Shorts, 2/27.

By David Hudson on 02/27/2009

"Spectacles of suffering and sex, Finnish director Teuvo Tulio's films are so similar in construction and theme that they run together like one long soap opera composed of a scattershot jumble of bucking horses, whores, crying babies, sailors, farmers, beer halls, weasel-faced men and zaftig, wild-eyed women." Anna Bak-Kvapil in The Auteurs' Notebook: "His style can be Eisensteinian, with expressionistic montages of the shining faces of the proletariat intercut with kittens, crucifixes, or half-smoked cigarettes, but he adores Hollywood, mimicking in his own over-enthusiastic way, Cukor, Lubitsch and Von Sternberg."

Nathaniel R presents "77 Appropriate Ways to Celebrate Elizabeth Taylor's Birthday."

Girish fires up another discussion: "I'm curious to hear about your experiences with films that you weren't ready for when you first encountered them - films that required considerable effort before you could understand and love them. Nicole Brenez calls these Strombolian films; for her, Roberto Rossellini's 'Stromboli' (1949) was such a work. She writes in 'Movie Mutations': 'These are films that resist, that one must surmount just as Ingrid Bergman scaled her volcano, and that change you forever...'"

"Contemporary Japanese comedies generally come in two varieties: wacky and noisy (most films written or directed by Kankuro Kudo), or quirky and dry (Satoshi Miki's 'Ten Ten' ['Adrift in Tokyo'] and Yosuke Fujita's 'Zen Zen Daijobu' ['Fine, Totally, Fine'])." For Mark Schilling, writing in the Japan Times, Keralino Sandorovich's "Tsumi toka Batsu toka" is "both wacky and noisy, quirky and dry... The movie is not a plunge into an amoral abyss, though it does journey into the surreal, absurd and perhaps, if you take your Ten Commandments seriously, offensive."

"It's not a stretch to regard Hollywood's re-adoption of the old-fashioned, glasses-needed optical illusion as a direct (and, some might say, desperate) response to their video game competition," writes Nick Schager, launching a "The Sandbox" here at IFC. "3D's reemergence helps to highlight the evolving, exciting crossover between the two art forms, a topic that I hope to explore with this column during the coming weeks and months. Because if one thing does seem certain in light of the past three decades' worth of continuing film-game synergy, it's that our arts and entertainment future is likely to be increasingly multimediumed - and to one degree or another, interactive."

More Opening Shots from Jim Emerson: "Shotgun Stories" and "The Dark Knight."

Eddie Murphy looks set to play Richard Pryor in a biopic. "Hitfix and Entertainment Weekly have separate reports confirming Murphy's involvement," notes the Guardian's Ben Child.

"Bronson," a hit at Sundance, won't open in the UK for another two weeks, but the Guardian runs a unique backgrounder from Erwin James: "[T]he film made me think a little deeper about the real Charlie Bronson. We have had some correspondence recently.... For all the pain he has caused - in his prison career he has taken 11 hostages and staged nine rooftop protests - he has had an abundance of grief in return. The film, he says, has given him a new impetus for life. "It has brought me a great feeling of inner strength and self-worth. I actually feel human again." All he wants to do now is get out and concentrate on his art. 'I'm a born-again artist,' he says. 'Through all this mad journey of institutions, I have found myself in art.'"

Also, Bibi van der Zee: "Hollywood is monstrously, demonstrably sexist. It's sexist in a way that must make industries like construction and engineering take off their hard-hats and whistle with admiration.... In Alison Bechdel's cartoon strip Dykes to Watch Out For, the character Mo explains that she only watches films in which 1) there are two female characters, who 2) have a conversation which is 3) not about men." And she puts the Sight & Sound top ten to the test.

Plus, David Thomson considers Michelle Williams and John Patterson meets Jennifer Lynch, "rowdy, bawdy, sick-in-the-head funny and very fast with a quip. A lot of laughing gets done today."

"Antonio Banderas has been added to the lengthening cast of Woody Allen's next pic, a still-untitled project set to roll this summer in London," reports Emilio Mayorga in Variety.

Film of the Month Club member Marc Raymond presents "a brief intro to my own relationship with Hong Sang-soo's cinema in anticipation of March's film of the month, 'Woman is the Future of Man.'"

Tim Lucas lays the Video WatchBlog to rest.

James Rocchi has seven points aspiring film critics might want to keep in mind.

"Whatever happened to the femme fatale?" asks Sheila Johnston. Also in the Independent, Stephen Applebaum profiles Rupert Friend.

In the Age, Philippa Hawker meets Jean-Claude Van Damme.

FilmInFocus runs an excerpt from Amy Raphael's interview with Mike Leigh for "Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh."

"An American Affair" is "a spanking new hybrid," writes David Edelstein in New York: "the paranoid-conspiracy coming-of-age teen-sex movie." More from Stephen Holden in the New York Times: "Were it a farce instead of an earnest, paranoid thriller with pretensions to historicity, 'An American Affair' might not seem so offensively exploitative. The fact that it is quite well acted, especially by [Gretchen] Mol, who has the air of a sophisticated 1960s party animal down pat, only compounds the insult." And more from Brandon Harris (SpoutBlog), Mark Peikert (New York Press), Vadim Rizov (Voice), Bill Weber (Slant) and Alison Willmore (Time Out New York. Here at IFC, Aaron Hillis talks with Mol "about the film, motherhood, Abel Ferrara and life after being the 'It girl.'"

"'Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience' isn't a movie so much as a devotional object, a kind of secular fetish designed to induce rapture," writes Nathan Lee in the NYT. More from Catherine Dawson March (Globe and Mail), William Goss (Cinematical), Peter Knegt, Mark Olsen (Los Angeles Times), Nick Pinkerton (Voice) and Nick Schager (Slant).

"Actorly diarrhea and writerly constipation are the frequent bane of subpar indie flicks, but in 'Trouble with Romance' these flaws are almost instructively exacerbated, like an inverted Syd Field handbook on amateurisms to avoid," writes Joseph Jon Lanthier in Slant. More from Jeannette Catsoulis (NYT), Nick Pinkerton (Voice) and Nick Schager (Screengrab).

Offline cooking tip. Mary-Louise Parker's Migas Pie in Esquire.

Online viewing tip. "Sita Sings the Blues." All of it. At Reel 13 via Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing.

Online viewing tips. Eliza rounds up "Great New Videos" at Creative Review.

[Photo: "Rakkauden risti," Tuxan Film, 1946]

Tags: Bronson, Elizabeth Taylor, Mike Leigh, Teuvo Tulio