bergman to bring him down. Smiles of a Summer Night is "a celebration, if you can believe it, of life and love." As for The Seventh Seal, "I'm sure I would have been depressed by the characters' obsessive brooding over the existence or non-existence of God as they faced up to the slow, agonising sickness that would bring their doom, if Bergman had only avoided making such a great film." Wild Strawberries? "So promising - but Bergman has to throw it away by reconciling the couple and consoling the professor with a reincarnation of his cousin. By the film's close, we are wallowing in whatever the opposite of depression is. Hope, I suppose."

"[W]hat I've been mourning these past few days is not so much the passing of these difficult, masterful old men but of the cinematic era they dominated - which sputtered out, its passing largely unremarked, well over 30 years ago," writes Richard Schickel in the Los Angeles Times. "[T]o an unprecedented degree, we redefined the nation's high and middlebrow culture. In this era, collegiate film studies burgeoned, publishers flooded the market with books about movies and, when I began my career as a movie reviewer at Life, which had the biggest weekly circulation among American magazines, I wrote regularly, without objection from editors or readers, about all the great directors listed above." And they are: "Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica, Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu, Federico Fellini and Satyajit Ray, the entire French New Wave (Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Melville) and, lest we forget, the cheeky Czechs of the Prague Spring." Anyway, get this: "At one point, the competition from foreign films grew so intense that the Los Angeles Times, no less, called for a protective tariff on cinematic imports."

"Things always look nearer and dearer in pop culture's rear-view mirror," writes the Toronto Star's Peter Howell. Yes, last week was a sad one, he concedes, but come on: "In many ways, there has never been a better time to be a lover of intelligent film, especially if you live in a city as fortunate as Toronto." Via Movie City News.

"In 1948, just two years after Bergman commenced his directorial career, the novelist Alexandre Astruc thundered across the pages of L'Ecrain Francais with a piece that in its time was seen less an essay than a call to arms," writes Tom Sutpen at If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger...:

In this article, "The Birth of a New Avant-Garde," he advanced the idea of "Le camera-stylo," and argued that film artists could only realize the full potentialities of the medium by means of direct, singular authorship, an authorship at once similar to that of a novelist or a painter but wholly dissimilar in that its methods were exclusively those of cinema. It was idealism run rampant, but that only made its allure, for some, all the more alluring.

It's a proposition with which one can, of course, dispute endlessly, but in the realm of narrative filmmaking Ingmar Bergman consummated Astruc's ideal more completely than any director of his day. So it falls, then, as naturally as night falls upon day, that in the full flower of his creativity he would often find himself dismissed by the high tide of auteurist movie reviewers, usually American, whose critical mandate was virtually fueled by such outlandishly romantic proclamations as Astruc's. The reason for this had little to do with his movies and everything to do with the attitudes of a certain breed of reviewer: Auteurist criticism, as it came to be, was essentially a sport, one where each critic mined a body of work for the oft-hidden authorial hand of its director and then wrote their way (often poorly) to Olympus. It's an engaging preoccupation, always good for passing the time, but Bergman made it too easy.

"A propos of Cries and Whispers, when I worked for Roger Corman in the 70s, he said he persuaded Bergman to let him distribute the picture by promising him he'd get the ultra-serious drama booked into drive-ins," recalls Variety's Todd McCarthy. "'I'm going to make you the new Jack Hill!' Corman told the Swedish auteur, referring to one of the era's low-budget maestros. Bergman evidently was so tantalized by this prospect that he let Corman have the film, and Corman was good to his word, playing a dubbed version at ozoners and making the picture one of Bergman's greatest successes." Via Scott Macaulay at Filmmaker.

Online viewing tip. Facets Features has a short clip from an interview with Bergman in which he references Antonioni.

And another. The cinetrix points to a collection of Bergman's soap commercials.

"Whatever Bergman's strengths finally are, I suspect they are not served by vanguardist treatments of modernity but of the continued tradition of certain older patterns within modernity," writes Zach Campbell in reaction to Jonathan Rosenbaum's NYT piece. "I think this is why he might still matter, which is not to say that he automatically matters, that he's beyond any debate, that he is necessarily more universal or timeless. We certainly cannot, should not, assume the last. (Less 'great,' less prolific, less spiritual, but I think Walerian Borowczyk actually harvests from some of the same fields - a premodern past beckoning within the trappings of modernity.) Are Bergman's works 'landmarks in the history of taste'? Of course they are - all very hallowed and very reviled works are. (And I'm sure Rosenbaum would not dispute this.) But that doesn't prove the facts of their merits or demerits, either, does it? Just as Godard may have had his heyday in the 1960s: his reception is important historically, helps us understand his art, but his worth is ultimately not correlative to his [acknowledged] relevance or acceptance (or dismissal) at any given time or place."

Harry Tuttle's a bit angrier at Rosenbaum, arguing that the NYT piece "demonstrates a selective memory, dishonest arguments, double standard principles and the poorest clichés on art cinema." More from Jonathan Lapper: "Rosenbaum is as always a superb writer and distiller of ideas and as I recently noted on these pages one of my favorite critics. His argumentation here however, seems specious at best."

Adam at Another Green World: "The films that are preferred among the film students and film lovers that I know are atypical, in that they don't conform to the Bergman archetype (which does, to be fair, conflate Bergman with his imitators and parodists): Fanny and Alexander, Smiles of a Summer Night, the early films just issued on Criterion's Eclipse box set. Persona seems to remain the one Bergmanesque Bergman film that even his detractors admire."

Updates, 8/6: Online listening tip. David Denby for the New Yorker.

Jim Emerson notes that Robert McKee has used The Virgin Spring "to illustrate the principles of a well-structured story":

Shame is another reminder that Bergman's movies weren't solely aimed at "art" - they were made to appeal to an audience. Right up to its bleak ending (downbeat, even nihilistic finales - as in Easy Rider - were fashionable and popular in mainstream cinema in the late 1960's, too), Shame is a rip-roaring story, with plenty of action, plot-twists, big emotional scenes for actors to play, gorgeously meticulous cinematography, explosive special effects and flat-out absurdist comedy. I don't know how "arty" it seemed in 1968, but it plays almost like classical mainstream moviemaking today.

"Rosenbaum's piece is definitely a putdown but I don't really see it as vicious or scandalous," writes Girish. "It's a contrarian dissent and I think it can be put to productive use." Meantime:

Can I confess something? I really admire Bergman both as a film-historical figure and as a filmmaker, but I have some trouble with a couple of aspects of his work. Sometimes his films seem to contain (for me) a sadomasochistic streak that sets up a through-line from the creator's self-punishment, that punishment then proceeding to characters and then the audience in sequence. I find it hard to come up with a convincing aesthetic justification for this strategy (which in itself, of course, is neutral and not worthy of condemnation) in Bergman's films; I can also sense the filmmaker taking a certain relish in this gratuitous exercise. This bothers me.

Continued here.

Very short shorts, 7/27.

Tips and tidbits, short attention style, as we head into the weekend.

Aaron Hillis, writing in the Village Voice this week, about YouTube's uneasy relationship with experimental video art (and Scanners, Lincoln Center's annual vid fest): "Yes, content-delivery systems have evolved enough to render us an even more attention-deficient culture, dulling our senses or at least sating us with heaping piles of free media. While Scanners (a/k/a the New York Video Festival) once served as a practical conspectus for the handful of video pioneers whose work stood out from the pack, the fest will soon become a bimonthly affair just to keep up, a valiant yet uphill battle to cut through the explosion of online video—two-inch QuickTime windows are not exactly the ultimate format for experimental work, by the way—and catch the attention of the hypnotized masses who are growing more and more accustomed to getting their 'art' between checking e-mail and the RSS feed." [Whew. Take a deep breath. And then...]

It then prompted a nice continuation at The Reeler.

Peter Hyoguchi has the scoop on Francis Ford Coppola's first movie in 10 years, in a video interview.

Johnny Depp, in a Dark Shadows movie? Yep, says Variety: "Depp has said in interviews that he has always been obsessed with "Dark Shadows" and had, as a child, wanted to be Barnabas Collins, the vampire patriarch of the series. The role was originated by Jonathan Frid."

Wiley Wiggins points to an appropriately creepy new anti-littering PSA from...David Lynch.

Over on Anne Thompson's blog, a few different writers are covering Comic-Con, and, hey, it's swell to see Karen Allen again.

On Cinematical, Matt Bradshaw with another edition of Trailer Park. By the way, watching the new coming attraction for Darjeeling Limited, I was struck by how quickly I could tell it was a Wes Anderson movie (honest, without having heard, or remembered hearing anyway, anything about it). Literally ten seconds. I saw the cast, heard the peppy soundtrack, the deadpan dialogue, the color - yep, you, too, can play Name That Director in ten seconds. (I love Wes Anderson; I'm just sayin'.)

Interesting marketing tool here:

The documentary No End in Sight now has its own customized an IM chat that can be embedded on one's site. The film's director, Charles Ferguson, will participate in chats with users at scheduled times. Their marketing folks are asking people to embed this app on their web sites so users can participate in a dialog with Ferguson. Interesting concept.

More on the film here and here.

That's all for now. Welcome back, David!

Primer: Writers and Poets in Film.

With the release of the film Molière today, over on the main site Simon Augustine, in kicking off his new primer on Writers and Poets in Film asks, "Could writers working prior to the 20th century have imagined their creations and characters being expressed in films, with all the dramatic innovations that moving pictures afford?"

"The journey from book to film is reversed and turned in upon itself: we witness not the translation of the mind's eye of the writer into a visual, fixed medium," writes Augustine. "Instead, the fixed visuals of film are used to dramatize the writer in the act of using their mind's eye. In these films, viewers are hopefully exposed to new inroads toward understanding the traditional literary experience and its modes of creation."

Read on for a look at films depicting Bukowski, Plath, Capote, Rimbaud, Burroughs, Shakespeare and many others, as well as some of the best examples of fictional writer characters in moviedom, in this insightful new exploration of the writer's life on the screen.

A summertime question for Fraser Lewry.

Just this past Thursday, Jemima Kiss announced in the Guardian, "Magazine publisher Development Hell has appointed Fraser Lewry as its first digital editor, leading the relaunch of music titles The Word and Mixmag online." I hope they realize what a very smart decision that one is.

Pardon another digression. Another episode. Just after the turn of the millennium, I decided that if I were going to say to my grandkids someday, "Ah, the dotcom boom. Yes, I was there," I'd better hurry. I was invited to meet the CEO of an Italian online music company at the Hotel Adlon, Berlin's finest, a legend in its own right. This wasn't that unusual in those days, but I broke my pattern by saying, Yes. I would be his Vice President for... what was it? Editorial? Community? Whatever. And so, for half a year, I flew around Europe, doing that VP thing, and of course, eventually realized that it was well and truly not my thing at all.

I did meet several great people along the way, though, and one of them is Fraser Lewry. Londoner, world traveler, connoisseur of fine food and fine music and one of the smoothest writers I know. Seriously. See his Blogjam entry on silkworm pupa pizza and you'll see what I mean.

I've asked Fraser, What's the greatest rock 'n' roll movie of all time?

Stop Making Sense. The Last Waltz. Woodstock. Presley's '68 Comeback Special. These are the names that tend to crop up again and again when people are asked to reveal their favourite rock 'n' roll movies. They appear so often in polls and best-of lists that their greatness becomes self-perpetuating, unquestionable, to the point where others equally worthy of attention are never mentioned.

Take Music Is The Weapon, for instance, a 1982 French documentary devoted to Afro-pop legend Fela Kuti. Not only does it feature some truly incendiary live footage shot at Kuti's Lagos club, The Shrine, it manages to get much closer to its subject than any of the movies listed above, and in one priceless sequence the singer is shown holding forth on Nigerian politics and sexuality, visibly intoxicated and clad in nothing but a tiny pair of pastel blue y-fronts. This is the kind of stuff you really don't get from David Byrne.

Another fine film is Driver 23, which documents 7 (seven!) years in the life of Dan Cleveland, leader of terminally hopeless metal band Dark Horse. Cleveland, a serious OCD sufferer and eternal optimist, does not make for comfortable watching, and has a huge blind spot where his own talent is concerned. The viewer knows they'll never "make it," but is compelled to watch despairingly as the band stumble from one harrowing failure to the next. It's Spinal Tap without the jokes.

The greatest rock 'n' roll movie of them all is just 22 minutes long. Shot on black and white film with a hand-held camera, The Cramps: Live At Napa State Mental Hospital chronicles perhaps the unlikeliest show ever organised. The footage is grainy, the editing abrupt, but the power of the performance is undeniable. It's absolutely electric, and all the more entertaining for the environment in which it takes place. Stage right, two patients spend the entire show rocking back and forth and jogging on the spot, lost in delirium. During "Love Me," a man climbs on stage, slowly turns to the house, screams long and loud, then quietly rejoins the audience.

All the way through, singer Lux Interior engages the crowd, at one point writhing around on the floor with two female onlookers and, by the end of the show, it's quite clear that all concerned are having the time of their lives. It's brilliant footage, and a genuine reminder of the vivid, visceral power of live music.

The Simpsons Movie.

The Simpsoonnnns... You've heard the theme music for an astonishing run of eighteen years now. Years ago, you probably wondered if there would be a feature film, as did the show's pantheon of creative talent, before they, and you, gave up. It would never happen, and maybe it's just as well.

Well, the time is nigh, The Simpsons Movie has arrived. If the show's been uneven over the past several seasons - or, some would argue, past ten seasons (and I'd argue even the down years have presented us with their share of hilarious, near classic episodes), causing many to doubt, well, if this thing would be any good, the movie's out and the reviews are streaming in slowly. So far, there are less "D'oh!"s than there are "Woo hoo!"s.

We'll collect many of the reviews here (including, hopefully this weekend, my own) as more people give their own yellow thumbs up or down.

TimeOut London: "The Simpsons Movie does not feel at sea on the big screen and, crucially, it is very funny." TimeOut Chicago, only slightly less enthusiastic: "It's a feature-length Simpsons episode, and possibly not even the Best. Episode. Ever. Still, there’s nothing disposable about a very special Simpsons, especially one that keeps cracking jokes about how it isn’t actually TV."

Entertainment Weekly's Lisa Schwarzbaum gives it a B+ (marking down a tic for action sequences that "sometimes falter"): "Turns out what they've done is make everything bigger, longer, and uncut, but let Homer be Homer, an average American screwup in a recognizable, screwed-up world of hypocrisy and lardy foodstuffs. The best thing about this long-awaited feature-length project, a classic Simpsonian interplay of family psychology, social commentary, and brainy visual and verbal jokes tossed off at rat-a-tat speed, is how relaxed it manages to be."

The Guardian (U.K.)'s Peter Bradshaw, not one to toss around rave reviews lightly: "So many movies promise what they could never deliver in a million years. The Simpsons Movie gives you everything you could possibly want, and maybe it's a victim of its own gargantuan accomplishment. Eighty-five minutes is not long enough to do justice to 17 years of comedy genius. It's still great stuff."

The AP's Jake Coyle wasn't as enthused: "Not to sound too much like the Comic Book Guy, but the Fox sitcom, which once brilliantly satirized TV's conventions, has gradually settled into its own ruts - which usually entail Homer acting silly for silliness' sake."

More from Andy Klein of LA City Beat: "Film adaptations of TV action series can benefit from more expensive special effects and from the kind of widescreen immersion that can’t be achieved at home. Comedies can go raunchier. For cartoon material, more money can lavished on smoother animation. But The Simpsons isn't particularly action-oriented; it's too family-oriented to significantly up the ribaldry; and it would be catastrophic to monkey with the characters’ trademark visual simplicity.

"In fact, director David Silverman and his team, including 11 – count 'em, 11 – credited writers and four vaguely defined consultants, have done some of the above in minor ways. Mostly, however, they’ve constructed a longer, more complex story and exploited the compositional differences of a widescreen format. (For all but the first few minutes, the film is presented in an aspect ratio of 2.35:1, the widest ratio currently in common use.)"

The San Francisco Chronicle's David Wiegand: "Here's the shorthand verdict: No one will be bored with the feature film, but everyone who knows the show well will have a nagging feeling that something is missing."

LA Weekly's Scott Foundas calls the satire "a 90-minute, years-in-the-making comic wind-up machine that begins by mocking its own audience for paying good money to see what it can watch at home for free and proceeds from there through the most wickedly funny arsenal of assaults on big government, organized religion and corporate America this side of Borat (which, like The Simpsons Movie, somehow managed to use Rupert Murdoch’s money to do it)."

The Onion AV Club's Nathan Rabin, who likes it overall, adds: "The fingerprints of co-writer/producer James L. Brooks are all over the genuinely tender moments sprinkled amongst the silliness."

More reviews linked here as they come in.

Online viewing tip: From MTV's Movie Blog: Brooks and Matt Groening debate the merits of a live action Simpsons movie.

Another: David Cassel with the Simpsons greatest drug moments.

Online listening tip: Matt Groening on NPR's Fresh Air.

Hirayama Hideyuki's Three for the Road Premieres at Lincoln Center

Jim Van Maanen attended a Japanese film premiere in NYC, and reviews the evening for us, covering raccoons, Kabuki theater and warm baths.

It's a good thing that Japanese film director Hirayama Hideyuki told his audience at yesterday's world premiere of his new film Three for the Road (Yajikita dôchû Teresuko), at New York's Walter Reade Theater, that he has always loved those half-dozen Hollywood "Road" movies that starred Bing Crosby, Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour. Otherwise some of us occidentals in the crowd might not have known quite what to make of this charming little "throw-away" concoction. One of the film's three stars, Kanzaburo Nakamura, in his enjoyable pre-movie remarks, told us to think of the film as a nice, warm bath. "Nothing much happens, but you'll find it relaxing." He also warned us, "If you don't enjoy it, I don't want to know."

Not to worry, Kanzaburo-san: your film is sweet, silly, occasionally funny and -during that fantasy reconciliation with your character's dead wife and child- even a bit moving. My favorite moments, however, belong to a trapped raccoon - initially meant for dinner - who is freed and then morphs into a child, various animals and even one in a pair of dice, thus saving our beleaguered trio during their visit to a rigged gambling den. Yes, it's that kind of movie, and if you were expecting a more classical Japanese film a la Mizoguchi, Kurosawa or Ozu, never mind. The film is of the light, popular sort that we rarely see here in America, probably due to cultural differences and references that go right over our collective head. (Mr. Nakamura's bath metaphor was not, as it turned out, inappropriate; I had to pinch myself a few times along the way to stay awake.)

Nakamura, one of Japan's more famous Kabuki actors, just the previous day finished a run at the yearly Lincoln Center Summer Festival in "Hokaibo," for which he received glowing reviews. His performance in Three for the Road is as relaxed and easy-going as Kabuki is stringently traditional (though his performance in Hokaibo was certainly not stringent), so it will probably be a treat for his fans to see him in such a role when Three for the Road opens in Japan this coming November. His two co-stars, Akira Emoto and Kyoko Koizumi (in the Lamour role) are also popular staples of Japanese cinema and television, and they work together like good old friends. (All three stars, dressed in the 19th Century garb of the film itself, were present at the premier, and addressed the audience genially, even posing for photographs.) The screenplay by Abe Teruo begins with a comical suicide pact between elderly lovers interrupted by a Jaws-like moment from the deep--which leads to the problem of "naming" the sea monster and then sprawls into everything from Kabuki to geishas, marriage vows, whacked off pinky fingers, and that raccoon. Mr. Hirayama's direction serves this pastiche as well as could be expected, and technically, the movie is certainly up to snuff: seamless, slick and full of beauty.

A colorful and fascinating article on Kanzaburo Nakamura and Kabuki appears in the 2007 Summer issue of KIE (Kateigaho International Edition), the magazine of Japan's Arts & Culture.

A summertime question for Kevin Kelly.

At first glance, True Films would seem to be nothing out of the ordinary. It's a film blog. It's got an angle: docs, or any other film that might be defined as non-fiction. But it's also a book, and here's where things start to deviate from the norm. The book is available in a variety of formats, explained here: "You have about 5 different ways to get this book."

By this point, you'll have noticed the name of the author: Kevin Kelly, editor of the Whole Earth Review in the late 80s, a co-founding editor of Wired and author of Asia Grace, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (required reading for the cast of The Matrix) and New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World.

That last one appeared about ten years ago, when I was editing a site called Rewired, a zine as we called them back in the day and one that was highly critical of Wired when the magazine was the talk of the town - that town being either San Francisco or what was then a cyberspace far, far less populated than it is now (and of course, in the mid-90s, there was a lot of overlap between the two). Wired has since drifted away from its cyberlibertarian roots and Rewired has simply drifted away. At any rate, the record of a series we ran on Kevin Kelly's New Rules can be seen here (scroll down for a sort of impromptu index).

Kevin Kelly, it seemed to me, was always extraordinarily good-natured about critiques of his and/or Wired's theses and hypotheses; his is an acutely inquisitive mind, after all, and currently, he's working on a new book, The Technium, about which he writes:

It's a word I've reluctantly coined to designate the greater sphere of technology - one that goes beyond hardware to include culture, law, social institutions, and intellectual creations of all types. In short, the Technium is anything that springs from the human mind. It includes hard technology, but much else of human creation as well. I see this extended face of technology as a whole system with its own dynamics.

Now, if you're going to watch over 150 documentaries with someone or simply turn to them for good tips on a few, this is the sort of fellow you'll want to consult. Which you can do at True Films.

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Kevin, I wonder if you could imagine one of your books adapted as a non-fiction film, and if so, any ideas as to who you'd like to see make it? Second, are there any other books, ideas, events, subjects that you think just cry out for a good documentary treatment?

Over the years I have had a few nibbles from filmmakers interested in translating both my first book (a heavy-weight tome on how bee hives, robots, the internet, and organizations all operate by similar laws) and my second one (on the new economy built upon ideas) into educational documentaries but the treatments seem far-fetched to me. There were so many abstractions to explain. Later when Brian Greene's remarkable and high-budget NOVA series on quantum string theory came out, I decided that maybe if you can make string theory pop cinematically then it could be possible to make complexity theory visual. But I've changed my mind again in the last 5 years as I've watched many hundreds of documentaries. I find that I really crave narrative structure in documentaries, and my first two books did not lend themselves to that arc. It remains to be seen whether my third in-progress book will.

Without contradicting myself too much, I think that almost any subject can be viewed through the lens of a documentary. The more of them I watch, the more excited I become when I find one that takes the least interesting subject possible - say vanity music recordings, or old girlfriends, or chickens - and transform it into something extraordinary. That selective gaze has always been the boon of photography, and it works wonders in film. Now that film is no longer film, but cheap bits captured by cheap cameras, filmmakers can "waste" footage making films about all kinds of small-time things. Which is paradise for us viewers. I think there is a whole unexplored genre of films about what people do as they work, how they do it. The runaway success of series like Project Runway, or Dirty Jobs, are examples of how making things can be inherently fascinating. Take me behind the scenes anywhere and I'll watch.

Ulrich Muehe, 1953-2007.

Well, this is awful - and, to me at least, entirely unexpected - news:

Ulrich Muehe (Mühe), so empathetically good in the Oscar-winning film The Lives of Others, has died.

From the BBC:

A well-known TV and theatre actor in his homeland, he had been receiving treatment for stomach cancer.

Muehe's performance as a Stasi agent who secretly protects a dissident playwright won him a best actor prize at the European Film Awards in 2006.

More from Der Spiegel.

I'll be doing up a wee batch of "shorts" tomorrow, just to post something here that isn't about someone's death, but wanted to get this out there. [Thanks, Evan.]

Update, 7/30: Signandsight translates Matthias Heine's remembrance for Die Welt.

Laszlo Kovacs, 1933-2007.

From Variety:

"Laszlo Kovacs, the Hungarian-born cinematographer who shot counterculture classics such as Easy Rider as well as Ghost Busters and Miss Congeniality died Saturday in his sleep in Beverly Hills. He was 74.

He was in his last year of school in his native Budapest when a revolt against the Communist regime started on the streets. With classmate Vilmos Zsigmond, he borrowed a school camera and filmed the conflict. They smuggled the footage into Austria and entered the U.S. as political refugees in 1957. The historic footage was later featured in a CBS docu narrated by Walter Cronkite.

He started working in television, moving into features with The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies [hard to believe he started there - ed]."

More from Stephen Whitty:

"He drew pictures with light.

Over an amazing 40-year career, cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs made some of the most haunting images you ever saw.

Captain America roaring down that highway in Easy Rider? The lazy smogginess of Shampoo? The black-and-white Dust Bowl world of Paper Moon, and the rich backlot colors of New York, New York?"

(I'm partial to Five Easy Pieces, myself. You have to hand it to Kovacs, he was diverse.)

And much more from Glenn Kenny.

Update, 7/24: Jason Whyte's tribute at Hollywood Bitchslap. (Thanks, William!)

A summertime question for Stephan Geene.

How refreshing it is to see a new film made in Berlin, a film that is even somewhat about Berlin, that has next to nothing to do with the Berliner Schule other than that the lead's played by Sabine Timoteo (probably best known for her roles in Christian Petzold's Gespenster [Ghosts] and Matthias Glasner's Der Freie Wille [The Free Will]). Not that the Berliner Schule, a school with pretty porous walls in the first place, isn't still a source of fresh and invigorating work, but Stephan Geene's After Effect reminds us that there's more than one way to tell an unconventional tale in this city.

I'd run through a plot outline, but fortunately, German Films has already seen to that. I'll just add that, at the bottom of that page, you'll find Stephan's bio, one line of which reads, "In the 1980s, he was active in the theater group 'Minimal Club' in Munich." I was, too, from 1985 through 1991. But there's a gaping chasm of difference between our levels of activity. Stephan wrote many of the texts we performed and directed each production. It was a collective to varying degrees, but the overriding aesthetic, as the work evolved away from theater and towards installation, was his; it was as if notes taken during a furious yet rigorously disciplined bout with theory (and it would always be chunkier theory that I could ever grapple with head-on, but Stephan's never been one to be intimidated by such things) were rendered in three dimensions and then placed and replaced in a meticulously mapped spatial and temporal order.

While not as breezy as Minimal Club's soap-like serial of 2002 to 2004, Le Ping Pong d'Amour, After Effect is nevertheless light-footed and walks a slightly straighter line in comparison with the work of the Munich period. Even so, it's no less stimulating.

---

Stephan, even though you shot After Effect two years ago, I think it's a happy coincidence - and maybe you do, too - that it's seen its premiere in what the papers are calling "Art Summer 2007," a season of a highly unusual alignment of major art events: Venice and Basel, Kassel and Münster. Each of these shows has its own brand identity which takes over its respective city and overwhelms it for the duration. Among the many other things going on in After Effect, Carl Celler Culture, an agency of sorts, commissions creative types to do more or less the opposite: to absorb a city's identity into a campaign - though the nature of that campaign is an impossible-to-define fusion of marketing and art. To what extent is Berlin, if maybe not perfect, at least very, very good in its role?

I wasn't really trying to keep the film focused specifically on Berlin, although, arriving in 1991, I did find the Berlin mix of this deluge of freelancers from all over, a temporarily undefined public space, a real estate vacuum, empty buildings everywhere as an echo of the expulsion of the city's Jews - it all struck me as quite unique, and this may have been the spark of the film, a deep-set feeling and a concrete experience that work is not the be all and end all and that everyone involved is a producer and consumer (of his/herself). You wouldn't have had this experience in Munich - and not in Paris, either. Other than that, with After Effect, I wanted to create something, an artificial space that would accentuate this odd liveliness of the characters. Their unlimited matter-of-factness when it comes to the projects they're working on. And the extent to which this idea of animals is an indication of a certain discomfort that undercuts their confidence without their actually being aware of it.

But sure, for me, this culture-saturated summer makes for a pretty good background, especially since I'm in Kassel right now: b_books and Pro qm are running the Documenta Bookshop. This allows for an amusing angle on all the brouhaha. It may be the first time in my life I'm doing something that might be called "business." But at the same time, it's also very much a "collective."

To Spoil or Not To Spoil.

Just a quick posting here, because Nathan Lee's article in today's NY Times, "Giving It All Away," addresses a topic that had made its away around the table amongst me and several fellow cinephiles just yesterday.

"I’m that terrible thing, the film critic armed with spoilers who isn’t afraid to use them....

"To spoil or not to spoil involves larger questions about the role of the critic, the needs of the reader and the changes to both caused by the scale, speed and outlaw spirit of Web-based commentary. In February, I tested that relationship — and roused the ire of some ardent online cinephiles — in my review of The Wayward Cloud, a lousy movie by a great director. Because I admire the work of Tsai Ming-liang, I gave myself license to fully explore where it went wrong."

I'm one of those people who are probably overly conscientious about revealing major plot twists, so it's interesting to see Lee's perspective here, even if I still disagree with some of it. What do you think? Is it pointless for a critic to even worry about it? Or obnoxious to reveal major twists?

8 Things (and a bit more).

Mike Everleth at Bad Lit and Sujewa Ekanayake, who's just wrapped what sounded like a fun week of screenings of his Date Number One, have both tagged me with that 8 Things meme running around. I decided to hold off on it until my holiday, which begins today (as you read this, I am gone), so after the 8 Things, a few words about what'll be going on around here this coming week. Also, if I offend anyone, you'll have 8 or 9 days or so to get over it, and if I say anything deathly embarrassing, I'll have 8 or 9 days or so to get over it.

On several occasions, I've met people, virtually or in person, who say they like the Daily and all, but they'd like to know a little more about the person who writes it. If you're not one of those, for heaven's sake, stop reading now.

First, though, a cut-n-paste of the rules:

1. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
2. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
3. People who are tagged write their own blog post about their eight things and include these rules.
4. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names. Don't forget to leave them a comment telling them they're tagged and that they should read your blog.

Ok, go:

1. My parents will be visiting us in Berlin next month, and this seems like a good way into this list: I am extraordinarily lucky. 20 years ago, probably 25 (I turned 48 this summer, by the way), someone was asking about my father, and I was going through the usual kid-profiling-his-father rigmarole, when suddenly, out came, "He's a good man." And that "good" just came welling up from deep, deep gut, a shocking physical sensation. I remembered that a few weeks ago when it happened again. Same sentence, same feeling, though probably even more pervasive now that I'm a father myself and can appreciate him all the more. My mother's someone people open up to immediately. She gets on a plane and, whether she wants it or not, she'll be carrying the full emotional history of the person sitting next to her when she gets off. That kind of ear - and heart - when you're growing up... just invaluable. Together, these two, my father and mother, they're a dynamic combo.

2. I used to think my resume was spotty. On paper, I thought, you'd be looking at a guy who starts things, gets distracted, drifts on over, then again and so on. At some point in the 90s, I realized that this is simply the way things are now. We live in an age of episodic lives. Creatively (rather than, say, job-wise, love-life-wise or otherwise), my first episode was probably my longest. As a kid, I had a poem published in a children's magazine. Years later, must have been junior high, some teacher told me that my poems reminded her of TS Eliot. I took that very, very seriously, believe it or not, and began reading the man. Through two years of theater (Baylor), a degree in film and a masters in English (both UT Austin), and years afterwards, I kept it up. Until I didn't anymore. In forgotten literary journals lost in stacks across America, faint traces of me sink further into deepest obscurity. I don't mind. Still love reading poetry.

3. I guess I should devote one of the 8 to moviegoing. Let's think back to the 70s. I was a teenager in Arlington, Texas, a suburban town that sprawls between Dallas and Ft Worth. As soon as I had my driver's license, that is, at 16, I'd drive to repertory theaters in one of those two cities to watch movies. These were the days before home video, kids. That monster Janus Films box set? Give or take a few titles, that was more or less my self-administered cinematic education. Plus the occasional cultish thing. Great times, but my two favorite moviegoing experiences have nothing to do with all that. And they couldn't be more different. First, with two friends, I saw Jaws the week it opened. The theater was packed and every last one of us screamed and jumped and yelped and held onto each other or batted each other away or laughed or hid... I'd never gone through anything like that. Fantastic ride. Second, I drove to Ft Worth one afternoon and paid one dollar to see a double feature: The Godfather and The Godfather Part II. This time, the theater was nearly empty. The Godfather was old, old news. There may have five or six other people in there, but I soon forgot that I was in a theater at all. About six hours later, I walked out into the dark absolutely bedazzled, still smelling that sauce with meatballs, and thinking now in the rhythms of threat and anxiety and power.

4. Before my voice changed, I sang in the Texas Boys Choir. Years later, I'd drive to jazz clubs in Dallas and blues joints in Ft Worth. Musically, I've gone through the zillion phases we all tend to go through. But if pressed, I'd guess that the album I've played most often in my life is Joni Mitchell's Hejira.

5. When I was very young, pre-kindergarten age, our family lived in France for a couple of years. I remember only snippets. I stuck a bobby pin in an electric socket, for example. Blew me across the room and knocked out half the town's electricity. I wouldn't see Europe again until we spent a long weekend in Amsterdam when I was 14. We took a bus from the airport to the hotel, and I remember that first step off that bus very, very well. I was looking down, literally watching my step. The street was black with rain pasting broad yellow autumn leaves against the asphalt. I looked up, the canal, the bridge, the stone steps, the sky, which no kidding, really was a Rembrandt sky. You may be expecting, "And from that moment on, I knew I'd have to live in Europe some day," but no, that's silly. What took over me wasn't anywhere that concrete.

6. I've lived nearly half my life in Germany.

7. I still have a "John Anderson for President" T-shirt. Sheesh.

8. I'd love to collect art but have no money.

So. I still haven't decided which Democrat to back in the 2008 presidential campaign, and so, I tag, in alphabetical order, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Chris Dodd, John Edwards, Mike Gravel, Dennis Kucinich, Barack Obama and Bill Richardson.

Meantime, this year I thought I'd do something like I did last year when I went away, only with a twist. Summertime questions, only instead of asking film bloggers, writers and editors, I'd go in search of widening the circle a bit and get in touch with people who might add another angle or two to the fragmented portrait of this 8 Things thing. I should have started a whole lot earlier. At least weeks before leaving, in other words, rather than days. In its conception, the project's not half-bad, I think, but much more time for explanation and coaxing is evidently required for this sort of thing than for, well, film bloggers contacted by another film blog.

In short, the roster of respondents this year is far shorter. Like, three. I'm grateful to each of them for coming through.

In between those days, the Daily will be in the capable hands of Craig Phillips; there's a dandy primer coming up, and of course, more.

Shorts, 7/20.

Tim Lucas watches the trailer for Todd Haynes's I'm Not There and sets out on virtual journey in search of the song and anything he can learn about it. Great stuff.

Emily Gordon and a friend take apart David Denby's piece in the New Yorker on the supposed devolution of the romantic comedy. For one thing, Gordon wishes it'd been written by someone "whose ideas about sex and love were informed in great part by John Hughes, David Lynch, Kevin Smith, Cameron Crowe, Nicole Holofcener, Amy Heckerling, Todd Solondz, Woody Allen (the movies and the man), Martha Coolidge, Nora Ephron, Steven Soderbergh and Quentin Tarantino - now there's a ripe and unstable blend.... What I'm saying is that just as screwball comedies were shiny fairy tales for the eras of disappointing early marriages, stock-market crashes, and limited opportunity for personal expression, There's Something About Mary is a shiny fairy tale for ours."

Daniel Day-Lewis's "choices seem to reflect more than just industry realities or access to the juicy roles someone of his stature commands," argues Jim Cullen in Common-place. "Actually, his recent body of work shows a remarkably textured, yet consistent, vision of American history." Via Bookforum.

AJ Schnack launches About A Blog.

Via Michael Sippey, I see that Errol Morris is now blogging for the New York Times. Just one several-day-old entry so far, but what an entry.

Also in the NYT: "JK Rowling's monumental, spellbinding epic, 10 years in the making, is deeply rooted in traditional literature and Hollywood sagas - from the Greek myths to Dickens and Tolkien to Star Wars," writes Michiko Kakutani, reviewing the publishing event of the year. "And true to its roots, it ends not with modernist, Soprano-esque equivocation, but with good old-fashioned closure: a big-screen, heart-racing, bone-chilling confrontation and an epilogue that clearly lays out people's fates. Getting to the finish line is not seamless - the last part of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh and final book in the series, has some lumpy passages of exposition and a couple of clunky detours - but the overall conclusion and its determination of the main characters' story lines possess a convincing inevitability that make some of the prepublication speculation seem curiously blinkered in retrospect."

Rowling, by the way, is not at all happy that reviews are already appearing. Mike Collett-White and Robert MacMillan report for Reuters - and the AFP reports on the reply: "'Our feeling is that once a book is offered up for sale at any public, retail outlet, and we purchase a copy legally and openly, we are free to review it,' said culture, books and theater editor Rick Lyman in a statement."

Related: "Might the hive mind of fanfiction predict the plot of the seventh Harry Potter?" asks Kevin Kelly.

Meanwhile, Marc Savlov on Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: "This is the first of the eventual septet's volumes to be directed by [David] Yates, and it's also the first to improve, literally, on its source material."

Also at the Austin Chronicle:

• Brad Neely is only one of the Austin-based animators making waves at Super Deluxe. Marc Savlov has the story. Related: Wizard People, Dear Reader.

• Spencer Parsons reviews Don't You Forget About Me: Contemporary Writers on the Films of John Hughes and finds it "interesting how thoroughly Ferris Bueller and Pretty in Pink's Andie Walsh dominate discussion. They fire up more identification and consternation here than the whole Saturday morning detention crowd combined."

• Raoul Hernandez: "'I've met a lot of hard-boiled eggs in my life, but you, you're 20 minutes.' So sneers Jan Sterling at Kirk Douglas during 1951's Ace in the Hole, and you can almost hear Billy Wilder yukking it up softly off-camera."

Jürgen Fauth reads Colin McGinn's The Power of Movies: How Screen and Mind Interact: "The first half of the book, where he investigates 'the metaphysics of the movie image' and the way we perceive it, is required reading for anybody trying to get a better handle on what it is, exactly, those flickering shadows do to us in that dark room.... In the final stretch, though, McGinn loses himself in conjecture and pursues all the wrong angles."

Joe Leydon's got an alternative reading suggestion: "The following are verbatim excerpts from actual student term papers I have received over the years.... Again, let me emphasize: These excerpts aren't from e-mails, or blog postings, or hastily scribbled answers on exams. These are from term papers."

"Fish Kill Flea is an elegy, not just for this one flea market, but for the almost-completely-dead American phenomenon of small, self-contained economic systems," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog.

The Nashville Scene's Jim Ridley talks with Jay Jonroy about his debut feature: "There is much humor in David & Layla, some of it surprisingly raunchy: you'll never hear the phrase 'Mr President' again in quite the same way. But the comedy stops mid-film for a sober interlude in which Layla, whose parents were butchered by Saddam Hussein, shows David images from the 1988 Iraqi genocide of Kurdish civilians at Halabja. This sequence, Jonroy says, is the reason he wanted to make the film."

Related: "Packed with meals, music and religious ideas, the movie offers interesting looks into Jewish and Kurdish Muslim traditions," writes Michael Ordoña in the Los Angeles Times. "Though it's no Romeo and Juliet, David & Layla is an offbeat cross-cultural romance with a positive message."

"Summercamp! is a documentary about, well, about summer camp. But it turns out to be the saddest, sweetest, most magical and most deeply affecting movie of the season," writes Andrew O'Hehir at Salon.

Dave Shulman meets Matt Groening at his house on the Pacific coast ("Huge, but not ostentatious; just big and friendly, with high ceilings, good light, good art and beverages") and has a leisurely talk for an LA Weekly cover story. Groening is busy, though: "The Simpsons recently broadcast its 400th episode and shows no signs of slowing down. Futurama's back in production (although not necessarily for prime time). He's got a new book out, an empire to oversee, his Life in Hell deadline each week, two teenage sons and, of course, The Simpsons Movie." Related: "Zack Kim performs a beautiful version of the Simpsons theme by playing two guitar at once," notes David Pescovitz at Boing Boing.

Stephanie Bunbury talks with Tom Kalin about Savage Grace for the Age.

"Aachi and Ssipak works because it has taken a taboo and run with it spectacularly," writes Adam Hartzell at Koreanfilm.org. "It's a dystopic future with no redemption except that of having fun with what remains are left."

Death at a Funeral "is sure to be measured against stalwarts like Waking Ned Devine that mock the ritual of a memorial service to skewer the respectability out of family life," writes David D'Arcy at Screen Daily. "While the movie falls well short of those standards, its manic pace and inane characters generally sustain the laughs."

"No End in Sight brings us closer than most accounts to cracking the perpetually confounding riddle of incompetence and ideology that characterize the administration's mismanagement of the war," writes Nicolas Rapold. Do watch the trailer.

Also in the L Magazine:

• Mark Asch: "Set a month into Margaret Thatcher's second term and sharing its title with the last good Clash song, This Is England passionately resurrects the moment of skinhead subculture's evolution from antiauthoritarian camaraderie into gangish belligerence."

• "At the heart of the international debate over Darfur is the recognition of history repeating itself, and The Devil Came on Horseback may have missed some opportunities in this regard by sticking to a straight path through [Brian] Steidle's journey," writes Cathy Erway. "Still, his story is unfinished, and that is the film's final unsettling triumph."

• Cullen Gallagher: "What Anthony Giacchino's documentary The Camden 28 seems to be asking is, 'Why can't we produce anti-war activists like in the old days?'"

• Michael Joshua Rowin recommends Walking to Werner. More from Matt Zoller Seitz in the NYT: "Werner is annoying, but there's no denying that it's a trip."

For the Los Angeles Times, Susan King talks with Rolf de Heer about Ten Canoes. Kevin Thomas writes, "De Heer, whose films include the well-received The Tracker, has understandably been highly praised by the Aboriginal community for evoking its culture and traditions with such authenticity, respect and grace."

Someone with Tribeca talks with Anne Hathaway and director Julian Jarrold about Becoming Jane. Related: In the Guardian, Steven Morris reports on "a cheeky experiment by an Austen enthusiast" that proves it'd be very difficult to become Jane today.

At PopMatters, Chadwick Jenkins returns to his exploration of Ingmar Bergman's use of Bach.

For 10 Zen Monkeys, Susie Bright talks with Jamie Gillis, "the first male superstar of porn."

Matt Bartley inducts cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki into the Hollywood Bitchslap / EFilmCritic Hall of Fame,

Jonathan Lapper launches a new series, "Acting Up," highlighting passed over performances. First up: Evelyn Varden as Icey Spoon in The Night of the Hunter.

Eric Kohn in the New York Press on Colma: The Musical: "[I]t's neat to see another product of the shoot-on-the-fly approach enabled by digital video that explores a genre often relegated to major studios—and manages to maintain its street-smart attitude rather than becoming sappy all at once." Related: Alison Willmore talks with director Richard Wong at the IFC Blog. Also, "Interview could easily qualify for a journalism class syllabus - if only because it drives home the importance of not underestimating the intelligence of your subject."

Geoffrey Macnab celebrates a 70th anniversary: "An extraordinary array of films has been made at Pinewood: everything from lowbrow farces with Roy Chubby Brown (1992's UFO) to extravagant masterpieces such as Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's ballet film The Red Shoes (1947). The studio has been home to superheroes and fantasy figures (Superman, Batman, Lara Croft, etc) while hosting Carry On films and (very occasionally) 'kitchen sink' and 'social problem' dramas."

Also in the Independent, Kaleen Aftab, is celebrating, too: the "renaissance in African cinema." And Lesley O'Toole interviews Richard Gere.

In the Guardian:

• David Thomson on Alain Resnais and Peter Bradshaw on Private Fears in Public Places. More from the Telegraph's Tim Robey.

• Peter Bradshaw on Buy It Now: "Antonio Campos's satirical fantasy about a teenage girl putting her virginity for sale on eBay was originally a half-hour short which won the Cinéfondation prize at Cannes in 2005. Now it has been expanded to feature length. This is a ropey 62 minutes."

• In the news: Brad Pitt and Gwyneth Paltrow; Catalina Sandino Moreno and Steven Soderbergh; Alan Rickman and Bill Pullman; and of course, Tom Cruise in his Nazi uniform. More on that at some point after I return from a quick holiday.

Adam Ross's interviewee this week: Ross Ruediger.

Online browsing tip. At Red Carpet Style Awards: "The Simpsons Go to Paris With Linda Evangelista," a spread in Harper's Bazaar via Coudal Partners.

Online browsing and viewing tip. The work of Raoul Servais at SiouxWIRE.

Online listening tip. Michael Moore on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Online viewing tip #1. Let the Bodies Hit the Floor, via Fimoculous.

Online viewing tip #2. "A great find," writes Alex Ross. "Ethan Iverson links to a YouTube excerpt from the Soviet-era cartoon Ballerina on a Boat, with music by none other than Alfred Schnittke."

Online viewing tips. Two by Harmony Korine at the DVblog.

Fests and events, 7/20.

"From this Friday until the beginning of August, Sao Paulo's Galeria Vermelho hosts one of the most riveting exhibitions of the summer," announces Miguel Amado at Rhizome. "Curated by local critics Fernando Oliva and Marcelo Rezende, Communism of Form: Sound + Image + Time - The Music Clip Strategy brings together works by 30 Brazilian and international artists that reflect, examine, or evoke the aesthetics of the music clip within contemporary visual culture." Through August 4.

Michelle Phillips joins a prestigious lineup of bloggers filing entries from the Mods & Rockers Film Festival for the Huffington Post. Through August 1.

Hoping he won't mind, I want to quote the entire first paragraph of Michael Fox's piece at SF360:

As recently as a decade ago, the various local "identity" film festivals provoked minimal interest and sold few tickets beyond their niche constituencies. Those days are long gone: A full 40 percent of the audience of the SF International Asian American Film Festival is now comprised of non-Asians. The SF Jewish Film Festival reports 25 to 30 percent of attendees aren't Jewish. What's going on? For one thing, savvy moviegoers outside the target demographic have learned to scout the niche fests' programs for films that premiered to raves at Berlin or Cannes (too late, that is, to make it into the SF International Film Festival). The Jewish Film Festival specifically benefits from broad and urgent local interest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which manifests itself as an insatiable appetite for documentaries from the region. The biggest factor, though, may be the number of interfaith and interracial relationships in the Bay Area. Looking for insights into your partner's culture or family? Tag along with them to a festival flick. All of which is to say you don't have to be Jewish to enjoy the SF Jewish Film Festival.

Also, program director Nancy Fishman points out a few highlights. Through July 26.

For the Reeler, Chris Willard talks with New York Asian American International Film Festival director William Phuan. Through July 28.

"Outfest programmers have once again assembled... a world-class collection of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered-themed shorts," writes Kim Adelman at indieWIRE. Through Monday. Also, Brian Brooks previews the New York International Latino Film Festival, July 24 through 29.

Matt Riviera previews the Melbourne International Film Festival. July 25 through August 12.

The Lumière Reader has more from the Telecom New Zealand International Film Festivals.

"A retrospective on Pedro Almodóvar and a tribute to US director David Lynch will be the main events of the Estoril European Film Festival, whose first edition will be held from November 8 - 17," reports Vitor Pinto at Cineuropa.

The Wine Country Film Festival's just opened in American Canyon; later, it'll be moving on to Napa and Sonoma.

For the LA Weekly, Hazel-Dawn Dumpert previews The Late, Great Kate: A Centennial Tribute to Katharine Hepburn, running through August 21. Susan King rounds up other local goings on for the Los Angeles Times.

The Philadelphia City Paper writes up the highlights of the second week of the Philadelphia International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival. Through Tuesday.

"Convention never could get its claws into Norman Mailer." Michael Joshua Rowin previews The Mistress & The Muse: The Films of Norman Mailer for the L Magazine. More from AO Scott in the New York Times:

The objection can be made that all of this stuff is trivial and secondary, an amusing distraction from the substantial and vexing edifice of Mr Mailer's real work, which is his books. Many of them, it seems to me, are too infrequently and poorly read, and some of their boldest gambits and thorniest truths are overshadowed by their author's reputation for excess on and off the page.

To see him as he was in his various nonliterary incarnations - as cinéaste and talk-show guest, as politician and polemicist - is to understand some of what he was up to in books like Advertisements for Myself (1959), Armies of the Night (1968), Of a Fire on the Moon (1970) and The Prisoner of Sex (1971). And Mr Mailer's first three films - Maidstone in particular - are worth seeing for the insight they provide into the ideas and ambitions that fueled Mr Mailer's writing in the 1960s and 70s, the wildest, most productive and most contentious period in a career that has never been especially calm or easy to comprehend.

More from acquarello and the Leading the Charge: Woodfall Film Productions and the Revolution in 60s British Cinema series: Tom Jones and The Charge of the Light Brigade.

"The Magnificent Revolutionary Cycling Cinema is the only UK touring bicycle-powered cinema." Thanks, Jerry!

"The short film evening Short & Sweet, which has been held weekly in Brick Lane for over a year, has arrived in the West End of London." More at the Creative Review.

10 mph may be making its way to you next month.

"The 19th Galway Film Fleadh came to an end on Sunday and by all accounts it was a rousing success," writes Mark Rabinowitz at indieWIRE.

Michael Guillén has a Robert Osborne double and, at the Siffblog, Anne M Hockens and David Jeffers wrap the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Earlier: "SFSFF's 12th."

Rachel Leers has a Silverdocs overview for In These Times.

An Atheist Film Festival? Jim Emerson floats the idea and the suggestions roll in.

Film & Music. Punk.

In a punk-themed issue of the Guardian's Film & Music section this week, Alex Cox quotes Luis Buñuel looking back on Surrealism:

The movement was successful in its details and a failure in its essentials. Surrealism was a cultural and artistic success, but these were the areas of least importance to the surrealists. Our aim was not to establish a glorious place for ourselves in the annals of art and literature - and certainly not in the cinema! - but to CHANGE THE WORLD. This was our essential purpose, and we completely failed.

"What Buñuel wrote of the surrealists is equally true of punk," writes Cox. "Whether a money-making scam or revolutionary movement, punk was decisively and swiftly killed by the double-whammy of the music business: CDs and pop videos. In the cinema, punk's presence was even more tentative." So then he asks, "What would a punk cinema look like, if one still existed?" Rules for breaking the rules follow.

Stuart Jeffries tells the story behind Derek Jarman's Jubilee.

"I recently discovered that I'm in The Filth and the Fury DVD eating cake and talking to Sid," muses Jez Scott. "I've been a policeman for 20 years - I'm a sergeant now - but I'm still a punk, as are a lot of coppers. I still go to gigs and crowd-surf with my boss. He's an inspector."

Keith Cameron: "Australian punk happened for the same reasons as British and American punk: a sense of disillusionment with what was on offer, musically and socially. But unlike the UK and US scenes, which were concentrated in London and New York, where musicians could feed off each other, Australian punks were scattered across the vastness of the country, and had only the flimsiest idea of what punk even meant."

Laura Barton sets out in search of the spirit of a groundbreaking tune, "Roadrunner," by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers.

Dave Simpson: "If 1977 was the year of the punk rock explosion, it also saw the rise of another musical movement, intimately entwined with punk - a massive eruption in British reggae, which became the black counterpart to the white heat of punk."

"Many years ago, when the cold war was still a recent memory and John Major lived on Downing Street, I bought a copy of Greil Marcus's book Lipstick Traces, the 'secret history of the 20th century' that draws ornate lines between the Sex Pistols, the French Situationists and Dadaism, and remains awe-inspiringly great - 'a coruscatingly original piece of work, vibrant with the energy of the bizarre happenings it maps out,' according to the venerable Terry Eagleton, and he should know." John Harris explains why he's writing about "Kleenex, once fleetingly cracked up to be the 'Swiss Slits' and forced to change their name to Liliput (which should actually be written LiLiPUT, apparently) by the international tissue manufacturers. They lasted from 1978 until 1983, and have since been pretty much lost to history." But I want to add this: In a few days, I'll be bringing up the subject of docs that need to be made. My nomination: Lipstick Traces.

Melville, segueing into the Brooklyn Rail and MovieMaker.

Premiere's Glenn Kenny binges on Jean-Pierre Melville: "The current perception of Melville here is that of a somewhat hardboiled cinephile, which he certainly was to a certain extent, what with the likes of later crime pictures such as Le Samouraï and Le Cercle Rouge. But of the four pictures I chose... only one, Le Doulos, is a genre picture. The other films give a different means of access to Melville the cinematic poet and thinker. After my immersion, I'm almost ready to put him alongside Buñuel."

"Le Doulos shows a director in transition," writes Jesi Khadivi in the July/August issue of the Brooklyn Rail. The film "shares some of Bob Le Flambeur's light-heartedness and predates the distilled existential dread of Melville's masterpiece Le Samouraï."

"The Siren can understand the admiration for the steel-colored perfection of Le Samouraï's look," she conceded a couple of weeks ago. "But watching [Alain] Delon dart around the Metro, in fear for his life, left her as cold as Harry Lime looking down from the Ferris wheel. The Siren has resigned herself to more lonely iconoclasm, but she did find this. Merci, M Rosenbaum, for expressing a few reservations. And apologies to Girish."

Back to the Brooklyn Rail. What else is in this summer issue:

Godard "once said that sport, in contrast to politics, literature and cinema, does not lie because it is the only action where the body does not act," writes Jenny Schlenzka in a review of Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait. "This might be one reason why [Douglas] Gordon and [Philippe] Parreno refuse to tell the story of Zidane's heroic rise. Instead, they focus on the power of his image, the image of him doing what he knows best: playing soccer. The premise of their film is as strikingly simple as it is effective."

"What does legendary singer Edith Piaf have in common with a secretive guy who murders innocent strangers for thrills?" asks Tessa DeCarlo, reviewing La Vie en Rose and Mr Brooks. "Both are hostages to their own dark sides, according to two films that use addiction as a shorthand way to pose a fundamental question: is it possible to become a better person?" Related: Joe Leydon talks with Kevin Costner for MovieMaker.

Sarahjane Blum on Nancy Drew:

Generations of women have learned from Nancy, Bess, and George that girls can dream, and think, and act. Now they see that girls can't, but Nancy can. Outside of the fantasy land of River Heights (where Bess and George remain full of moxie) a powerful girl remains an aberration. A circular argument arises: girls like to shop, Nancy would rather sleuth, Nancy isn't really a girl. And it's true: Nancy isn't really a girl. Even after hundreds of books and films devoted to her, the character barely feels human.

"Since the mid-90s, director Shane Meadows has defined himself as the definitive voice of lower-class Northern England," writes Karl O'Toole in a review of This Is England. "Meadows' films come across as the observations of a concerned insider rather than an outsider taking a quick tour."

Hong Sang-soo's Woman is the Future of Man sparks an association in Jed Lipinski's with Jules and Jim: "[U]nlike Jeanne Moreau, who 'revealed her goals only after she'd achieved them,' Sung Hyunah seems almost entirely a product of her mistreatment by guys; a clean slate covered in lewd men's room scrawl."

With Pete Tombs's guide Mondo Macabro as a starting point, Br Cleve is off in search of Bollywood horror.

David N Meyer and David Wilentz line up a string of reviews from the New York Asian Film Festival.

And MovieMaker:

Henry Jaglom argues - occasionally in italics - that "this is the very best time in history to be an independent moviemaker!" Related: Jennifer M Wood has a good long talk with Jaglom, who then also adds a good short list of "Things I've Learned as a Moviemaker."

"While autonomy used to be the battle cry of the generations of both John Cassavetes and Martin Scorsese, today's indie studios are in a better position to expose a film to an array of audiences," writes Jerry Weinstein. "No two outfits share the same business model, even though they do share a mission of broadening the audience for independent film."

"With all the entertainment options and technologies vying for audience attention, today's movie theaters are under attack." Mark Sells counts the many, many ways.

"In the movie industry as we knew it, production was always production and post was always post—but the buzzword of the future is 'workflow.' With digital technology enveloping all stages of the moviemaking process, it is now easier than ever to transition seamlessly from shooting a film to editing it and getting it viewed by an audience." Then Nick Dager gets geeky.

Jennifer Straus talks with Julia Stiles about writing and directing her first short, Raving.

And Bob Fisher talks with cinematographer Guillermo Navarro about shooting Pan's Labyrinth.

Sherman Torgan.

"From Hollywood Elsewhere comes sad news from the very heart of Hollywood," writes Dennis Cozzalio. "Sherman Torgan, owner and manager of the New Beverly Cinema, died unexpectedly yesterday while bicycling in Santa Monica."

"I imagine he died doing what he loved, which is a happy thing; I don't think anyone could run a theater like the New Beverly for three decades without having a passion for it," writes David Lowery. "There's an art to showing movies, a sort of showmanship crossed with curatorial craft, and it's slowly being lost. It'll never fade completely (not as long as devotees are willing to set up screenings in Parisian catacombs), but as of today its its lustre is a little bit dimmer than it was before."

"[S]ome of you may have noticed he got a thanks in the Grindhouse credits," notes Blake Ethridge at Cinema is Dope. "Condolences to everyone that knew Sherman and were touched over the decades with his charge and dedication in providing films old and new a place to still breath and to be discovered all over again."

Offscreen. Issues of Representation.

In the latest issue of Offscreen to go online, editor Donato Totaro considers "one of Québec's national treasures," Pierre Perrault, as the National Film Board reissues his work on DVD.

Guan Soon Khoo revisits one of Zhang Yimou's most controversial works: "[D]ue to the dualist nature of the filmmakers' intentions - of a blockbuster for the world and a culture-conscious film - Hero's technical merit, both in its narrative structure and metaphorical showmanship, elevates it to a contemporary masterpiece, not a timeless work of art."

"Comparing the iconographies of Anna May Wong and Lucy Lui exemplifies the marginalized roles Asians are given in Hollywood, as well as showing the transition of the Asian American female from a desired to a feared figure," writes Krystle Doromal.

In an essay on Chronicle of a Disappearance, Lindsey Rock writes, "Through the exquisite use of rupture, fractured non-linearity, repetition, irony, and wry humor, Elia Suleiman exposes the fractured Palestinian identity: the lack of cohesive unity, the denied, the negated and the absurd."

Robert Robertson: "In the case of both [Sergei] Eisenstein and [Frank Lloyd] Wright the experimental process was crucial to the realisation of the ideal of an organic unity in their work, and integral to this approach was the method of testing for Nature's equilibrium."

Reverse Shot. Take Two.

With "Take One," Issue 17 of Reverse Shot, contributors were asked to "pick a single, memorable shot and use it as a springboard for reconsidering a film, filmmaker, or even cinema itself." Now, a year later, with Issue 20, editors Michael Koresky and Jeff Reichert present their writers with a topic that "couldn't be more open to interpretation": "Even though the shot may be the most instantly relatable element of film form, the captured image isn't the exclusive domain of cinema; it's the cut, the edit between two images, that has most clearly defined the unique character of the seventh art." Hence the issue title, "Take Two."

Chris Wisniewski reinforces the argument with a quote from, naturally, Sergei Eisenstein: "Cinema is, first and foremost, montage." And he adds, "For Eisenstein, it's not just that the juxtaposition of two images or shots can be meaningful in the hands of the right filmmaker; it's that cinema is images, sounds, and moments of time colliding with each other to produce new meanings. The cut is not simply one cinematic tool among many; it is the essential characteristic of the cinema." Now, to the film at hand: "If this is the way we conceive of the art and theory of film, then what do we do with a movie like Rope?"

Lauren Kaminsky revisits a cut you'll surely remember in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: "[I]t's so narratively jarring because it undermines plot, setting, and characters entirely. Without warning we are yanked from a love story and dropped into what might have been war, ripped from the safety of eternally recurring, fictional time and thrust into the gravity of causational, irreparable and unrepeatable History. As Kundera might say, the buoyant narrative never recovers from the weight of these Russian tanks, all the weightier for being real."

Michael Koresky looks back to the year 2000: "It would be too simple and clichéd to say that Spike Lee was on the cutting edge; by all accounts Bamboozled seems to have been shot in its fashion out of necessity. Yet rarely has Lee's aesthetic been so accurately, spiritually wedded to his ideology - the erratic sound mix, the inconsistent lighting, the sense of multiple cameras jostling for screen supremacy... all fruitfully aid this tale of woe and compromise."

Elbert Ventura can still hear Juliette Binoche scream: "Code Unknown up to that point had largely unfolded in discrete scenes all filmed in long single takes. Cutting within the scene, [Michael] Haneke reverts to conventional film grammar—and, in the process, calls attention to the scene's artifice."

Nicolas Rapold considers the effect of Steven Soderbergh and editor Sarah Flack's use in The Limey (1999) of footage of Terrence Stamp in Ken Loach's Poor Cow (1967): "The cut to the past helps Wilson transcend the typical fictional character's limitation: namely, that he's created for the occasion, for this film.... The cut also posits film as something to be quoted and reused."

"There's a cut late in Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ that does more than connect, surprise, or demonstrate: it quakes and shifts the ground below," writes Eric Hynes. "The entire film anticipates this cut, as does one's expectations of the climax to the greatest - or at least most repeated - story ever told, but still there's no preparing for it."

White letters against a black background: "MEANWHILE." Daniel Cockburn: "Coming ten minutes into Hal Hartley's first feature The Unbelievable Truth, it predicts much of what is to be admired in the coming 80 minutes and dozen or so features: spelling-out of cinematic and dramatic fundamentals that we take for granted, that we don't need to elucidate because they're... well, fundamental."

"[W]hat's so striking about the Bressonian universe, and probably most responsible for his lasting reputation, are his editing decisions," writes Jeff Reichert. "[I]t's rare that a shot ends exactly when you might expect it to, and even rarer that what follows provides easy linear causality." Then: "Throughout Au hasard Balthazar, Bresson employs that most traditional of cinematic devices - the reaction shot - to incorporate Balthazar's silent observation into the emotional fabric of the film. We don't, and can't know what the donkey is thinking at any given time, but don't need to because the editing does the work for us."

"Kenneth Anger was the first American filmmaker to understand the pop song's dark potential for the realm of moving images," writes Michael Joshua Rowin. "And Scorpio Rising, the 1964 avant-garde short that marks the summit of Anger's vision, was the first American film to not just acknowledge in sound and image a youth culture whose hold on the American imagination had achieved a theretofore unprecedented power and influence, it was the first to seriously study the consequences of such a break.... To understand a film by Anger is to understand the use of sound in accordance to the cut. It is to learn from a master."

"To a certain extent, the disruptive Surrealist practice of the 1920s where one would walk in and out of films randomly in order to craft one's own dream narratives - the first of many 'appropriative' challenges to the supposedly ironclad discourses of Hollywood cinema - was already inherent within any given film," writes Andrew Tracy. "Surrealists sought to void the various texts of meaning in order to build a new text made up of evocative fragments, the assembly line fantasies of Hollywood often had only the most tentative of holds on meaning in the first place.... The particular case in point: Going Hollywood (1933)."

Travis Mackenzie Hoover decides "to write about the greatest cut in the [Claire] Denis canon, if not cinema itself. For years, I have isolated one surreptitious shot match in her largely overlooked Nenette and Boni as defining her particular brand of brilliance, which merges hyperstylized formalism with gentle realism to create something at once tactile and relaxed. Now it can be told: a single cut related to classical film grammar while also expanding and redefining its emotional range, it places the director astride the line of cinematic convention."

"The first few minutes of Days of Being Wild (credits for executive producers, cold opening, title card) are my favorite few minutes in a movie made in my lifetime," declares Nathan Kosub. "The opening scene is edited quickly, to the assured click of Yuddy's heels on concrete. It isn't that the ensuing transition from Maggie Cheung's backward glance to the title is unexpected, or particularly unique. It is, however, the essential cut for understanding the themes of Wong [Kar-wai]'s career: namely, memory and dreams."

Ryland Walker Knight: Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror "says we are each immortal, forever unbounded by the 'robes of a skeleton' that 'sheath' our bodies; therefore I find the defining edit of the film near its close when, abruptly, the narrator finally flies, unlocked and awakened, into the immortal, eternal life the film attempts to define and inhabit."

"Perhaps the quintessential example of the philosophical martial arts film is A Touch of Zen (Hsia Nu), by the legendary King Hu," writes Kevin B Lee, who then focuses on the impact of a single cut towards the end of the film.

"Where to start with a cut like this, a cut that explodes questions of documentary mode, genre, and the construction of personal narrative?" Brendon Bouzard studies "a classic variation on the shot/reverse shot," that moment between Charlton Heston and Michael Moore in Bowling for Columbine.

"The Parallax View seems to tell us that representational democracy is nothing but a duping fantasy framework to make us feel as acting players in the country's governance," writes Vicente Rodriguez-Ortega. "Others do the actual work. The Parallax Corporation rules almighty. And to reinforce this, a highly elliptical editing style is utilized, every twenty minutes or so, reminding the spectator of who's pulling the strings."

The big build-up, and then the fight scene that wasn't in Raiders of the Lost Ark: Indiana Jones pulls out a gun, fires, fight's over. "What gives the sequence its memorable charge is Indy's bemused reaction shot - an interruption to the sword-twirling antics that announce spectacular danger, but don't black out his practicality," writes Eric Kohn.

This issue's "Shot / Reverse Shot: Kristi Mitsuda argues that Julia Loktev's Day Night Day Night is "profoundly frightening" yet "eschews sensationalism." But for Michael Joshua Rowin, it's "not about the morality or immorality of terrorism, it’s about generating a rush."

Interviews:

• Jeff Reichert with Volker Schlöndorff.

• Jeannette Catsoulis with John Carney, Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová.

• Michael Koresky with Sarah Polley.

Plus, reviews of 10 new releases and two DVDs.

Scrap Heaven.

"Sang-Il Lee's Scrap Heaven stands as something of a companion piece to David Fincher's Fight Club," notes Rob Humanick at Slant, "both works examining the effects of economic dehumanization and oppressive social constructions with a refreshingly youthful vigor, like a ribald twentysomething with everything to prove and nothing to lose in the process."

"Lee's visual jazziness and cast are compelling, but nothing can compensate for a deflated, toilet-humored script that negates its potential for sharp social satire with increasingly adolescent and superficial vilifying philosophies," writes Aaron Hillis in the Voice.

"Scrap Heaven has style to spare," allows Laura Kern in the New York Times. "Yet while stumbling between comedy, meditative drama and action, it ultimately develops an identity crisis similar to that of its loosely drawn lead characters (whose own stories are considerably enhanced by a talented cast)."

Cashback.

"There are a few moments of truth in Cashback, but those... are all cribbed from other movies and television shows," grumbles Matt Singer at IFC News.

"The movie is too cute by half," concedes Jim Ridley in the Voice. "But the flaky humor of wage slaves serial-killing time is good, rude fun; the trompe l'oeil camera trickery creates a woozy sleepwalking effect; and [director Sean] Ellis (a fashion photographer who's collaborated with David Lynch) and cinematographer Angus Hudson shoot the immaculate rows of paper towels and canned veggies with an Andreas Gursky-like eye for symmetrical splendor."

Matt Riviera finds "real beauty - and not a little humor."

Updated through 7/20.

Updates, 7/19: IndieWIRE interviews Ellis.

"Cashback aims for a Risky Business-type meld of sex comedy and art film, but doesn't have the steam to satisfy either," writes Stephen Snart in the L Magazine.

Updates, 7/20: "With its depressive, wishy-washy hero and alterna-pop soundtrack, Cashback wants to be a 21st-century answer to The Graduate (whose hero was also named Ben)," writes Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Times. "But between the film's validation of Ben's adolescent concept of beauty, its wafer-thin characterizations, its gorgeous but overwrought widescreen photography and its abundance of 'How did they do that?' trick shots, Cashback instead suggests a Malcolm in the Middle episode directed by Paul Thomas Anderson."

"Though graced with luscious imagery and dramatic soundtrack swells of Ravel and Bellini, all that useless beauty serves to prop up a conventional romantic comedy that's neither affecting nor funny," adds Scott Tobias at the AV Club.

"Ellis draws a very romantic portrait of a young artist as he ponders love, beauty and living in the moment," writes Kevin Crust in the Los Angeles Times. "In expanding the story to feature length, he makes some missteps, but all in all maintains the charming tone that dominated the original version."

Live-In Maid.

"Live-In Maid is modest in scope, but it feels complete, fully inhabited, in a way that more overtly ambitious movies rarely do," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "Its story and themes are outwardly straightforward, but as the film develops, it acquires a glow of mystery, as [director Jorge] Gaggero invites you to contemplate, within the context of two perfectly ordinary lives, the paradoxes of friendship and the challenge of maintaining dignity in a world that conspires to undermine it."

"Gaggero wisely confines almost all of the action to Beba's hermetic apartment, where the surfaces are kept polished to a high sheen, and pays deep attention to the grunts, wrinkles, and sighs of daily life," writes Julia Wallace in the Voice.

Updated through 7/20.

Earlier: Larry Rohter's backgrounder in the NYT. The film screens at Film Forum through July 31.

Updates, 7/19: Salon's Andrew O'Hehir calls Live-In Maid "a wrenching, often painful comedy with its roots in Bergman and Bresson and Chekhov, as well as in the extremely unfunny condition of the Argentine economy. Not a shot or a sentence or a line is wasted. Live-in Maid surely won't get much play here, but it's exquisite, diamond-tipped filmmaking, further evidence of the fine work Argentina's artists are producing under extreme circumstances."

"[W]hat we see in Live-In Maid is an odd but fascinating co-dependency," writes Aaron Dobbs. "But what is truly fascinating to me about this relationship is the question it presents: can these two women truly ever be friends? Can the power and class struggle which is ingrained in them due to their 30 years together ever put them on an equal plane? Will Dora ever be able to address Beba by her first name? Will Beba ever understand why maybe she should call before showing up with storage items at Dora's, even if she thinks that she's being generous in giving them to her?"

Update, 7/20: "Live-In Maid's premise would be ideal for a play, or a bravura performance piece like Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club. "Instead, writer-director Gaggero shoots for a kind of docu-realism, with a few overtly cinematic interludes, like one well-paced split-screen sequence. Gaggero's style is serviceable, but it doesn't really give Aleandro and Argentina the time or space to establish their tangled relationship."

Sunshine.

"Reigniting the sun: it's a science-fiction proposal that's naturally grandiose and metaphorical in concept... and promising in terms of narrative stakes, yet [director Danny] Boyle and [screenwriter Alex] Garland wisely throw a bunch of curve balls at the audience," writes Michael Koresky at indieWIRE.

"The fun in watching Sunshine relies on entering knowing the concept and not much more; Garland piles so many divergences, catastrophes, and moral dilemmas on top of one another with such accelerating swiftness that it grows impossible to look away. Things might get overwrought, silly even, but it's immensely pleasurable plunging headfirst into the fiery mess-even (or especially?) when it turns into an interstellar slasher film."

Updated through 7/20.

"Sunshine has been marketed as a cerebral science-fiction film (it even prompted us to discuss that very topic on this week's IFC News Podcast) but it's much more visceral than that," writes Matt Singer. "To be sure, there are plenty of 'big ideas' - mostly about the morality of mankind intervening in God's plan for the Earth, and whether such a God or a plan even exists at all - but at times, especially near the end, this is more Jason X than 2001: A Space Odyssey, if only Jason X were a good film with characters we cared about."

Also at IFC News: Aaron Hillis talks with Boyle, who tells him, "For whatever reason, whether good or bad in the short-term, our dedication to cities, progress and science in the long-term is astonishing. That's the path we're all on together, apart from the Taliban. It will enhance and maintain life given us by the start. That's a good thing, I think."

"Ideas scintillate over the surface of Sunshine without ever quite igniting, but at least the movie sparkles," writes Nathan Lee in the Voice. "What it doesn't do is cohere. Action flick, sci-fi thriller, metaphysical adventure, incoherent allegory, ethical hypothesis, and horror film all at once, this mad multitasker has the agenda of a dozen movies. Problem is, we know which ones."

2001, Alien, Solaris. "These allusions, and many others, merely underscore how much better those other films are," writes Peter Keough in the Boston Phoenix.

"Remember that old Twilight Zone episode in which the earth and the sun got way too close for comfort?" asks Cheryl Eddy in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. "As realistic and science based as any film about rocketing to the sun can hope to be, Sunshine elegantly, eerily taps into the same anxiety as that Twilight Zone episode - that we're all part of a particular cosmic scheme that will eventually, inevitably end."

Jason Silverman talks with Boyle for Wired News. And Claire Faggioli talks with Boyle, too - for SF360.

Earlier: "Anticipating Sunshine." and "Sunshine.," an April entry compiled during the days of the film's UK run.

Updates: Michael Guillén talks with Boyle, too.

"It's a good thing Boyle, whose impossible to categorize career has leapt from bravura breakout Trainspotting to zombiepocalypse film 28 Days Later to the slightly slushy kids flick Millions, is always such an imminently watchable director," writes Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog. "Sunshine may have some of the grand and solemn coffee shop philosophies of certain 70s sci-fi films, but it plays out like a smart, taut combination of Event Horizon and 2010. (Oh, hush now, 2010's not so bad.)"

Updates, 7/19: "Disappointingly, nobody actually says 'Negative, Captain,' but there's a lot of hushed, urgent talk about adjusting trajectories and such, and it comes as an immense relief when serial calamity strikes," notes Ella Taylor in the LA Weekly. "don't mean to put you off Sunshine, which is the most ravishingly atmospheric movie I've seen all year.... For sheer technical virtuosity, British cinema has every reason to thank Boyle and his Cool Britannia cohorts for dragging it out of its long obsession with the kitchen sink, and at 50 the director has grown up and away from the callow cynicism of Trainspotting. But aside from the lovely family film Millions, Boyle has never been very good at the human thing, and still isn't."

Danny Boyle has "trashed the suspense film (Shallow Grave), the stoner film (Trainspotting), the musical farce (A Life Less Ordinary), the horror film (28 Days Later) and now with the new space exploration movie, Sunshine, he destroys science-fiction," growls Armond White in the New York Press.

"While Boyle may occasionally step on the accelerator without paying heed to spatial orientation or character development, Sunshine has, simply put, stunning moments of sheer exhilaration fit for a big-budget spectacle scaling the epic dimensions of the cosmos," writes Michael Joshua Rowin in the L Magazine.

"[T]he plot does not compute," protests Robert Cashill. The film represents "a series of escalating wrong choices."

Nick Schager at Cinematical: "A gorgeously crafted intergalactic saga sorely lacking in originality or profundity, Boyle's film marries 2001 aesthetics with an Alien narrative to create a rather straightforward - and superficially entertaining - adventure devoid of much meaning."

Reeler ST VanAirsdale talks with Boyle.

Updates, 7/20: "If Sunshine plays out more like a viscerally pleasurable diversion than an intellectually stimulating head trip, it's largely because Mr Boyle tends to lean on familiar genre stratagems and his estimable technique rather than risk anything by going too far out and freaky," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "[W]hat's most interesting about Sunshine isn't whether the crew members survive but that they're willing to blow themselves up for their beliefs. 'I think it will be beautiful,' says one, contemplating annihilation, which doesn't make this the first movie about suicide bombers, only one of the more curious."

"[A]s gifted a filmmaker as Boyle is," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek, "he can't sustain the mood of dread he builds in the movie's first act. Slowly, Sunshine begins to creak under the considerable weight of its own pretensions."

"[T]hough it can't maintain its momentum all the way to the end, Sunshine until it stumbles is gratifyingly far from the usual space-opera stuff," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times.

"[N]o other film I've seen has made such a palpable on-screen presence of the sun's deadly heat and blinding light," writes JR Jones in the Chicago Reader.

"On paper, it's a horror movie for dour physicists," notes Tasha Robinson at the AV Club. "But the paper version wouldn't hint at the aggressively showy visuals, or the punishing sound effects and music, set at a volume fit to blow viewers back into their seats like the guy in the old 'Is it live or is it Memorex?' ad."

Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times: "So, anyway, younger girls won't like this movie, unless they know what happens under an automobile hood. Younger boys won't like it because the only thing that's possibly going to blow up real good is the sun. But science-fiction fans will like it, and also brainiacs, and those who sometimes look at the sky and think, man, there's a lot going on up there, and we can't even define precisely what a soliton is."

"[U]tterly unique, fresh and even revolutionary," declares Aaron Dobbs. "And yet, even with such virtual hyperbole, Sunshine may not achieve classic status."

James Rocchi sits in on a roundtable interview with Boyle for Cinematical.

Shorts, 7/18.

Noah Baumbach has written an adaptation Claire Messud's novel The Emperor's Children; Ron Howard will direct; Diane Garrett reports for Variety. Also, Michael Fleming: "Fox 2000 has set John Carney to direct Town House, a Doug Wright-scripted comedy that begins production in January. Pic marks the studio debut for the director of the Sundance prize-winning film Once."

"Satoshi Kon's Paprika is the finest, most exhilarating animated feature film that I have seen in quite some time," writes Steven Shaviro. "Paprika's style is something that I am a total sucker for: it's wildly, floridly psychedelic, but at the same time somehow harsh and astringent."

"I know of few recent films that have proved as polarizing as Funny Ha Ha (2005), but somehow I've managed to find myself in a place suspended between what seems to be the typical 'love it' or 'loathe it' reactions," writes Jesse Ataide. "It seems many of my peers have had no problems in enthusiastically proclaiming [Andrew] Bujalski 'the voice of our generation,' but like Jonathan Rosenbaum finally admits in his review of Regular Lovers (another film about young people coming to grips with the banalities of everyday living), I can recognize what it is that may give the impression that this film is capturing the essence of my particular generation at this particular moment in time, but when it comes down to it, as much as I like the film itself, I just don't really recognize the portrait."

At the House Next Door, what a double bill: Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Syndromes and a Century and Tsai Ming-liang's I Don't Want To Sleep Alone. Ryland Walker Knight caught it last Friday and was evidently not alone as he found it easy to fall in love with the first while the second turned out to be pretty rough going.

"Is [Bruno] Dumont repeating himself in Flandres?" wonders Gerald Peary in the Boston Phoenix.

George Ratliff's "sense of characterization is extraordinary, and he creates a satisfying psychological model of family life that can be picked up and looked at from any angle," writes Dan Sallitt. "Joshua is not just a character drama, however: it is a suspense film. After a strong first hour, the suspense format becomes dominant in the last forty-five minutes; and, though the characters remain more or less coherent, the movie's back somehow breaks anyway." Also: "I'm still baffled at how a filmmaker as assured and expressive as [Claire] Devers could have vanished from our collective consciousness."

"I expect a lot of things when I delve into Bonus Features on a DVD, but discovering an obscure, forgotten game show pilot that is the only known collaboration of William Castle, Robert Bloch, and Groucho Marx is not one of them." Tim Lucas elaborates.

The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw responds to Nick Cohen's piece in Sunday's Observer: "Why is Hollywood so keen to create terrorists who are not al-Qaida, not Islamist, not Muslim? Why not name the elephant in the living room?... I think The Case of the All-American Terrorist is at once more simple and more complex than Nick Cohen implies. It's more a psychological symptom of denial - a distant cousin to the denial suffered by pro-war parties in politics and the media."

Now, this is a subject line: "CNN Throws in Towel, Admits to Two Errors, and States That All 'Sicko' Facts Are True to Their Source (or something like that)... Moore Realizes All This is Huge Distraction and Then Spends More Precious Time Thanking Paris Hilton for Seeing 'Sicko'... Meanwhile, More than 300 Americans Die Because They Had No Health Insurance During the 8-Day Gupta-Moore War..."

In the Voice:

• Ed Gonzalez on Linas Phillips's Walking to Werner: "His quest for truth is spiritual, an example of striving through suffering, and it inspires the type of euphoria that may lead someone to one day walk to Linas."

• Ella Taylor on In Search of Mozart: "The music is divine, but the film sags beneath several tons of expert talking heads."

• Julia Wallace: "Although it's hard to be too churlish about such a good-hearted film, Summercamp! manages to make watching kids have fun surprisingly tedious." More from Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times.

Vince Keenan reads Bruce Dern's Things I've Said But Probably Shouldn't Have in which, among other things, he "expounds at length about what excites him to this day about acting, namely capturing actual human behavior onscreen. He cites several of these living moments, called 'Dernsers,' with many coming from my favorite Dern movies, Smile and Diggstown. His comparison of Matt Damon's performance in Good Will Hunting and Ryan O'Neal's in Love Story has me ready to watch both movies again....This warts-and-all book goes on the (very) short list of acting memoirs worth reading."

Cineuropa runs an interview with screenwriter Louis Gardel (Indochine).

Dennis Cozzalio has 26 questions for you. It's "Mr Shoop's Surfin' Summer School Midterm."

Ted Pigeon runs through a list of some of his favorite documentaries and asks after yours.

There comes a point in a lifetime... Michael Atkinson: "I no longer record off of cable (my area only recently got TCM in any case), I no longer buy DVDs, and am very stingy about buying books (whereas I used to be a slut). I don't think I'll live long enough to see and read everything I already have."

In the Guardian, Ronald Bergan remembers Edward Yang.

Sheila Variations wishes Clifford Odets, who would have turned 101 today, a happy birthday. Via Keith Uhlich at the House Next Door.

Online browsing tip #1. Slow Dancing. Via Alex Ross.

Online browsing tip #2. Nathaniel R presents: "Ten (semi-randomly selected) reasons why the cinematography of The Fabulous Baker Boys (one of the best films of its decade) should've won Michael Ballhaus the Oscar."

Online viewing tip #1. In a fresh episode, Reeler TV goes man-on-the-street.

Online viewing tip #2. Michael Caine and Britt Ekland steam up your monitor in a scene from Get Carter. Probably NSFW. Go via Joe Leydon, who's got the trailer, too.

Fests and events, 7/18.

"Easily trouncing the recent Hollywood heat rash of over-extended superheroes and Hasbro infomercials, this summer's most satisfying sci-fi blockbuster is a crypto-Marxist, proto-Fascist spectacle first released 80 years ago: Fritz Lang's Metropolis, the legendary art deco futuro- fable of industrialist excess, proletarian rebellion, and robot romance, one of the last big-budget exhilarations of the pre-talkie era." Ed Halter celebrates another run, this one at Film Forum for a week starting Friday. Update: More from Vadim Rizov at the Reeler.

Also in the Voice, Carl Rollyson previews The Mistress and the Muse: The Films of Norman Mailer (July 22 through August 5) and wonders why Mailer turned to filmmaking in the first place. "One of Mailer's inspirations was surely John Cassavetes... Mailer wanted to create a stark black-and-white cinema verité/faux documentary that would blur the boundaries between fact and fiction - a harbinger of what he would produce in his nonfiction novels. But in Maidstone, the best of Mailer's filmmaking efforts, the results are, as Vincent Canby wrote in the Times at the time, a 'mixed bag,' veering from tedious to terrifying."

"[T]he number of films produced during Hollywood's first decades meant a few Jewish movies slipped onto the screen, if only for novelty's sake," notes Dennis Harvey in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. "One is a 1925 feature called His People. This rediscovered gem is the centerpiece attraction of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival's 27th annual program" and it's "a major exception to the silent era's ironic general avoidance of Jewish imagery beyond the occasional comic stereotype, scheming shopkeeper, or biblical flashback." Also, a few more tips for the festival that opens tomorrow and runs through July 26 in SF before traveling on to other Bay Area towns.

Michael Hawley has previewed 14 films in the lineup and writes at the Evening Class, "My favorite of the bunch by far is Oliver Hirschbiegel's Just an Ordinary Jew."

Toronto's added more titles, including David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises, and Brian Brooks has got them at indieWIRE. More from Kurt at Twitch, where reviews from the Fantasia Festival are still coming in.

The Philadelphia Weekly offers a guide to the second week of the Philadelphia International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival.

More from acquarello and the series Leading the Charge: Woodfall Film Productions and the Revolution in 60s British Cinema (through July 26): A Taste of Honey and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.

"The [Dallas Video Festival] kicks off its 20th year in two weeks, and the just-released lineup represents the festival's rebellious, mixed media idealogy better than ever," notes David Lowery. July 31 through August 5.

Alleyball's the winner at the Independent Features Film Festival.

I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry.

"Tremendously savvy in its stupid way, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry is as eloquent as Brokeback Mountain, and even more radical," argues Nathan Lee in the Voice. It's "the first movie to effectively hijack that all-purpose justification for right-wing bigotry, 'protecting the children,' and redeploy it as a weapon of the homosexual intifada.... This sodomite had a gay old time."

And Ed Gonzalez? Not so much: "I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry is pro-gay but it's less interested in collapsing straight-male hang-ups about gay men than is in putting on a surprisingly mawkish show of political correctness against distinctly retrograde forms of homophobia," he writes at Slant. "This is one of the stranger straight-male fantasies out there: The filmmakers sincerely believe that homophobia is easily resolved, but they seem to desperately want a cookie from the gay community for realizing that 'the word faggot is a bad word.' Their vulgar self-congratulation compromises their goodwill."

Updated through 7/20.

"Like Mary Poppins's spoonful of sugar, a little comedy makes it a whole lot easier for audiences to swallow exposure to concepts that make them otherwise twitchy," writes Alonso Duralde at AfterElton.com. "There are, in fact, three main methods employed by comedies (and even some dramas) that allow filmmakers to teach audiences a civics lesson about equal rights without being thuddingly didactic about it." Check 'em out.

John Hazelton, writing for Screen Daily, finds the film "turns out to be a pretty inoffensive but not terrifically funny buddy comedy that slips its vague pleas for lifestyle tolerance in between bursts of the kind of broad, un-PC humour for which its star is best known."

Following a "list of moments that made me cringe," Rob at I Don't Like Renee Zellweger writes, "I don't usually consider myself easily offended, and am all for humor that pushes the boundaries of taste, but I am honestly disgusted that GLAAD has stamped this movie with their approval and even say so on their website." Thanks, Nathaniel.

Updates, 7/19: "I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry is not as hilarious as it thinks it is, profound as it pretends to be, or tolerant as it intends," writes Bill Gibron for PopMatters. "Yet none of this will matter to the throngs who only think of film as a way to waste two hours. For them, this crackerjack comedy will allow them to remain bigoted and have a belly laugh or two. And Hollywood scores another monetary hash mark in the category of knowing audience underestimation."

"[L]ove him or hate him, [Adam] Sandler understands - sometimes more in the breach than the observance - that winking at the audience can derail a comedy in seconds, and that if you're going to offend liberal sensibilities, you have to go all the way. For all the sitcom capering, he and [Kevin] James play out their skittish partnership absolutely straight, if that's the word," writes Ella Taylor in the LA Weekly. She wanted to hate it, but just can't. Two more observations: "If nothing else, Chuck & Larry should open up a whole new career path for the ineffably funny, unselfconsciously buck-naked Ving Rhames as an übermacho firefighter who's been sitting on a little secret of his own. Astonishingly, Chuck & Larry's screenplay is credited to Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor, with whom one doesn't associate such go-for-it vulgarity, though there were hints of raunch to come in the famous hotel sequence between Thomas Haden Church and Sandra Oh in Sideways."

"Chuck & Larry has more laughs per minute than any movie since Hot Fuzz," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "Half the fun is knowing how thoroughly these jokes will outrage the PC brigade - especially with other bad-boy gags in the mix.... This is no Staircase, yet Chuck & Larry ascends - past our seemingly instinctual prejudices. It's a modern classic (despite a cheap-shot plug for Giuliani). By comparison, Hollywood's most celebrated gay comedies - In & Out, Chuck and Buck, Blades of Glory, even the laughable Brokeback Mountain - were all failures of nerve."

"Thirty minutes of this movie will bring the chuckling, immature inner bigot out of even the most staunchly mature liberal," Cullen Gallagher gleefully warns us in the L Magazine.

Alonso Duralde's back at AfterElton.com, this time with a review: "While it's very easy to eviscerate Chuck and Larry from an activist point of view - the pre-enlightened Sandler makes jokes about 'Olympic Baton Swallowing,' while Dan Aykroyd tells the leads, 'What you shove up your ass is your own business' - all one really has to do to slam the flick is look at the lazy, contrived writing and the traffic-cop direction by frequent Sandler accomplice Dennis Dugan (Big Daddy, Happy Gilmore)."

"I'm sorry, what year are we living in?" asks Aaron Hillis at Premiere. "That anyone in their right minds could be fooled into thinking that two hours of overt homophobia with a disingenuous punch line about tolerance is okay makes me pig-biting mad. That the seemingly prototypical audience I watched it with laughed like stoned hyenas makes me somewhat embarrassed to be an American. And that an inane Adam Sandler comedy of lowest-common-denominator gags could rile me up this much just makes me want to cry. It's almost ugly enough to be considered a perverse work of art."

Updates, 7/20: "Fear of a gay planet fuels plenty of American movies; it's as de rigueur in comedy as in macho action," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "But what's mildly different about Chuck & Larry is how sincerely it tries to have its rainbow cake and eat it too." The film "has been deemed safe for conscientious viewing by a representative of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, a media watchdog group. Given the movie's contempt for women, who mainly just smile, sigh and wiggle their backdoors at the camera, it's too bad that some lesbian (and Asian) Glaad members didn't toss in their two cents about the movie."

Josh Ralske agrees: "Maybe we're scouring the film so conscientiously for signs of homophobia that we don't notice the way women are portrayed. But in hindsight, the film is more repugnant in its treatment of women than in its (still somewhat troublesome) portrayal of gay men."

"[N]o matter how crass and clueless the trailers make it look, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry is something sweeter, and quite a bit messier, than I expected," writes Stephanie Zacharek at Salon. "[W]ith its tepid gags and faltering pacing, [it] may not be a very good movie. But at least, within its clumsiness, it strives for some kind of solidarity."

"There are two ways to look at it," suggests Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "Either be depressed that the culture hasn't evolved past its crude stereotypes and gay-panic jokes, or be encouraged by signs that the masses are slowly inching toward tolerance. Whatever the case, the film's desire to simultaneously mock and embrace makes it the most schizophrenic comedy of its kind since Shallow Hal, which chased fat jokes with an earnest message about how real beauty comes from within. Good intentions can only carry these films so far, and this one falls woefully short."

"The depiction of gay life (or more precisely Chuck and Larry's experience of it) is more pathetic than offensive," writes Kevin Crust in the Los Angeles Times.

"Chuck and Larry's message of acceptance is about as believable as Liza Minnelli's last marriage," quips Kate Worteck at Nerve.

"Perversely, I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry uses gayness as a metaphor for male friendship," writes Steve Erickson at Gay City News. "Just as abortion is the unmentionable hovering over [Judd] Apatow's view of unwanted pregnancy as the route to male maturity in Knocked Up, bisexuality is the absence felt everywhere here." If the film "were more daring, it might suggest that his extensive sexual history with women isn't a sign of exclusive heterosexuality, but a high sex-drive potentially aimed in several directions."

Filmmaker. Summer 07.

No, Steve Buscemi is not one of Filmmaker's "25 New Faces of Independent Film." That's one face that's been around; but chances are you'll have seen one or two of the 25 new ones, too - a few names at least will ring a bell. But of course the point of the feature is to introduce us to faces and names we don't know - yet.

"In the current debate over the Iraq war, Charles Ferguson's debut documentary, No End in Sight, takes what is perhaps the most troubling position of all: the war could have gone right." Scott Macaulay talks with Ferguson about "making a first doc, post-Michael Moore political filmmaking and the future of Iraq."

Updated.

Jason Guerrasio talks with Jason Kohn about Manda Bala (Send a Bullet), which "has three main threads. One centers on the corrupt politician Jader Barbalho, who created the largest frog farm in the world for money-laundering purposes. Another looks at plastic surgeon Dr Juarez Avelar, who has performed miracles for deformed former captives by reconstructing the ears their kidnappers have sliced off. Finally, we meet a kidnapper, 'Magrinho,' who puts the whole film in perspective when he says, 'You either steal with a gun or a pen.'"

Peter Bowen talks with George Ratliff about Joshua - and its lead, Jacob Kogan: "He seems to have read everything that we have read and seen all of the same movies, but he is only 10. One of the most amazing things is how quick Jacob was. The character is a piano protégé, but Jacob did not play any piano, and in two weeks he learned to play a Beethoven sonata that would have been difficult for most adults."

James Ponsoldt talks with Werner Herzog about Rescue Dawn: "It's the physicality of the jungle that attracts me — the looming and dangerous beauty in it. But I've never used a jungle as a scenic backdrop. It's always somehow like an inner landscape, like fever dreams of a landscape."

"[M]aking the credits, grants, refunds and rebates work for an independent film demands a very close inspection of a state's tax incentive program and, just as important, the specific needs of one's production." Alicia Van Couvering peers into the labyrinth.

Updates: Anthony Kaufman adds a note to his piece in the print version on "the ongoing clusterfuck of indie film."

Matt Dentler spots several SXSW alumni among the 25 new faces.

The Oregonian's Shawn Levy spots two from his corner of the country.

Sock Puppets of Cité Soleil.

David D'Arcy asks the real Asger Leth about the faux "Asger Leth."

You may have read about the Wall Street Journal's expose and all the fallout over the revelation that the CEO of Whole Foods has been blogging for years on behalf of his own cause under the faux-biblical Internet alias of "Rahodeb". He's far from alone, as we've seen in the much-publicized Lee Siegel case at the New Republic.

Sockpuppetry is also alive and well in the world of movies, and in the latest case that's surfaced, we see that it has moved far beyond the pre-blog practice of creating "film critics" and parading their flattering judgments in ads and on posters, as Sony did with the reliably quotable "David Manning" back in 2001.

Updated through 7/20.

In an email sent out Friday from the address asgerleth79@gmail.com to asger_leth@yahoo.com, someone who gives the impression that he's Asger Leth, director of the documentary The Ghosts of Cite Soleil, is sending out a review entitled "Leni Riefenstahl Goes to Haiti," by Charlie Hinton of the Haiti Action Committee. Hinton has been a public critic of the film. The Leni Riefenstahl comparison tips you off to what's coming, an attack on the documentary that is purportedly endorsed by the director himself, even though the film is stigmatized as this era's version of Nazi propaganda. (And we thought that we had almost figured out what the neologism "blogofascism" actually meant.) In the message, "Asger Leth" praises the review that accuses him of carrying water for the Bush administration and neglecting crucial facts about Aristide.

Reached in his native Denmark, Leth claimed that neither "Asger Leth" address on the mass email was his and laughed at the effort at impersonation. "They want to discredit the film as much as they can, but they're pissing up against a hurricane," he said, citing a high percentage of positive reviews of the documentary. He described Hinton as an "Aristide freak."

In a previous dispatch, I described attacks on Leth at the San Francisco International Film Festival by Bay Area Aristide supporters who treat the former Haitian president with the same reverence once reserved by American leftists for Fidel Castro. Now, if you see a message that begins, "Fantastik!.... as you know for nearly 3 years I have worked tirelessly to bring my dark vision of Santo Domingo into the light...," you'll know: That's not Asger Leth.

- David D'Arcy.

---

Updates, 7/20: "What makes Ghosts of Cité Soleil so gripping, and so troublesome, is the intimacy that the Danish director Asger Leth has engineered with the Chimerès, without which there would be no picture," writes Ryan Gilbey in the New Statesman:

Several times during this film, I thought of Man Bites Dog, the 1992 mockumentary in which the complicity of a camera crew in the life of the hit man they are filming increases until they are raping and murdering along with him. Leth doesn't cross the line into criminality, but you can't be entirely sure that he wouldn't comply if 2Pac asked him to pass those bullets, or load that gun.

It doesn't make me proud to admit it, but that moral ambiguity is what gives this documentary its heat, and its edge. As with the best work of Errol Morris or Nick Broomfield, you never know from one scene to the next where your sympathies will fall.

"Leth's movie is politically and morally illiterate," argues the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw. Yikes.

But at the AV Club, Noel Murray argues that "Leth has made something undeniably exciting" and gives the film a B-.

Online viewing tip. 12.5 Seconds Later....

It's delightful, it's whimsical, it's funny and maybe just a tad cruel. But in a good way. It's 12.5 Seconds Later..., a new 4.5 minute short by Jamie Stuart for Filmmaker.

After you watch it, read this:

"Jamie Stuart walks us through how he used Final Cut Studio 2 to make his latest short film."

Shorts, 7/17.

"What Ever Happened to Queer Cinema?" asks Alonso Duralde at AfterElton.com. "Yes, the success of [Brokeback Mountain] lifted long-gestating projects like The Mayor of Castro Street, The Front Runner, Stone Butch Blues and The Dreyfus Affair out of development limbo, but as of today none of them have a firm shooting date set. And independent cinema, where queer voices have been breaking the rules of cinema and exciting audiences with new possibilities for at least the past few decades, seems content to make one toothless genre picture (lesbian romantic comedies! gay thrillers!) after another." Via Jenni Olson.

Jason Sperb relaunches Jamais Vu.

Girish opens "a series of occasional posts I'm planning on the subject of surrealism and cinema."

At Cinematical, Patrick Walsh has news of a followup to The Golden Age, meaning, yes, Shekhar Kapur and Cate Blanchett would be making a trilogy about Elizabeth I, and Erik Davis hears that Jonathan Demme will be shooting Dancing with Sheba this fall with Anne Hathaway.

For more up-n-coming news, see Boyd van Hoeij at european-films.net, the Guardian and Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog.

For The Big Sellout (Der grosse Ausverkauf), Florian Opitz "travelled to four continents to draw attention to the destructive consequences of the wave of privatisation carried out internationally in the 1980s and 1990s." Bernd Reinhardt at the WSWS: "Opitz graphically and tangibly shows the dramatic consequences of vital services such as water, electricity, healthcare and transport being put into private hands."

Ed Gonzalez on Descent: "Director Talia Lugacy understands how rape can leave a woman without the authority of expression, and so she pitches her feature-length debut as a work of careful instruction and, finally, rebellion—a means for victims of sexual aggression to grapple with, if not necessarily overcome their feelings of powerlessness." Also at Slant, Nick Schager: "With The Sugar Curtain, documentarian Camila Guzmán Urzúa cinematically strives to reconcile herself with her memories, an endeavor motivated by her still vibrantly warm feelings for the Havana of her 1980s childhood and the harsh, depressing reality of its present state."

"Curt Johnson's documentary Your Mommy Kills Animals takes an expansive look at the American animal-rights movement, and all the savagery, nobility, and hypocrisy therein," writes Michael Koresky at indieWIRE. It "makes for a surprisingly level-headed, appropriately balanced primer on the current state of this multifaceted activism."

Dave Kehr's DVD column in the New York Times this week takes on the latest package from Eclipse, Raymond Bernard's Wooden Crosses and Les Misérables: "Mr Bernard, who did his best work before World War II (and then spent the war in hiding from the Nazis), is little remembered today, even in France. But on the evidence of these two very powerful, very personal films, he's a vital figure much worth reclaiming." Also, "excellent new versions of five CinemaScope films of the 1950s featuring Joan Collins, two of which are quite watchable."

Michael Atkinson at IFC News on Harry Kümel's Malpertuis: "Truth be told, no film could quite live up to the decades of subterranean fanboy hype it's inadvertently produced... Kümel's first feature, Les Lèvres Rouges (Daughters of Darkness), released earlier the same year, is a widely appreciated elegant-decadent rejigger of vampire lore set in a bedazzlingly barren off-season seaside hotel. Malpertuis is as inelegant a movie as you can imagine, in your face, lit like a carnival and entranced with its own grotesqueries.... You have to see it, of course, and I'm glad I did, finally, after all these years." Also, Terry Gilliam's Tideland "may be one of those films that require a distanced cultural context, not the demands of the marketplace now, to frame it."

"The term 'Euro pudding' referred to a flood of films from the 1960s and 70s like The Cassandra Crossing, Woman Times Seven and The Fifth Musketeer, combining a melange of international talents such as a German actress, French actor and Italian director in hopes of luring coin (and audiences) from each country," writes Ali Jaafar in Variety. "Now, a new generation of European filmmakers is creating a more organic flavor of Euro pudding. Filmmakers like the Teuton-Turkish Fatih Akin and French-Algerian Rachid Bouchareb are making films that tackle the growing interconnectivity of European society." Via Ray Pride.\

"The opening is that point of the film which is the most purely cinematic. Image, mood and feeling are uppermost, all working on our senses before the narrative drama takes over." Peter Bradshaw introduces yet another list at the Guardian, with honorable mentions going to the openings of The Seventh Seal and Tokyo Story. Xan Brooks then takes over, writing up ten more.

Also, Germaine Greer blasts Richard Neville, his book, Hippie Hippie Shake, the upcoming adaptation and any and everyone that has anything at all to do with it whatsoever. Then there's Graeme Allister's guide to summer counter-programming in the UK.

"Welles's best sequences brim with the sheer ecstasy of simultaneously living and creating, and doing both freely and to the fullest," writes Tom Huddleston at Not Coming to the Theater Near You. "F for Fake is perhaps the most glorious and sustained example of this tendency."

Kamera runs an extract from Colin Odell and Michelle LeBlanc's David Lynch.

What if Harry Potter were black or gay? wonders Malena Amusa at Alternet. Related: Motoko Rich talks with Jim Dale, Harry Potter's voice in the audio versions, for the NYT and two pieces on wizard rock: Joshua Zumbrun and Sonya Geis for the Washington Post and Tim Dowling for the Guardian.

Frank Dietz, an artist whose work is often based on classic horror film characters dreamt up by someone else, has announced that "the selling of my work is apparently illegal, which I did not realize after 12 years of doing so, so I will no longer sell my monster art." Tim Lucas wonders if he's been contacted by this or that studio and writes, "As someone who owns a couple of Dietz originals (a painting and a charcoal portrait), I find the possibility of such bullying both galling and reprehensible. I say this as someone with intellectual property of my own, toward which I feel a sense of vigilance and responsibility."

"[T]he main reason cinemas are going digital is that they are desperate for an edge," argues the Economist. Also: "3-D films can earn three times as much revenue per screen as 2-D versions on their first weekend. They are also immune to piracy... And even the most advanced home-cinema system cannot do 3-D."

David Poland posts the Women's Wear Daily profile of Nikki Finke that she evidently made disappear. Via Eugene Hernandez: "The constant battles and bickering between must-read Hollywood industry bloggers David Poland (The Hot Blog), Nikki Finke (Deadline Hollywood Daily) and Jeffrey Wells (Hollywood Elsewhere) often deliver engaging insider tales from LA."

"The long, sad decline of Robin Williams: a timeline" by Willa Paskin at Radar Online. Via Bookforum, also pointing to Carla Meyer's piece for the Sacremento Bee on journalists in the movies.

Online viewing tip. The Walk: Wiley Wiggins reinterprets David Lowery's The Outlaw Son.

Fests and events, 7/17.

Tonight at Gallery 1988 in Los Angeles, Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier host the opening of Crazy 4 Cult, an exhibition featuring 50 artists riffing on favorite scenes in cult movies. Via Drawn!

"2008: Man With a Movie Camera is a participatory video shot by people around the world who are invited to record video according to the original script of Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera and submit it to a website which will archive, sequence and deliver the submissions to The Big Screen in 2007-08. When the work streams your contribution becomes part of a worldwide montage, in Vertov's terms the 'decoding of life as it is.'" Via Coudal Partners.

At Twitch, Blake's got another round of titles slated for this fall's Fantastic Fest.

Acquarello's posting reviews from Leading the Charge: Woodfall Film Productions and the Revolution in 60s British Cinema, a series running through July 26: Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer.

"Tropfest and Tribeca team up for Tropfest@Tribeca, a free, public, outdoor short film festival. Now taking entries."

"John Sayles will be saluted at the 48th Thessaloniki International Film Festival in Greece, November 16 - 25, 2007, where his new film, Honeydripper, will have its European premiere," reports Eugene Hernandez at indieWIRE.

Online viewing tip. At IFC News, Alison Willmore talks with Grady Hendrix about how well the New York Asian Film Festival went - and with Sion Sono about Exte. Lots of clips from the full festival lineup - fun stuff!

Shorts, 7/16.

"Long unavailable on revival or official video circuits, Robert Bresson's first feature - made during the occupation in 1943 shortly after his one-year German imprisonment - was digitally restored by the Centre Nationale de la Cinématographie in 2005, screened at the Cannes Film Festival, and recently released on DVD by Éditions Gallimard." And Doug Cummings reviews Les Anges du Péché at Robert-Bresson.com: "Bresson would later disparage the film's melodramatic elements as well as its occasional theatrical acting, but what might have seemed like indulgence by his later standards has widely been recognized as restraint by others.... Moreover, the film projects a distinct Bressonian sensibility in its fascination with the darker side of religious life, not only the suffering and struggling that occurs between spirit and flesh, but also the psychological turmoil that can flourish within religious codes and institutions."

"A minor America: the term was used regarding the US films selected at the Cannes Film Festival - Zodiac by Fincher, Death Proof by Tarantino, No Country for Old Men by the Coen brothers and Paranoid Park by Gus Van Sant," notes Hervé Aubron in Cahiers du cinéma. "Since then we've been wondering if this migration of concept described by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their book, Kafka for Minor Literature (Minuit Publications, 1975) would hold up. It's not doing much better for the time being. It remains gimmickry, but it does have staying power, and is spreading to other recent American films, from Cronenberg to Shyamalan, Friedkin to Scorsese."

A special edition of the News Reel at Wim Wenders's official site: "20 Years of Wings of Desire."

"The cinema added something invaluable to the romantic comedy: the camera's ability to place lovers in an enchanted, expanding envelope of setting and atmosphere." How, wonders David Denby, have we come from an era in which the "best directors of romantic comedy in the 1930s and 40s - Frank Capra, Gregory La Cava, Leo McCarey, Howard Hawks, Mitchell Leisen and Preston Sturges - knew that the story would be not only funnier but much more romantic if the fight was waged between equals" to what is currently "the dominant romantic-comedy trend of the past several years - the slovenly hipster and the female straight arrow.... the slacker-striver romance." Related: Zach Campbell on Knocked Up and Judd Apatow in general.

Also in the New Yorker:

• "Sicko is a revelation," writes Atul Gawande. "And what makes this especially odd to say is that the movie brings to light nothing that the media haven't covered extensively for years." Even so: "If, in 2009, we actually swear in a President committed to universal health care, the fight will turn ugly."

• "The animation gang at Pixar don't settle for goosing old fairy tales and shining up media-weary jokes, as the DreamWorks folks do in the Shrek series," writes Denby. "They create each movie afresh, and some of their productions, especially [Ratatouille] and The Incredibles, both written and directed by Brad Bird, have reached heights of invention, speed, and wit not seen in animation since the work done by Chuck Jones at Warner Bros in the 1940s." Related: In the Observer, Masoud Golsorkhi marvels at the hit that Ratatouille's become "in the land of 'Freedom Fries.'"

Did you know Mia Farrow is blogging? She's just back from a trip to central Africa. Via Tunku Varadarajan's piece in the Wall Street Journal on ten years of blogs.

Mike at Esotika Erotica Psychotica points to five blogs that make him think.

Rob Humanick is "hosting an opportunity for you to finally clear out all those stacks of DVD's you desperately want to get back to their rightful owners." The Movies I've Borrowed for an Unreasonably Long Time Blog-a-Thon runs all week long.

"Universal and Tribeca partners Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal" have "optioned the Roy Rowan memoir Chasing the Dragon: A Veteran Journalist's Firsthand Account of the 1949 Chinese Revolution," reports Michael Fleming for Variety.

At some point, as reluctant as I've been to, I'll return to the Valkyrie hoopla in Germany. As Bryan Singer prepares to start shooting on Thursday, the debate over the casting of Tom Cruise as Claus von Stauffenberg has finally begun to simmer down, so the point at which one can begin look back at the whole mess with a bit of perspective may not be that far off. In the meantime, though, Mark Oppenheimer has a not-at-all unrelated piece in the New York York Times Magazine: "Most people in the Los Angeles acting community believe that the Beverly Hills Playhouse is a serious conservatory where actors train with a master teacher, while others think it's a recruitment center for Scientology. I wondered if it might be both. What if the playhouse was a serious conservatory, and [Milton] Katselas a master teacher, not in spite of Scientology but because of it?"

As it happens, one click over, Jesse Green's profiling John Travolta in the run-up to the opening of Hairspray.

Also:

• Manohla Dargis and AO Scott find that the Harry Potter films make for "a fascinating case study. Looking at the five movies side by side, you can see how the material lends itself to diverse film genres and styles, from breezy children's movie to ominous political thriller, and how very dissimilar directors approach, sidestep and conquer similar material." Related: The Observer's Philip French on Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Earlier: the Phoenix entry.

• Larry Rohter talks with writer-director Jorge Gaggero and his lead actress, Norma Aleandro, about Live-In Maid.

• Greg Evans recommends checking out the first season of The Outer Limits, the early 60s sci-fi series boasting the talents of producer Leslie Stevens, screenwriter Joseph Stefano and cinematographer Conrad Hall.

• Brad Stone previews VeohTV: "The software acts like a Web browser but displays only Internet video, presenting full-length television shows and popular clips from the Web's largest video sites, like NBC.com and YouTube."

• And Saul Hansell reports on Sony's entry in the Internet video race, Crackle.

• Michael Cieply and Brooks Barnes: "In a strategy that is starkly different from other top film studios, [Ron] Meyer has determined that Universal should stay well behind the leaders, allowing the flashiest and most expensive projects - and typically the biggest payoffs - to go elsewhere."

For the Age, Philippa Hawker talks with Michael Rowland about his debut feature, audience favorite at the Sydney Film Festival and winner of the jury prize in Karlovy Vary: "Its catalyst, as it happens, was his reading of Thomas Friedman's 1999 book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, a reflection on globalisation and its implications. But Lucky Miles is an unpredictable response: it's a comedy and a drama, an adventure, a buddy movie, a tale of arrivals, discoveries, misunderstandings and blunders."

"B.I.K.E. is probably the closest to an 'insider' look at the infamous Black Label Bike Club, an anti-consumerist group of pro-bicycle culture anarchists, that's going to be made," suggests Mike Everleth at Bad Lit.

"In Back to the Future, Executive Decision, True Lies and dozens of others, Arabs were off-the-peg bad guys. Yet after 9/11, the stereotypes weren't fleshed out with an all-too-real psychopathic ideology, but abandoned." Nick Cohen argues - in the Observer, no less - that those stereotypes should be fleshed out.

Also:

• Vanessa Thorpe: "[T]he extraordinary story of how [John] Myatt and [John] Drewe joined together to con art experts and some of the world's most prominent private collectors over seven years is to be turned into a Hollywood film, with George Clooney and Clive Owen tipped to play the leading roles."

• Gaby Wood has a long backgrounder on Adrienne Shelly and Waitress.

• Sarah Hughes notes that "a disturbing new musical breed has emerged - the 80s-film-turned-musical."

Reviews from the Fantasia Festival are still coming fast and strong at Twitch.

Norman Lear's first and only foray into feature filmmaking, Cold Turkey, "stands as a seamless demonstration of insightful social humor," writes Adam Balz at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.

"Television and cinema are similar in design and function, but the split between them strongly exhibits my adopted notion that not only can nothing be understood or interpreted without context, but that context decides the content; to the point that context is more important than the text," writes Ted Pigeon, arguing that we find ourselves at "the beginning of a bigger dialogue about nature of inter-medium influence, connectedness, and disconnectedness and the varying shifts in visual style in various visual media."

MS Smith: "Whatever differences Late Autumn might have with its predecessor, the similarities are more significant, particularly a quality that Michael Atkinson attributed to Late Spring that applies to the later film equally well: 'Ozu's Zen-infused sensibility translates on film to something like the art form's nascent formal beauty: patiently watching little happen, and the meditative moments around the nonhappening, until it becomes crashingly apparent that lives are at stake and the whole world is struggling to be born.'"

For the Guardian, Andrew Dickson meets Helvetica director Gary Hustwit, whose "first attempt at a full-length documentary, shot on a credit-card budget and made up of interviews with designers and typographers, has somehow become a global phenomenon."

For SF360, Glen Helfand talks with Jennifer Baichwal and Edward Burtynsky about Manufactured Landscapes.

"For all its awkwardness, [Your Mommy Kills Animals] is a documentary for thinkers that offers dense and comprehensive representation of animal rights as movement, ethic, culture and law," writes Sara Schieron. Also at Slant, Rob Humanick on the barely bearable In Search of Mozart: "No wonder history's dead."

Filmbrain runs across linkage between Seconds and 2046 and wonders, "Influence... or merely coincidence?"

Celebrating Katharine Hepburn's centenary, a month-long retrospective, The Late, Great Kate, starts Friday. Susan King's been calling around for the Los Angeles Times: "[S]everal people who worked with her — many of whom called her a friend — offered their impressions of working with the complex actress."

The "B" Movie Celebration lineup is in place. August 17 through 19.

Online magnifying tip. A "History of Film" poster.

Barbara Stanwyck @ 100.

"The tributes to Barbara Stanwyck this year, which marks the 100th anniversary of the year of her birth, started early and frequently," writes Edward Copeland. "Dammit, she deserves it. Still, I saved my salute until today, the actual 100th anniversary of her birth." The Odienator comments: "This is a great piece about a grande dame."

Anne Thompson points to earlier tributes by Anthony Lane in the New Yorker, Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times and Terrence Rafferty in the New York Times, notes TCM's Stanwyck-a-Thon and reminds locals that "the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences has mounted its largest-ever exhibition dedicated to one star, featuring more than 70 posters and lobby cards from Stanwyck's pics."

Updated.

Peter Nellhaus revisits Roustabout: "That Barbara Stanwyck took the role may have been as a favor to producer Hal Wallis as well as an admission that at age 57, her choices of roles in theatrical films was limited.... [T]his is Stanwyck at her most self-effacing, with the possible exception of her last big screen role in The Night Walker. At least compared to some of the films her contemporaries were doing, Stanwyck was able to end her screen career with a modicum of dignity."

More in German from Gerhard Midding in the Berliner Morgenpost.

Updates: "Here is just a small sample of what the Siren turned up in her search for what other professionals thought of 'Missy,' as her friends called her." What a round-up.

The Shamus is rattled by Stanwyck's biography, but then decides, "Maybe Barbara Stanwyck could have spent more time addressing her personal life, but she didn't care about her personal life. She cared about her work. Her work was her life, and the people she worked with loved her for what she gave to that work. And so in the end, that is what we must judge her on."

Jonathan Lapper celebrates "one of her earliest and most unglamorous films, So Big!."

Goya's Ghosts.

"The official portraitist of Amadeus and The People vs Larry Flynt will return to theaters Friday with Goya's Ghosts, a costume drama and controlled historical epic that marks his first film since the Andy Kaufman biopic Man on the Moon in 1999," writes Paul Cullum. Profiling Milos Forman for the Los Angeles Times, he finds in the new film "a startling allegory for modern geopolitical adventurism - a subject the 75-year-old director has had much time to reflect on as of late."

But for Nick Schager, writing at Slant, Foreman "goes astray with Goya's Ghosts, a beautiful disaster of a period picture that weaves its preposterous story around Francisco Goya (Stellan Skarsgård) during the Spanish Inquisition and Napoleon's invasion of Spain."

Updated through 7/20.

The Reeler meets the director and notes that "Goya's Ghosts stands apart [from Forman's other films] in that Forman primarily exaggerates the world the artist lives in, not the artist's personal life."

Forman's a guest on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Updates, 7/17: Dan Persons talks with Javier Bardem, who sees his character, Brother Lorenzo, as "a victim of the totalitarian regimes that happened in that moment in history."

"It's certainly refreshing to see Forman, who wrote the film with legendary screenwriter and Buñuel partner-in-crime Jean-Claude Carrière, forgo his usual tendency of beating viewers over the head in order to convince them of the immaculate saintliness of his outsider heroes," writes Michael Joshua Rowin at indieWIRE. "Unfortunately, things start getting a little silly and, in typical Forman fashion, more than a little overwrought when Goya's Ghosts arrives at the Napoleonic War."

Updates, 7/18: "A prestigious, handsomely mounted costume piece with a messy, modern sensibility, Goya's Ghosts doesn't have to stretch very far to find present-day parallels," writes Sean Burns in the Philadelphia Weekly. "Religious fanaticism and state-sanctioned torture have made great comebacks recently, and if nothing else the screenplay (by Forman and Jean-Claude Carrière) possesses the outsized, commendable fury of some extremely pissed-off aging hippies. Unfortunately it's also more than a little daft."

"[T]he film takes as many plot-twists as Pirates of the Caribbean; distinctly Goya in its emphasis on the grotesque, it shows none of the Spaniard's artistic economy," writes Charles Petersen in the Voice.

Nick Dawson talks with Forman for Filmmaker.

"So Milos Forman gets to hang women upside down and torture them, but Eli Roth can't?" asks DK Holm at ScreenGrab.

Update, 7/19: Salon's Andrew O'Hehir recalls the glory days of the costume drama: The Lion in Winter, Anne of the Thousand Days, "and, I don't know, Becket and A Man for All Seasons." So what happened? "No contemporary actor (except, maybe, Meryl Streep) has the mixture of theatrical respectability and movie-star cachet that [Richard] Burton and [Katharine] Hepburn and [Peter] O'Toole had, and the old high-culture audience has been whittled and niche-marketed down into insignificance.... Maybe all these circumstances go some way toward explaining the incoherent dreariness of Goya's Ghosts," which "has no clear purpose, no clear message and no clear central character. Like most costume dramas these days, it dwells on the gore, filth and violence of the past (if not as much as Patrice Chéreau's outstanding Queen Margot or Tom Tykwer's intriguing failure Perfume), but toward what end is never apparent."

"Goya's Ghosts spins a compelling narrative with an excitingly subversive hook," writes Eric Kohn in the New York Press.

Mark Asch in the L Magazine: "Pure paper tiger, Goya's Ghosts seems destined to resurface as part of a retrospective a decade or two hence, at which point rep-house completists will survey the synopsis and credits and ponder: Why haven't I ever heard of this movie?"

Bilge Ebiri for New York: "It's hard not to see resonances with the Iraq war while watching Goya's Ghosts." Forman: "The script was finished months before the Iraq war. There's a line in the film about how the French think they will be greeted with flowers as liberators... that was in the script! Napoleon said it to his generals. And then they said it to their troops. It's difficult to explain to people that the line was there before our vice-president said it." Via Phil Morehart at Facets Features.

Updates, 7/20: "By recreating Inquisition brutality, Goya's Ghosts aims to denounce the West's bludgeoning response to terrorism," writes Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Times. "But its rhetorical tactics are jejune; its comparison of 21st-century America and Inquisition-era Spain doesn't track; and its second half abandons satire for half-baked historical melodrama."

"A logy, rambling period piece, it feels about as far away from the spirit of Amadeus as it's possible to get with wigs and britches," writes Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times.

"[I]n spite of all the vivid little details, the big picture never comes into focus," adds Tasha Robinson at the AV Club.

Bilge Ebiri at Nerve: "'What are an artist's responsibilities to history?' Forman seems to be asking. He never quite finds his answer."

Hairspray + summer movies.

"The emergence of Hairspray as a hit Broadway musical was the ultimate joke," writes David Edelstein in New York. "Now busloads of suburbanites could thrill to what began as a gay boy's wet dream of the fusion of early rock and roll and outlandish middle-class tackiness. Adam Shankman's movie of the Broadway Hairspray gets better as it lumbers along, but there's something garish about its hustle - it's like an elephant trumpeting in your face. Every number is a showstopper: pumping arms, ecstatic frugging, hyperactive editing, climax on top of climax. The songs have the same manic pitch and blur together; there's nothing as seductive as the centerpiece of [John] Waters's movie, the sinuous 'Limbo Rock.'"

"Shankman's movies make a shitload, and often stink like one, but somewhere along the way, he must have picked something up (maybe in choreographing truly great modern films like Boogie Nights and Stuck on You), because this new candy-colored version of John Waters's affectionate ode to the music of Baltimore in the 1960s and embracing your girth is the kind of movie tuner that we've been promised for years now," writes Jason Clark at Slant.

Updated through 7/20.

"I admire John Travolta, but using this movie star, rather than the show's Harvey Fierstein, as Edna Turnblad, Tracy's hefty mother, is an idiocy on the same level as replacing Julie Andrews with Audrey Hepburn for the movie version of My Fair Lady," argues David Denby in the New Yorker.

"[T]his bright, bouncy movie musical is a happy surprise, a candy-colored ode to outsiders that left me with a big grin," writes David Ansen. Also in Newsweek: "A white actor wouldn't dare put on dark makeup to appear black today," notes Jennie Yabroff. "So why is it still OK for male actors to wear dresses?"

"The fact that Hairspray is a mildly amusing one-note crock isn't bothering the critics so far," notes Jeffrey Wells.

Jesse Green talks with Travolta for the New York Times.

Earlier: David D'Arcy (Screen Daily), Dennis Harvey (Variety) and David Poland (Movie City News).

Updates, 7/18: "Shankman has gotten Hairspray on the screen, all right, but he hasn't rethought the material in cinematic terms (the way, for example, that Frank Oz did when adapting the similarly stylized Little Shop of Horrors)," writes Scott Foundas in the Voice. "The result is an odd hybrid that lacks both the rambunctious energy of a live performance and the expressionistic pull of a great movie musical."

"Hairspray stands as one of 2007's great films," declares Bill Gibron at PopMatters. "It's intoxicating and invigorating, jumpstarting your long dead belief in the art of the movie picture while systematically saving the summer from such standard operating ordinariness as sequels and remakes."

"The movie business has been heading this way for years, but this summer is proving the apotheosis of the one-week blockbuster," writes David M Halbfinger in the New York Times. "The blur of big-budget films may have left moviegoers with whiplash, given how quickly each film announces itself in television ads and then disappears from marquees, yet few in Hollywood are complaining. Far from it, since the steep drop-offs are largely fueled by a run of blockbusters from every major studio, and Hollywood has a chance of breaking 2004's summer box office record."

Chris Braiotta, writing for the Boston Phoenix, finds Hairspray "absurdly likable, with its go-get-'em energy and unironic joy."

Kristin Thompson sorts through some old magazines and finds herself comparing Hollywood's fare in two summers: 1994 and this one.

"In his marvelously esoteric obsession with outsiders, Waters draws inspiration from the likes of bohemian pariah Jack Smith," notes Eric Kohn at the Reeler. "But the musical Hairspray is closer to the vitality of the lavish Hollywood productions that Smith's avant-garde creations naughtily deconstructed. Its brash subversive edge hides beneath the rhythms.... It's easy to see how a fluffy project like Hairspray could get squashed by the distinctly separate boundaries of film language, but the movie finds a solid balance between a gloriously stagy feel for its big numbers and old-fashioned movie magic to lift the overall feeling to the level of a big-screen sensation. It offers a fleeting excitement, but an impressive one; the movie might not change your life, but it's sure to brighten your day."

Matt Dentler asks Todd Rohal, "What is your favorite movie of Summer 2007 and why?" The answer may have you calling up your friendly bootlegger.

Update, 7/19: "That Hairspray is good-hearted is no surprise," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "The surprise may be that this Hairspray, stuffed with shiny showstoppers, Kennedy-era Baltimore beehives and a heavily padded John Travolta in drag, is actually good.... [T]he overall mood of Hairspray is so joyful, so full of unforced enthusiasm, that only the most ferocious cynic could resist it. It imagines a world where no one is an outsider and no one is a square, and invites everyone in. How can you refuse?"

"Hairspray isn't noxious like the Dreamgirls movie-musical, but it isn't nearly good enough," declares Armond White in the New York Press. "[T]his movie-musical adaptation makes the same mistake as the 2002 Broadway incarnation - it domesticates Waters's parodistic anarchy into general-audience silliness."

Richard Corliss profiles Travolta for Time, and the piece opens with a terrific story. But that photo by John Russo is disturbing somehow.

Updates, 7/20: "Hairspray is reasonably entertaining," concedes Stephanie Zacharek at Salon. "But do we really need to be entertained reasonably? Waters' original was a crazy sprawl that made perfect sense; this Hairspray toils needlessly to make sense of that craziness, and something gets lost in the translation. But the one thing that's truly wrong with Hairspray isn't the fault of the filmmakers: It simply has no Divine. Still, her ghost, dressed in a muumuu of moonlight, insists on shimmering over the proceedings. It's little wonder everything below her pales in comparison."

"[T]he movie's style and exuberance torpedoed my initial misgivings within seconds," writes Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times.

"[A]s film versions of stage musicals go, Hairspray is infinitely funnier and quicker on its feet than The Producers or Chicago," writes the Telegraph's Sukhdev Sandhu. "At the screening I attended, when the audience wasn't laughing at lines such as Queen Latifah's 'If we get any more white people in this record store this is going to be a suburb,' sections of it were dancing in the aisles."

"Though the film is too slick and heavy-handed in its pro-integration sloganeering, and it's burdened by Travolta's ill-conceived star turn, its infectious high spirits and catchy tunes still pack one hell of a sugar rush," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club.

For the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw, Hairspray "manages to be not completely outrageous, not completely relaxed and not completely funny, with daubs of satire applied with a paintbrush eight inches across." Also, Alice Wignall interviews Nikki Blonsky.

"The movie seems guileless and rambunctious, but it looks just right (like a Pat Boone musical) and sounds just right (like a Golden Oldies disc) and feels just right (like the first time you sang 'We Shall Overcome' and until then it hadn't occurred to you that we should)," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times.

"Thanks to the casting, to Shaiman's genuinely memorable score, and to Shankman's direction, Hairspray is - reservations be damned - totally enjoyable," writes Andy Klein.

For Aaron Dobbs, Hairspray is "the best movie musical in years."

Weekend shorts.

"Tarantino's masterpiece is also the film via which he takes leave of structure," writes Emmanuel Burdeau. "Death Proof sees the fast paced succession of two similar parts which no reason binds, twice the same story... Tarantino contents himself with bouncing from one to the other, unraveling two times two ribbons, language and the road."

Also freshly translated for Cahiers du cinéma, Cyril Neyrat notes that Tsai Ming-liang's I Don't Want to Sleep Alone "has the simple confidence of a new start" and Jean-Michel Frodon looks back to Cannes: "After the generalized disappointment in the 2006 edition, the Festival has incontestably succeeded its 60th birthday." And no, currently, there's nothing new in English at the site regarding Juliette Binoche, but isn't she lovely?

An unusual sort of update, but this really is the place for it: Jean-Michel Frodon explains how the project Boyd mentions in the comment below came about. Why now? "The precise circumstance is Juliette Binoche's decision to work with, in a little more than one year, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Amos Gitai, Olivier Assayas and Abbas Kiarostami." But that's just for starters.

"[N]o one working in modern cinema, a culture that supposedly prizes originality (at least outside Hollywood), may be as brave, as politically vital, and as utterly intolerant of the medium's systemic compromises as [Peter] Watkins," writes Michael Atkinson in Good Magazine.

"So, again, can you teach art? Or dreaming? Or cinema?" For the Financial Times, Nigel Andrews meets Stephen Frears, 66, who's working with Josué Méndez, 30, "a Peruvian pupil-protégé," on the younger filmmaker's next feature. They're just one pair in a mentoring project: "Rolex hands $50,000 to each team and tells them to get on with it."

Jason Morehead may be a tad more of shoegaze fan than I am, but if so, only a tad. Regardless, good news: Matthew Solarski reports on a shoegaze doc in the making at Pitchfork.

"Naomi Watts has signed on to star opposite Clive Owen in The International, an action thriller that Tom Tykwer is directing for Columbia Pictures," reports Borys Kit for the Hollywood Reporter, where Gregg Goldstein has this story: "Tim Robbins, Martin Landau, Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Harry Treadaway will star opposite Bill Murray and Toby Jones in 20th Century Fox's fantasy City of Ember from Walden Media/Playtone and producers Gary Goetzman and Tom Hanks." Both via Cinematical.

Flickhead reviews Andrew Semans's All Day Long: "Comparisons could be made with some of the ideas found in the works of John Cassavetes, Hal Hartley and Eric Rohmer, but only superficially. Those filmmakers operate from vantage points of idealism, where characters are capable of verbal communication, seduction and deception. With Mr Semans, humanity is tongue-tied by want and desire."

"By the time the last section wraps up with a mighty act of surgical self-destruction, you know you're in the grip of a full-blown Cronenbergian imagination." Phil Hoad talks with György Pálfi about Taxidermia, in which Peter Bradshaw finds "a certain tendency to sub-Rabelaisian scenes of music, dancing and rumpy-pumpy that reminds me of Emir Kusturica's recent movies: much surface activity that masks a lack of ideas. Kusturica could well be an influence. One to be wary of. Aside from this, Taxidermia is a visually striking, provocative dish served up with the most horrid ingredients imaginable: greed, revulsion, alienation and loneliness."

Also in the Guardian:

• "[I]f you are looking for a sober documentary that explains what has been happening in [Haiti] in the period from the Duvalier dictatorships to the ousting of former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004, [Ghosts of Cité Soleil] ain't it," writes Duncan Campbell. "Nor did [director Asger] Leth ever intend it to be.... Too many documentaries, he says, are made for people who already know the arguments." More from Kevin Crust in the Los Angeles Times.

• Alex Rayner has a backgrounder on Daft Punk's Electroma, which Alfred Lee caught for the LA CityBeat. "Judging by the ensuing walkouts and boos over the final credits, the movie didn't go over too well."

• "I find a good deal of my film-related pleasure these days in books rather than on the screen," writes John Patterson, who then lists several surely terrific volumes. "But still I'm not happy. All I notice are the gaps, the spaces on the shelves where unwritten books about subjects that obsess me would sit if only some lazy bastard would just write them."

• Bradshaw on Molière, a "very moderate sub-Stoppardian speculation about the great French playwright Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, or Molière, played by Romain Duris.... You need a very sweet tooth for this kind of thing." More from Tim Robey in the Telegraph: "After Olivier Dahan's galumphing La Vie en rose, it's certainly a pleasure to see a French blockbuster that's so assured and light on its feet, even if [director Laurent] Tirard allows it to dawdle just a little in the second half." And yet more from Ray Bennett.

• Bradshaw also reviews the "deeply pointless adaptation of Macbeth, in which the original play is transferred to modern gangland - perhaps the biggest cliche imaginable," and Last Tango in Paris: "Nobody makes sex films like this any more, with the exception of France's Catherine Breillat, who actually has a minor acting role here." More from the Evening Standard's Derek Malcolm.

• Rob Mackie on Flags of Our Fathers and Letter From Iwo Jima: "As a pair, the films paint a grim but memorable picture of the last days of a war which had a clearer objective than any since." Also: "A shame that The Illusionist has to follow the more celebrated but less satisfying The Prestige."

For the Times of London and Sky Movies, James Christopher treks to the set of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People to talk with Kirsten Dunst and producer Stephen Woolley not about the movie but about what makes a modern classic. And then he names his top 8.

Meanwhile, Rebecca Davies tallies Telegraph readers' votes: "Because of the huge diversity of the films put forward, it's been impossible to compile the top 100 list I originally intended. So here are the top 54 films (with quite a few ties)."

At european-films.net, Boyd van Hoeij has an update on Lars von Trier's Erik Nietzsche: The Early Years. Also, a "Quick Chat with Julie Delpy about 2 Days in Paris."

"Chinese Cinema 101" is a quick rundown of the essentials from Tribeca's Artistic Director, Peter Scarlet.

The New Statesman runs Wim Wenders's talk about "Europe's soul" you'll have seen mentioned here before.

You know there's more to cinema in India than Bollywood, but do you know how much more? "A country of more than a dozen official languages, India has several different 'ollywoods' scattered across the subcontinent, churning out movies that cater mostly to regional audiences," writes Henry Chu. "Almost as prolific [as Bollywood] are 'Kollywood,' the Tamil film industry based here, and 'Tollywood,' its Telugu-language counterpart in the neighboring state of Andhra Pradesh. Combined, the two entertainment powerhouses released nearly twice as many feature films last year as Bollywood."

Also in the Los Angeles Times: "Lady Chatterley is the most frankly sensual movie in memory," writes Kenneth Turan. And Kevin Crust reviews Lights in the Dusk and Dr Bronner's Magic Soapbox.

Stuart Klawans in the Nation on Live Free or Die Hard: "Did you need more proof that September 11 did not, in fact, change everything?" Also, Knocked Up "belongs to the genre that Stanley Cavell brilliantly defined as the American comedy of remarriage: films about a woman and man who have separated because their original union was false, and who now must work out a true way to live together.... But even though Knocked Up respects the conventions... it also departs from them by taking this deeply adult genre and regressing it toward childhood."

Ray Pride: "Steeped in many of the political and economic developments of the decade in Hong Kong since the 1997 handover of the former British colony, a supple parable of the absorption of Hong Kong and Macau into the Chinese dragon, the eyes-wide, visceral, fluent, violent Triad Election is one of director Johnny To's most accomplished. (Comparisons to the French master Jean-Pierre Melville, a major influence on John Woo, are not misplaced here, either.)"

In the New York Times, Matt Zoller Seitz finds Hula Girls to be "an encyclopedia of clichés." Also, Jeannette Catsoulis: "Though hyped as a torture movie, Captivity is really the extreme revenge fantasy of every (slightly damaged) guy who ever lusted after a woman far out of his league." More from Robert Abele in the LAT and Ryan Stewart at Cinematical.

"Iraq in Fragments is a nearly flawless film, a still-timely documentary shot in a war zone with cinematography of a caliber rarely seen even in a controlled studio product," writes Annie Wagner in the Stranger.

For Stop Smiling, Justin Picco reviews Criterion's release of Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara: "Among several questions the set wonderfully complicates is to what extent these films can be considered the work of a discrete identity in the first place. Each is the result of a unique collaboration between blossoming filmmaker Teshigahara (who'd come to previous fame for his work in ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement) and novelist Kobo Abe. World-class Japanese film scholar Donald Richie... cannot compare this creative lockstep between filmmaker and working novelist to any other partnership in film history."

Paul Matwychuk talks with John Dahl about You Kill Me and DK Holm's notion of "film soleil."

Gill Pringle profiles Michelle Pfeiffer for the Independent.

"The Shamus watched Coal Miner's Daughter for the first time in years, and I was struck again by the sheer force and magnetism of Tommy Lee Jones's performance as Doolittle Lynn, the husband of country star Loretta Lynn. Sissy Spacek won the Oscar as Loretta and it remains a fine, sturdy performance. But it would be nothing without the grounding wire of Tommy Lee's presence."

"Technology plus economics equals the current sorry state of the mainstream cinema." For the Literary Review of Canada, Geoff Pevere reviews The Decline of the Hollywood Empire, by Hervé Fischer, whose argument he doesn't quite buy whole: "While there is no doubt there are major changes afoot, and that these changes, whether they are based in digital production, distribution or exhibition technologies, represent seismic shifts for the movie industry, it is far from a done deal that they will incur Armageddon for Hollywood." Via Bookforum.

Adam Ross's interviewee this week: Jeff Ignatius

"Film director Richard Franklin, known for the thrillers Patrick and Road Games, and more recently the compelling dramas Hotel Sorrento and Brilliant Lies, has died in Melbourne aged 58." Matthew Clayfield points to Sandy George's obit in the Australian and to Aaron W Graham's profile in Senses of Cinema.

"Jim Mitchell, who helped bring eroticism into the political and social consciousness of San Francisco and later was imprisoned for the sensational killing of his own brother, died apparently of a heart attack, at his home in western Sonoma County, investigators said Friday," report Peter Fimrite, Jaxon Van Derbeken and Steve Rubenstein in the San Francisco Chronicle. "The porn impresario, whose lime-lit life and tragic downfall were featured in a book and television movie, was pronounced dead at around 8 pm He was 63." Via Movie City News.

Online browsing tip. Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog: "This series of side-by-side comparisons of frames from various Disney films (via Wired's Underwire blog) is meant to show how Disney recycles frames from one 2D animated flick to another in order to save time, money and labor value."

Online viewing tip #1. At AICN, Quint's got a clip from Todd Haynes's I'm Not There with Cate Blanchett as Bob Dylan and David Cross as Allen Ginsburg.

Online viewing tip #2. "Making a movie is hard. Cohabitation is harder." Tight Shots is a new webisodic series from Lena Dunham. Speaking of Nerve Video, did you catch all of Season 2 of Joe Swanberg's Young American Bodies?

Online viewing tips, round 1. The Hollywood Reporter's Steve Bryant: "Thought it might be worthwhile to pull together links to some of my reviews of web-only shows. There's some amazing stuff out there."

Online viewing tips, round 2. Voyeurs at SiouxWIRE.

Online viewing tips, round 3. Apple's just added dozens of new trailers to its collection.

Weekend fests and events.

"[M]y Fish Kill Flea co-directors and I have been waiting half an eternity for this one," writes Aaron Hillis. The NYC premiere will be July 21 at Rooftop Films, and what's more, the film is only part of what looks to be quite a program for that Saturday night.

"Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, stop the presses!" yells Todd at Twitch. "Uwe Boll has made a good movie. This is not a joke." It's Postal and he caught it at the Fantasia Festival. Meantime, more reviews, they just keep on coming.

Michael Moore has announced the lineup for the Traverse City Film Festival. July 31 through August 5.

The lineup's in place for the Edinburgh International Film Festival. August 15 through 26.

"Like the jury of the 50th anniversary edition, for its 75th anniversary the jury of the Venice Film Festival will be made up exclusively of directors." Boyd van Hoeij's got the roster at european-films.net. And Fabien Lemercier has news on probable French entries at Cineuropa. And the BBC reports that Ang Lee's Lust, Caution will be competing. August 29 through September 8.

With the series of Midnight Mass weekends underway, Michael Guillén has a long talk with Joshua Grannell (aka Peaches Christ): Parts 1 and 2.

Vince Keenan: "On the last night of Noir City, bad girls ruled."

The Lumière Reader posts another round of reviews from the Telecom New Zealand International Film Festivals.

Sujewa Ekanayake is blogging the week-long run of Date Number One in Kensington, MD. Michael Tully interviews him, too.

"For those of you in the Eastern Pennsylvania region who missed the massive SouthSide Film Festival in Bethlehem last month (you know who you are), you have one night to catch up on the best films, July 19." A heads-up from Mike Everleth at Bad Lit.

At the Reeler:

• Annaliese Griffin "braved a torrential downpour on Wednesday to see Vera Cruz, one of Robert Aldrich's most celebrated Westerns. Screening as part of BAM's Overlooked Aldrich series, Vera Cruz stars Gary Cooper as Ben Trane, a former Confederate soldier traveling through Mexico."

• "Perhaps the standout selections" of Premiere Brazil! 2007 for ST VanAirsdale are "Hector Babenco's 1981 landmark Pixote: The Law of the Weakest and its 2005 companion doc Pixote in Memoriam. Through July 23 at MoMA.

• "I learned two things about Abel Ferrara Thursday evening. He doesn't seem to care much for Q&As, and he likes for the afterparty to be close by." Christopher Campbell attends a screening of King of New York.

"At Guerilla Drive-In screenings, you don't shell out $12 for tickets or stretch out in stadium seats," writes Steve Chawkins. "Instead, you join a hundred or more cinema fans draped in blankets and hunkered down amid the weeds, watching films projected onto random walls."

Also in the Los Angeles Times: "Movies are popping up all over this summer, with screenings in such diverse locations as ranches, cemeteries and town plazas." Susan King rounds up several local goings on.

In New York? Check in with Michael Lerman at indieWIRE or Christopher Bonet at IFC News or, of course, the Reeler.

In Karlovy Vary, Ronald Bergan listened in as a distinguished panel discussed American movies from the 70s - why they were so terrific and what the hell happened after Star Wars.

The Rhode Island International Film Festival is looking for shorts. Entry's free but there is a cash prize.

Online browsing tip. Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918 - 1945, at the National Gallery of Art through September 3. Via wood s lot.

Online listening tip. An MP3 of the "LonelyGirl15: A Case Study" at SXSW in March.

Bergman @ 89.

Edward Copeland wishes Ingmar Bergman a happy 89th. Well, absolutely. If he wants a happy one, by all means.

For the Independent, Geoffrey Macnab heads up to Fårö:

As a guest at Bergman Week, you can't help but feel like a naturalist hoping to catch a glimpse of a rare and near-extinct breed. This impression is reinforced by one of the week's main events - the Bergman Safari. On a blustery Saturday evening, when the light is grey and overcast (just as Bergman and his cinematographer Sven Nykvist used to like it), we clamber aboard an old bus and set off round the island. Our hosts are Arne Carlsson, a bluntly-spoken islander who worked as his truck driver and cameraman for Bergman, and the formidable Katinka Farago, who was an assistant and production manager on many of his films. We wander across "Persona beach," are shown where Liv Ullmann and Max Von Sydow's farmhouse was burned down in Shame ('Bergman's only action movie') and drive past various houses that he has built for his family and collaborators. We also stop briefly on the north side of the island for a 'Bergman burger.'

En route, there are anecdotes about Bergman's reckless driving, his rivalry with Tarkovsky, his plans to make a film about Jesus on the island and also - by way of contrast - his attempts to make an erotic portmanteau film with Federico Fellini and Akira Kurosawa. (The project fell through when Bergman was the only one to finish his screenplay.)

In the Guardian, John Patterson looks back on the moviegoing days of his youth: "Where Bergman, the northern Protestant miserablist, had Death, miserable and implacable as all-get-out, doomily playing chess by a frigid fjord, Fellini, the Catholic of the exuberant south, would routinely match Ingmar and then raise him a dozen luridly painted, first-century hermaphrodite hookers dancing naked around a phallic birthday cake."

Friday the 13th Blog-a-Thon.

"All 'round Ye Olde Internette, people are talking about the Friday the 13th films," writes Stacie Ponder, host of the Blog-a-Thon at Final Girl. "It's glorious in a sort of Hands Across America kind of way, don't you think?"

Related online viewing. Phil Morehart posts the original trailer at Facets Features.

SFSFF's 12th.

Jonathan Marlow previews the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, opening today and running through the weekend. Several notes follow.

Not quite a decade ago, while I was briefly living in Berlin, I chanced a last-minute flight to Venice to attend a festival that I'd read about for years - Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, more commonly known as the Pordenone Silent Film Festival. Presented each year by film historian/author/festival director David Robinson, every accolade for the event proved absolutely true. The week-long fest is the oldest and greatest of its kind, devoted exclusively to films created with unsynchronized sound (primarily, but not limited to, feature-length and shorter works from the period of 1935 and earlier). Along with Cineteca Bologna's Il Cinema Ritrovato, these two festivals place Italy among the forefront of countries to see the remarkable restoration work of film archives around the world.

Slightly more than a decade ago, a similar (if slightly smaller) gift to cineastes debuted in San Francisco. Founders Melissa Chittick and Stephen Salmons' Silent Film Festival, now spread over three days each July, arguably represents the best opportunity in the Americas to catch a sizeable dose of these remarkable works over a compact timespan (although it should be noted that there are regular Bay Area silent screenings at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum in Niles, the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley and the Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto, and elsewhere up and down the coast from Seattle to San Diego).

Updated through 7/19.

For their 12th installment, Salmons and Executive Director Stacey Wisnia have collected an exceptional assortment of classics (Ernst Lubitsch's The Student Prince in Ole Heidelberg; William Wellman's Beggars of Life, starring Louise Brooks and Wallace Beery) and relative rarities (The Valley of the Giants and a program of French shorts "saved from the flames" by Serge Bromberg of Lobster Films). Add to this a pair of features by the DeMille brothers (William's Miss Lulu Bett and the better-known Cecil's The Godless Girl, soon-to-be-released in the aforementioned National Film Preservation Foundation box set); a quartet of comedies from Hal Roach Studios; a well-deserved tribute to Turner Classic Movies (with the Valentino-and-Nazimova Camille and hosted by the affable Robert Osborne); the Cineteca Bologna-restored legendary Maciste; and the Telluride-by-way-of-Pordenone discovery A Cottage on Dartmoor, directed by the under-rated Anthony Asquith and introduced by Eddie Muller of the Film Noir Foundation (and due to direct a film of his own a few days later).

With such an outstanding assortment of films, it could be claimed that the SFSFF team have crafted their greatest program to date. Film aficionados would be richly rewarded by venturing to the Castro Theatre and spending this weekend in the dark.

- Jonathan Marlow

At the Siffblog, David Jeffers reminds us what a remarkable year 1927 was before turning his attention to one of its many jewels, "a breathtaking Ernst Lubitsch production, The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg. Also: Camille and another fine overview from Anne M Hockens.

More previews: Max Goldberg in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, where he also writes, "now as then, there can be only one Nazimova.... If Nazimova's personal life seems spun or at least exaggerated, it was all at the service of her queenish persona - something on prime display in Camille, thanks in no small part to [Natacha] Rambova's logic-defying art deco set designs. The many arches and frills that appoint bedrooms and ballrooms accentuate Nazimova's sinewy bends, beaky sneers, and bomber swoons."

"If for nothing else than A Cottage on Dartmoor, this year's Silent Film Festival would be a rousing success, but there is, of course, much more to look forward to," Max Goldberg adds at SF360.

Updates, 7/14: "I can think of worse ways of spending a weekend than sitting in America's premiere 1922 movie palace watching gorgeously restored 35mm prints of silent classics with live musical accompaniment." An overview from Michael Hawley at the Evening Class.

More from Adam Hartzell at Hell on Frisco Bay: "Of all the festivals in San Francisco, the Silent Film Festival is my favorite."

Mick LaSalle on The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg: "[T]his isn't about nostalgia - seeking the past in the present. It's about the opposite, finding the present in the past."

Update, 7/16: The Student Prince of Old Heidelberg "concentrates not on doomed romantic love but on personal sacrifice," writes Anne M Hockens, which is why she suspects audiences now react to the ending differently than audiences in the late 20s would have.

Updates, 7/17: "When attending nearly every program in a weekend-long film festival like the 12th Annual Silent Film Festival, it's impossible not to start noticing connections, coincidences, crossovers and synchronicities." Brian Darr burrows in.

"I have to share the most incredible cinematic experience I've ever had in a movie theatre." Shahn sees A Cottage on Dartmoor.

Update, 7/18: A wrap-up from shahn.

Update, 7/19: Michael Guillén's taken notes from Mick LaSalle's introduction to Student Prince and expands on them, too.

Time.

"Turning Vertigo on its head, Time's brilliantly absurdist premise gets at the fundamental, misery-inducing disconnect between passion and intimacy like no other film I've ever seen," writes Mike D'Angelo at Nerve. "Haunting and incisive, Time's a rare film that dares to tell the truth about scars that never heal."

"At first, and even most of the way through, [Kim Ki-duk's] Time seems like a social-realist relationship movie, full of poetic observations about the fallacies of love and the fragile nature of identity in contemporary life," writes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon. "Our central couple, the suave Ji-woo (Ha Jung-woo) and the leggy Seh-hee (Park Ji-yeon), seem like hip and fashionable Seoul-dwellers, exactly the kind of young Koreans who go see Kim Ki-duk movies. Sure, Seh-hee is a bit pathologically jealous, prone to starting an angry scene if Ji-woo sneaks a peek at a cute waitress. But none of that conveys how dangerously insane this movie and its characters are."

Updated through 7/19.

"Kim has lost his damn mind," declares Vadim Rizov at the Reeler. "There were rumors of this when The Bow debuted at Cannes in 2005 to such disastrous response that it never screened in New York. Summaries say that film was the story of a 60-year-old man who raises an adopted girl from infancy for the purpose of marrying her nubile teenage ass when she turned 17. Gross - and apparently unredeemed by stylish execution. But Time is almost as conceptually nutty."

At indieWIRE, Jeff Reichert declares that this "thirteenth film by that most disposable of Asian auteurs, Kim Ki-duk, should finally, definitively, expose the filmmaker's patented layering of ambiguities as nothing more than the tawdry covering-up of an empty imagination.... If you've seen Hiroshi Teshigahara's The Face of Another or John Frankenheimer's Seconds, then Time is certainly not worth a passing thought."

"There's a gothic chill to the film's raw depiction of going under the knife, as well as to the Vertigo-ish early going, during which Ji-woo begins to fall for the clearly bonkers Seh-hee version 2.0," writes Nick Schager at Slant. "Yet there's a persistent, frustrating glibness to [Kim's] depiction of vanity, distrust, and possessiveness that undermines any serious examination of the thematic issues at hand."

"Time has been described as a comedy about the hollowness of relationships in a global consumerist culture, and it certainly is," writes Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Times. "But while the film's cultural context is of the moment, its depiction of romantic desperation is timeless."

"[A]ny unreserved accolades for this wayward talent will have to wait until next time," writes Jason Bogdaneris in the L Magazine.

"Time has an unbeatable premise, and writer-director Kim could've taken it in just about any direction, from black comedy to poetic romance to Hitchcockian dread to trenchant social commentary," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club. "It's a minor disappointment when he tries to do everything at once - in his preoccupation with scattered genre effects, he literally loses the plot."

Update, 7/14: "Kim Ki-duk has never had what you could call a light touch, and "Time" has the awkwardness of his work at its roughest, shuddering between flat-out allegory and shrill portrait of a demented relationship," writes Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog. "And yet, before the film ventures into the realm of the isolatingly ridiculous, there is something to its morose portrayal of the trouble with men and women, and of love inconveniently enduring while novelty and passion inevitably fade."

Update, 7/16: "The film quickly sets itself up not as the deeply internal psychological portrait of the Hitchcock, nor the modernist socio-historical art film of the Teshigahara but rather moves in Kim's usual rhetoric of breezy allegory," writes Daniel Kasman. "It is a rhetoric using both generic conventions to structure narrative and deploy characters and what may be termed art-house cinematic conventions that use minimalism and coolness to distance the story and present it as a fable. This allegorical style has worked for the director in the past, but in Time the emotional melodrama and thriller semantics of the former seem to try and make up for just how thinly written the film is, with the pretensions and purported weight of meaning implied by the later approach 'enabling' the film to so poorly grapple its own subject under the guise of fable-like simplicity and cool, measured consideration."

Update, 7/19: "Ultimately, it's a strange and subtly told tale that successfully hacks into the desires and fears of most us who are trying to figure out how to make love work - without sewing it all back together into a nice, pretty package," writes Jerry Portwood in the New York Press.

Tekkokinkreet.

"A clutter-bomb vision of a colorfully decaying pan-Asian metropolis that spurs a few of its fiercest defenders into violent battle, Tekkonkinkreet is a Japanese anime feature that for all its stylistic bravado is sharply attuned to a modern world afraid of change," writes Robert Abele in the Los Angeles Times.

"At first glance, there's nothing remarkable about the apocalyptic, futuristic yarn being told here, in which a couple of street orphans with unexplained superpowers must battle a variety of evildoers trying to take over their neighborhood," writes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon, but "by the end of this phantasmagorical journey, I was as wrapped up in the precarious fate of these two wounded kids and the honorable yakuza warlords of Treasure Town as I've been in any film all year."

"Beautiful and a touch bewildering, Tekkonkinkreet kinks up a fairly familiar story of love and loyalty with a helping of underworld crime action, the usual juvenile agonies and some fuzzy philosophy," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "The first-time feature director Michael Arias, an American who lives and works in Japan, stuffs a lot of exposition and action into 100 eminently watchable if baggy minutes. But the laudably ambitious screenplay attributed to Anthony Weintraub tends to distract as much as it engages."

"You would never find anything like it in American animation," writes Kristi Mitsuda at indieWIRE, and that's "too bad, because films such as this (coming on the heels of another fantastical Japanese mindfuck, Paprika) make you realize how much more the form can encompass when its malleable properties are exercised."

Eric Kohn, writing in the New York Press, finds the film "distracts from its overstuffed plot with a handful of engaging visual set pieces, demonstrating an intriguing willingness to thrill in abstraction."

"[D]on't call it anime," advises John Constantine at Nerve. "Tekkonkinkreet looks more like the bastard child of Cordell Barker and Moebius than Osamu Tezuka. Its characters are exaggerated and rounded and the architecture is halfway between Hong Kong and Bollywood. It's a unique spectacle" and "has more imagination and beauty in five minutes than almost every other animated film released in 2007 combined."

Shorts, 7/12.

"Charles Ferguson's new film No End in Sight exemplifies what's missing from the public equation: a sense of justice, a conviction that men who lie and thereby kill, maim and destroy on a federal, governmental level should be held accountable in, at minimum, the same manner in which such a criminal would on a personal, social level," writes Michael Atkinson. "Kings and czars have had their heads on pikes for as much, and rightly so. The Hague operates on this dictum, and every nation in the world respects its process except us."

"As someone who despised Crash so much that I was almost moved to a physical fight on the night it won all its Oscars... I have to say I was pretty surprised by writer/director Paul Haggis's new picture, In the Valley of Elah," writes Premiere's Glenn Kenny. "[G]iven the near-brain-numbing chorus of blogosphere voices screeching about how this entity they call 'Hollywood' isn't doing enough to get the populace properly agitated about the Islamist threat, it's interesting to see what a 'Hollywood' filmmaker who takes on the subject of the Iraq war actually does."

"[Pascale] Ferran's Lady Chatterley isn't remotely bawdy, but it is candidly, tenderly carnal in a way rarely seen in contemporary cinema, where sexuality crouches, trapped like a frightened deer, between prissiness and prurience," writes Ella Taylor. "Coming from a director who hangs out with pomo ironists like Arnaud Desplechin, this is surprisingly naturalistic filmmaking that refuses to engage with the feminist theories that have sent Lawrence's posthumous reputation careening from literary god to chauvinist devil. In fact, Lady Chatterley is a resolutely unintellectual movie whose primary language is its earthy physicality."

"The French film industry has been enjoying a box office resurgence of late, both at home and aboard," reports Anthony Kaufman, who's got the numbers and the quotes at indieWIRE.

"The unreconciled ghosts of colonialism and its legacy of economic stagnation, currency devaluation, and underdevelopment among emerging contemporary African nations lies at the core of Djibril Diop Mambéty's whimsical, yet incisive (and sadly, unfinished) series of envisioned fables, Tales of Little People," writes acquarello.

A brisk and bracing read: Henry Woolf looks back over six decades of friendship among six friends, led, you might say, by Harold Pinter: "If you want a glimpse of what we were like then, how particular, how different from each other, yet sharing a common language, a common stance, read The Dwarfs. It brilliantly captures young men in all their pride and peacock before society closes in and squeezes the life out of them."

Also in the Guardian:

• "The adventures of Tintin in the Congo will be moved from the children's shelves in Borders bookstores across the country and placed in the adult graphic novels section after the book was criticised for having allegedly racist content," reports Lee Glendinning.

• Graeme Allister: "Leonardo DiCaprio is in talks to star as Hugh Hefner in a big screen biopic of the notorious Playboy founder." However that turns out, as you'll have heard, Brett Ratner will direct and Brian Grazer will produce.

• Xan Brooks: "[I]t remains to be seen whether Harry Kirkpatrick will go on to become the new Alan Smithee... But why Smithee and why Kirkpatrick? Why pick these names in particular?"

"For director Dusan Makavejev, the failure of revolution is no reason not to cling to revolutionary ideals. Yet ideals cannot obscure inevitable horror, and none of it should stop you from laughing," writes Spencer Parsons. "A specter of failure hangs over the aesthetic, political, and sexual revolutions of Sweet Movie and WR: Mysteries of the Organism and lurks about in Criterion's fine packages of extras for good measure." Also in the Austin Chronicle: Marjorie Baumgarten talks with George Ratliff about Joshua.

Michael Cieply reports from Encino for the New York Times: "In an unusually blunt session here on Wednesday, several of Hollywood's highest-ranking executives called for the end of the entertainment industry's decades-old system of paying so-called residuals for the reuse of movie and television programs after their initial showings." The explanation: "'There are no ancillary markets anymore; it's all one market,' said Barry M Meyer, chief executive of Warner Brothers."

Angela Watercutter delves into the world of Cloverfield for Wired. Via Fimoculous.

Dave McDougall at Chained to the Cinémathèque chooses his all-time top 100: "I will certainly change my mind on half of these films by the time I hit the publish button."

Online browsing and viewing tip. SiouxWIRE on the work of Saskia Olde Wolbers.

Other fests, other events.

"The Golden Age by director Shekhar Kapur will open the Premiere section of the RomeFilmFest," reports Camillo de Marco for Cineuropa. "The non-competition section of large-scale premieres will roll out its red carpet for leading actress Cate Blanchett in the highly anticipated follow-up to Elizabeth (1998), in which she will once again play the Queen of England." October 18 through 27.

"High-profile film festivals are also highly exclusive, often resembling the closed society of a debutante's coming out ball. But the local short film festival Hi Mom!, now almost 10 years old, is more like a high school kegger: rambunctious, loosely organized and open to anyone who shows up thirsty. Forget hors d'oeuvres and distribution deals; think stacks of free pancakes and flaming trophies." Brian Howe profiles one of five winners of the Independent Weekly's 2007 Indies Arts Awards. On Saturday, there'll be a "Best of the Fests" outdoor screening in Carrboro, NC.

Vince Keenan has another fine night at Noir City Northwest: "For me The Spiritualist, aka The Amazing Mr X, is the find of the festival, the B-movie perfectly executed," and it "set up the audience for the main attraction. Nightmare Alley, according to Eddie Muller, is not only one of the greatest noirs but one of the finest American films of the 1940s."

"If you love movies, seeing Napoléon on the big screen, in a rare 70 mm print, is a must - the film's greatness is physical and theatrical, rather than in its depth of content," writes FX Feeney in the LA Weekly.

My, look at all those reviews and reports at Twitch from the Fantasia Festival.

"The 48 Hour Film Project came storming through Austin for the sixth time last month, leaving in its wake more than a hundred movie-makers, aspiring movie-makers, and dilettantes who had forsaken the comforts of both their creative approaches and their soft pillows to find out whether they had it in them to write, shoot, and edit a short film in the span of a single weekend." Josh Rosenblatt has the story in the Chronicle.

Ismet Redzovic files the fourth report from the Sydney Film Festival for the WSWS: "12:08 East of Bucharest and Beauty in Trouble: mixed results from Eastern Europe."

Online listening tip. Vanessa Redgrave talks about her late husband, Tony Richardson on the Leonard Lopate Show. The occasion: Leading the Chagrge: Woodfall Film Productions and the Revolution in 60s British Cinema, a series opening tomorrow at the Walter Reade in NYC and running through July 26.

Philadelphia Int'l G&LFF.

Sam Adams profiles Alan Cumming, "arguably the most visible queer actor in the English-speaking world, a position he's achieved not by downplaying his sexuality but by flaunting it.... He has been a prominent activist for gay causes and received numerous awards, including the 2004 Artistic Achievement Award from the Philadelphia International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, which will screen his solo directorial debut, Suffering Man's Charity, on July 21."

Thusly opens the Philadelphia City Pages cover package on the fest opening today and running through July 24. Besides an annotated list of the first week's highlights (compare, contrast or simply pair with the Philadelphia Weekly's), there's also Sam Adams's profile of another honoree, Farley Granger, recipient of this year's Artistic Achievement Award.

Outfest 07.

"Born out of frustration, it has evolved into a celebration: Outfest's Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Film Festival is turning 25 today. It is the city's oldest continuous film festival and one of the largest gay and lesbian film festivals in the world." Lisa Rosen files a good and long one for the Los Angeles Times.

But the LA Weekly's taking a less celebratory approach: "Watching most contemporary queer movies, particularly the American ones, is to see art reflect the downside of the progress achieved in the culture wars, in gays and lesbians securing that much-coveted 'seat at the table,'" writes Ernest Hardy, clearly saddened and frustrated to find that Queer Cinema has become "infantilized art."

Updated through 7/16.

"[A]s much as I and my fellow LA Weekly reviewers root for Outfest, it's time for me to state in print that the festival's programmers often make me more than a little crazy," adds Chuck Wilson. "Year after year, they fail to trumpet the few truly interesting films that come their way, opting instead to promote the tried and true. It's as if they have no faith in their audience, believing them to be as shallow minded as the rest of America thinks LA queers are." Still, the critics pick the ones worth catching.

One of the highlights will be a restored version of Bill Sherwood's 1986 film, Parting Glances, "one of the best American movies ever made" about AIDS, writes Ella Taylor, who talks with Steve Buscemi about the film that launched his career.

Updates, 7/13: "As a transsexual woman, I realize I watch trans-themed movies through a different filter," writes Christine Daniels, reviewing Another Woman and Red Without Blue for the LAT. "Minor details that clank off-key can ruin an entire production for me. In both of these films, there is dialogue that rings so laser-beam true to what I have experienced and what my friends have experienced, it made me squirm with discomfort."

"[A]fter previewing a number of the films slated to appear, I am tempted to ask the various filmmakers and producers: Didn't you see the movies that screened last year? And, if you did, why have you all decided to make those movies again?" Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat.

Update, 7/14: AJ Schnack talks with Mike Roth, whose Saving Marriage debuts at Outfest: "I know the log line of Saving Marriage is 'the fight to keep gay marriage legal in Massachusetts,' but when you watch the film, you realize it's not so much about gay marriage as it is just about marriage. It's also about people who stand up and fight for what they believe in, and that is an inspiring theme with universal appeal. So the audience response is pretty much the same at both GLBT and general film festivals. They're reacting to the characters and the story, and it doesn't really matter if they're gay or straight."

Update, 7/16: "There is so much new documentary and dramatic work exploring the explosive intersection of spirituality and sexuality that this week's Outfest... has created a five-film series, 'Queers in Christ,' on the subject," notes John Horn in the LAT. "Although diverse in story and tone, the movies are linked by a common argument: That God and Jesus would welcome every member of the human family into their realm, regardless of sexual orientation. Since good storytelling involves conflict, though, there are any number of people in these films - including Scripture-quoting anti-gay activists and not-in-my-house Pentecostal parents - taking a dramatically different view of inclusion."

Mods & Rockers.

"The Mods & Rockers Film Festival is getting real," writes Steve Hochman in the Los Angeles Times. "After seven years of emphasizing the fantasy and frivolity of the 60s... co-founder, producer and host Martin Lewis has put together a series this year that highlights some of the era's top music documentarians."

John Patterson, too, is glad to see the fest "shed its 007-inspired side." He elaborates in the LA Weekly:

Mods & Rockers has always been predicated upon the rich pop-cultural exchanges and transfusions that were effected in the 1960s between swinging, mod-pop London and hippie-trippy California, London having been the cultural capital of the decade until early 1967, when it was briefly superseded by Haight-Ashbury. But Los Angeles was always waiting in the wings as hippiedom's Second City (although musically, LA always kicked SF's ass!). This year, that rich cultural seam is once again successfully strip-mined, with an emphasis largely, by hazard or design, on the westward movement from London to the Golden State.

Then: "If forced to choose a single exemplary movie from this teeming cornucopia, I'd make it Tony Palmer's legendary BBC documentary All My Loving.

The 8th edition opens tomorrow and runs through August 1.

Shorts, 7/11.

"Now that a filmmaker can bypass the need to make costly film prints, he or she can burn their finished film to DVD, screen it theatrically through digital projection, or make it available for download. But still the question remains: How does an independent filmmaker compete in a very competitive marketplace?" For PopMatters, Brian Holcomb directs this and several other questions on many minds at the moment to Lance Weiler, whose latest film, Head Trauma, "has been very well received and continues Weiler's DIY approach with a personally supervised theatrical tour leading up to the DVD release."

"Matt Hanson is a noted British author, filmmaker and film futurist interested in expanding the boundaries of traditional filmmaking," writes Elina Shatkin. "His latest project is A Swarm of Angels, a crowdfunded, open source filmmaking venture that aims to create a £1 million movie with the help of 50,000 participants around the globe."

This interview is one of many stories in an "experiment in 'pro-am' journalism" and "crowdsourcing" conducted by Assignment Zero in collaboration with Wired News. Executive Editor Jay Rosen: "I wouldn't say it's easy for widely scattered people working together voluntarily on the net to report on a big story unfolding in many places at once. But we know a lot more about it now than we did when we started, and one of the goals of Assignment Zero was to test whether pro-am methods had potential. I think they do, but we haven't really unlocked it yet. We are, however, getting closer."

For more on all this, see Emily Gordon's interview with the New Yorker's James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds, at Rosen's PressThink. Much of this is via Bookforum's still-outstanding new blog.

Filmbrain points us to five blogs that make him think.

"As has been pointed out by others, what the serious film bloggers do best is write about past films in the present tense," writes Peter Nellhaus. "Yes, there are current films worth writing about that are often shabbily or superficially evaluated by the so-called professionals. What I think those of us within our virtual communities do best is create little chain reactions of re-looking at films."

The cinetrix passes along word that For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism, a unique documentary in the making, written and directed by Gerald Peary, is in need of a last round of funding for completion. Click the title, look around and then consider clicking that yellow star.

Meantime, Gerald Peary's also been reading Patrick McGilligan's