Shorts, 2/17.

By David Hudson on 02/17/2009

"Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art served as the glamorous venue for last night's world premiere of Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra's much anticipated Bollywood spectacular 'Delhi 6,' starring Abhishek Bachchan and Sonam Kapoor. In addition to the director and composer AR Rahman (who is currently being showered with awards for his score for 'Slumdog Millionaire), the luminous stars were on hand to greet the crowd." And Jürgen Fauth's got photos of the event, too.

"There is a press blackout on reviewing the 'Watchmen' movie until March 6," blogs Matt Selman for Time. "However, I've seen the movie, and I'm not press. Don't worry, I'm not going to write a review of 'Watchmen.' What I am going to write about is the emotional experience of seeing a piece of literature with which I have an intense personal connection literally come to life. It's a serious freak-out." Via Movie City News, pointing out that, why, yes, both Time and Watchmen are products from the house of Warner. Update: At the SpoutBlog, Christopher Campbell's tracking the backlash.

For New York, Mark Jacobson profiles New York Press critic Armond White: "If the discourse of cinema, as he claims, has reached 'the bottom' - victim of Roger Ebert's thumbs up/thumbs down Roman Colosseum-style methodology, excessive blurb-mongering, fixation on weekend box-office reports, sheer laziness, etc, etc - the fault lies not with the movies themselves. There will always be good movies. The problem is with the messengers, the sold-out, the politically and historically indifferent movie-critic sheep who have abdicated the passion-filled mantle of Kael and Sarris."

At the House Next Door, Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard have a good long talk about "Mulholland Dr."

"Given neither to mocking anti-establishment, hippie values, nor to unadulterated patriotism, [Paul] Newman might not have been a zeitgeist actor," writes Tony McKibbin, "but maybe more than any other American star of the late 50s through to the late 70s, suggested what America could become: how it could combine a questioning of the country, while still proposing that the US was a nation of astonishing vigour and attractiveness."

Also in Film International: "For better or for worse, modern cinema begs for consumer participation beyond the darkness of the movie theatre." Terry Hobgood reviews Kristin Thompson's "The Frodo Franchise: 'The Lord of the Rings' and Modern Hollywood." And Peter Bergwall: "At the University of Saint-Petersburg I showed 'Lilya 4-ever' to a small group of 17- and 18-year-old students and although they seemed to be moved by Lilya's fate, grasping the basic purpose of the film, I was struck by how differently they seemed to experience the authenticity of the film compared to the Swedish critics and the Swedish audience."

China will be celebrating the 60th anniversary of its communist revolution with a film featuring the "most powerful lineup in the history of Chinese film." The quote's from China; this one's from Clifford Coonan in Variety: "Among the stars will be helmers Chen Kaige and Feng Xiaogang plus thesps Andy Lau, Jiang Wen and Ge You."

Jim Emerson marvels at the "good news for modern Hollywood" Ted Baehr and Tom Snyder deliver in the Wall Street Journal.

"Welcome to Random Roles, wherein we ask actors for memories about roles that defined their careers. The catch: They don't know beforehand what roles we'll ask them to talk about." Noel Murray launches the AV Club series with Tim Matheson.

With "Brendan and the Secret of the Kells," Tomm Moore and Nora Twomey have "created a charming, gorgeously realized fable about the power of imagination and art to thrive even in the most hostile times," writes Todd Brown at Twitch.

Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay talks with director and producer Tommy Pallotta, whose doc "American Prince" premieres at SXSW about a decision many seem to be making recently: "Recently I got rid of my Myspace, Facebook, and Linked In accounts because I think that being able to control information about yourself will be the new commodity of the future. I didn't like the way that people were able to add info about me on those sites. I first got onto these social networks as an exercise to see how they work, and now I'm getting off of them as an experiment to see how that works in this day and age."

"'Opium War,' Afghanistan's entry for Best Foreign Language Film at this year's Oscars and the follow-up to [Siddiq] Barmak's 'Osama,' which won a Golden Globe in 2004, is a black comedy. Barmak wasn't expecting the making-of story to be one, too." Aryn Baker talks with him for Time.

Ryan Stewart interviews James Gray for Slant.

Joseph Aisenberg at Bright Lights After Dark: "Last year two books - 'Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life Of Jean-Luc Godard' (Richard Brody, Metropolitan Books, May 2008, 720 pgs), and 'Spellbound by Beauty: Alfred Hitchcock and His Leading Ladies' (Donald Spoto, Harmony Books, Oct 2008, 352 pgs) - gave us an intimate, sordid and creepy view of human nature on the job; the ways power can corrupt; how film directors often live on a very gray line, at an even odder remove from life than writers do."

"In her latest film, 'Right America: Feeling Wronged,' which [debuted] on HBO Monday night, [Alexandra] Pelosi attends McCain and Sarah Palin rallies in 28 states and puts her microphone in the faces of some very passionate conservatives," writes Mark Schone, introducing his interview with the filmmaker for Salon. "As defeat looms, she watches the Republican base go through a very public grieving process, with most of the stages that psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross described - denial, depression and a whole lot of anger - but not very much acceptance." Ted Zee has some related online viewing.

"Why does Hollywood take our favorite novels and turn them into crap?" asks Willing Davidson in Slate.

Online "Hm." Dan Meth's "Trilogy Meter." Via Coudal Partners.

Online listening tip. "Are Recessions Good For Movies?" ask IFC's Matt Singer and Alison Willmore.

Online viewing tip #1. Jamie Stuart (The Mutiny Company) has launched a channel and will be uploading an early short of his every week or so.

Online viewing tip #2. "As Obama's new Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner presents the country with a $2 trillion bank rescue plan this week, PBS's 'Frontline' series looks back on the high-level meetings and panicked maneuvers that took place in the early days of our financial crisis," writes Heather Havrilesky in Salon. "From the near collapse of teetering giants Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and AIG, to the eventual downfall of Lehman Brothers, this investigative play-by-play of the start of the financial crash unveils how the nation's banks, unregulated for so many decades, revealed themselves to be a disturbingly shaky house of cards." "Banking at the Brink," the first installment of "Inside the Meltdown," airs tonight and will be viewable online after its broadcast.

Tags: AR Rahman, Armond White, Delhi 6, Mulholland Dr, Watchmen