Shorts, 5/6.

By David Hudson on 05/06/2009

Criterion releases "The Friends of Eddie Coyle" on May 19; Glenn Kenny gives us a preview now, noting that, with the exception of composer Dave Grusin, everyone involved in the making of the film - the cast, featuring Robert Mitchum, screenwriter Paul Monash, director Peter Yates - "has an acute awareness that they're inhabiting the world of George V Higgins, the attorney-turned-author who wrote the very fine novel on which this picture is based.... The dialogue is colorful, but not too colorful, and it tells a good deal of the story. But what's even more important to Higgins's storytelling, particularly in the very tight early works that made his reputation... are the silences that fall between the spoken sentences. It's in these interstices when all of the decisions of the various characters are made: Am I gonna give this guy a break? Am I gonna keep my word? Am I gonna drop dime on him? Am I just gonna drop him?"

With "Profit motive and the whispering wind" now out on DVD, GreenCine runs Kevin B Lee and Keith Uhlich's interview with John Gianvito.

"One might have reckoned that the director of 'Fight Club' and 'Panic Room' would become one of the key artists of the digital age," writes Kent Jones. "I don't think any of us, however, would have guessed that [David] Fincher, with 'Zodiac' and 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,' would achieve a vision of time so heartbreakingly acute as to rival those of John Ford and Orson Welles."

Also at Criterion's Current: "Ivan the Terrible" "has always been the Eisenstein feature that's given me the most pleasure - the greatest 'Flash Gordon' serial ever made as well as a showcase for the Russian master's boldest graphics," writes Jonathan Rosenbaum. Teaching it, though, hasn't been easy: "Part of the problem has been reconciling the film's multiple paradoxes - how much it functions as Eisenstein's autocritique and apologia as well as an attack and glorification of Stalin, meanwhile combining elements of both high and low art at virtually every instant with its tortured angles and extreme melodrama."

"With it a near certainty that director JJ Abrams's forthcoming 'Star Trek' will find its way to copious box office receipts this coming weekend," begins Michael J Anderson, "it strikes this writer as more necessary than ever to advocate for producer Abrams's much lower profile 2008 release 'Cloverfield,' whose enormous theoretical interest and high quality is altogether unlikely to be eclipsed by the filmmaker's latest. Director Matt Reeves's second feature, from a Drew Goddard screenplay, ranks as one of the most formally instructive Hollywood pictures of the current decade, revealing the material basis of the digital image in a manner that few films have attempted."

"Like some half-thought-out Japanese gutter-trash take on one of Celine's midnight-express rides to hell, Masashi Yamamoto's 'Carnival in the Night' is a wallow in an urban hell that spins well out of control more times than should be legal in a feature film," writes Chris Barsanti. "It gathers up the excessive bile of its punk ethos and spits it right in the viewer's face, but the effect is more likely to be bemusement (the occasional giggle, perhaps) than the desired shock and awe. Still, it's something to behold, when all is said and done, a sociopathic spasming that goes further in plumbing the debilitated core of go-go capitalist Japan than most comparable Western underground filmmakers tend to dare. But, then, it was the 80s."

Also at PopMatters: "A glum and downbeat boxing film, 'Homeboy' not only anticipates many of the key concerns of the highly-celebrated 'The Wrestler,' but also, by now-obvious extension, the real life trajectory of [Mickey] Rourke himself," writes Kit MacFarlane. "But the film fell into the 'too depressing' pit on its release, and the presence of standard genre cliches saw it treated dismissively by those who didn't look close enough to see those same cliches being quietly, but firmly, derailed. Despite the presence of actors like Christopher Walken and Jon Polito, a delicate score by Eric Clapton, and even a fawning reference in Bob Dylan's 'Chronicles' ('The movie traveled to the moon every time [Rourke] came onto the screen. Nobody could hold a candle to him'), it is rarely mentioned today at all."

"It was the fervent belief of many in the early years of cinema that justification for the medium lay in how it interpeted stage drama," writes Luke McKernan. "Some two hundred films, most of them one-reelers of the pre-war period, were produced that closely or loosely owed something to one or other of Shakespeare's plays.... This was more than enthusiasm for high culture; it was good business." Via Catherine Grant.

"Reviewers and bloggers have wanted to say that 'Let the Right One In' is not really a vampire movie at all, and in interviews the director has given some encouragement to this view. It's a film about childhood, the touching affection of two alienated 12-year-olds for each other, and the violence that haunts even the quietest of hearts.... But it's important to see Eli as more than a symbol of alienation, and it's worth taking the story literally," argues Michael Wood in the London Review of Books.

The Guardian's Charlotte Higgins reports that Abbas Kiarostami will not be directing "Così Fan Tutte" for the English National Opera after all; seems he found the visa application process too "unduly time-consuming and hugely complicated."

Yoji Yamada, on the other hand, will be directing a stage adaptation of Yasujiro Ozu's "Early Summer" for the the Mitsukoshi Theater in Tokyo. Chris MaGee has details.

"Along with other distinctions, 'Goodbye Solo' is the first Iranian film made in North Carolina," argues Stanley Kauffmann in the New Republic. "The film can be called Iranian because it virtually asks for it."

Peter Nellhaus finds it hard not to contrast "Ong Bak 2" with the original.

In the New York Observer, Sara Vilkomerson talks with Duncan Jones and Sam Rockwell about "Moon."

"Though not as impressed with Austrian filmmaker Götz Spielmann's 'Revanche' as some critics, I found the film interesting enough to want to speak with the writer/director, whose earlier movie 'Antares' I loved." And so, James van Maanen did. Related: "Revanche" is one of the films in Andrew Schenker's recent all-purpose roundup.

Steve Dollar has tea in the lobby with Marianne Faithfull for Stomp and Stammer.

Online listening tip #1. Rob Davis talks with Rian Johnson about "The Brothers Bloom."

Online listening tip #2. David Rabe and Jill Clayburgh discuss their "Creative Marriage" on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Online viewing tip #1. At Cargo, Simon Rothöhler has Jean-Pierre Léaud's screen test. Check out Richard Kanayan, too, who follows in the same clip.

Online viewing tip #2. The trailer for "Banksy's Coming for Dinner." Via Coudal Partners.

Online viewing tip #3. Ernest Borgnine at BFI Southbank.

[Photo: Detail from the poster for "The Friends of Eddie Coyle," Paramount Pictures, 1973]

Tags: David Fincher, David Rabe, Götz Spielmann, Jill Clayburgh, JJ Abrams, John Gianvito, Marianne Faithfull, Masashi Yamamoto, Mickey Rourke, Peter Yates, Rian Johnson, Robert Mitchum, Sergei Eisenstein, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Vampires, William Shakespeare