Shorts, 6/10.

By David Hudson on 06/10/2009

Updated through 6/11: According to WWD (thanks, Ed!), the New York Observer has slashed its editorial team by a third, and among the laid-off writers is film critic Andrew Sarris. I imagine that this news will strike anyone who loves reading about movies as it's struck me - a little confused about how to feel, much less react. On the one hand, Andrew Sarris helped reclaim American movies for Americans by importing and reinterpreting an appreciation of American directors. On the other hand, he's been quoting from the press kits just a whole lot lately. When it comes to Sarris, I often think back to the piece Phillip Lopate collected in his "Totally, Tenderly, Tragically" over ten years ago: "I miss the old lawgiver: it's a bit like watching one's once terrifying father sink into a mild, fond embrace of the moment.... Clearly Andrew Sarris's criticism has meant the world to me. If it no longer affects me as deeply, that is partly because I have become my own man through cannibalizing him."

Update, 6/11: Dave Kehr has spoken with Molly Haskell and now notes that Sarris may be off the NYO staff, "but he will continue to write on a freelance basis, exactly as Rex Reed does currently. Not great news, but - particularly in the current context - not a catastrophe. Andrew's day job, teaching at Columbia University, is not in danger."

"The dynamic of convergence and divergence is a central part of one arena of film studies that has, for better or worse, been called cognitivism." By the time you get to that sentence, David Bordwell has already unpacked it.

The first book from Bright Lights Film Journal, "Action! Interviews with Directors from Classical Hollywood to Contemporary Iran" will be out on July 1. But you can - and should - pre-order now. Editor Gary Morris: "Amortized over 370 pages and umpteen-thousand words, $18.45 is a pretty good deal. Especially considering the veritable tidal wave of high-quality verbiage to be found inside, courtesy of Bresson, Truffaut, Fellini, Kiarostami, Caveh Zahedi, Allie Light, Allan Dwan, Melvin and Mario van Peebles, Clint Eastwood, Barbara Kopple, Sirk, Otto Muehl, Robert Wise, Mania Akbari, Michael Haneke, the Brothers Quay - you know, the gang."

"Paul Schrader's little remembered 1978 film 'Blue Collar,' with Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel and Yaphet Kotto... is striking for its simultaneous relevance to today's headlines (desperate workers one paycheck away from poverty) and evocation of an era long gone, when autoworker unions could be seen as bloated and greedy rather than shrinking and impoverished, and jobs on the line were as plentiful as American cars on the road." Saul Austerlitz at Moving Image Source: "Schrader's film is a union noir for the 1970s, its villain the faceless somebodies who squeezed the American dream dry, but its schizophrenic tone - part blue-collar comedy, part heist film, part Greek tragedy in Detroit - covers a painfully realistic, painfully familiar world of working-class striving. It is a world in which a visit from the IRS or a daughter's crooked teeth can serve as the harbinger of tragedy just as much as any loose woman or false accusation from a past generation's noir. 'Blue Collar' is a movie whose time has come and gone and come again."

"A firm, authentic and not altogether unappealing slice of Negro Miserabalism is a tough thing to find in the cinema - it's not like American blacks have ever had their Mike Leigh." Brandon Harris at Hammer to Nail: "So it is with great pleasure that one gets the chance, via Tina Mabry's revelatory Slamdance 09 competition entry 'Mississippi Damned,' to experience a rundown, backwards Mississippi community filled with unrepresented but omnipresent racism, misogyny, alcoholism, intra-communal homophobia, man-on-boy and boy-on-younger-girl sexual abuse, diet-related illnesses, and many other manifestations of malaise engendered by dead-end, working class, southern black life just above the poverty line. That this is also a place where one will find great acts of love and sacrifice, glimpses of beauty and tenderness, moments of ribald humor and hard luck smiles, is an obvious truism and shouldn't be surprising."

Roger Ebert remembers John Wayne.

At Criterion's Current, Marie Nyreröd ("Bergman Island") remembers Ingmar Bergman.

Catherine Grant rounds up online resources related to "an early favourite director of mine," María Luisa Bemberg.

The "Reading the Movies" meme infects the Morlocks: R Emmet Sweeney draws up a list.

To catch up with Glenn Kenny's "Tuesday Morning Foreign Region DVD Report" for The Auteurs' Notebook, this week it's Michael Anderson's "seemingly low-budget thriller called 'Chase a Crooked Shadow.' And a nifty, brisk piece of work it is, too."

"'Beat' Takeshi Kitano" "struggles to find a consistent tone but is nevertheless a useful primer," writes Eric Evans at Toronto J-Film Pow-Wow. "The second Kitano book I discovered is 'Beat Takeshi Vs Takeshi Kitano,' Casio Abe's scholarly examination of the two Takeshis: The TV star and comic who delights in scatology and pranks, and the director whose soulfulness and insight into worlds of crime and pain set the bar for Yakuza pictures. Casio's treatment is nuanced and his research is exhaustive; one cannot fault the book's depth or Casio's palpable respect for his subject. But while I recognize the appeal of the dueling Takeshis as a solid thematic hook on which to hang a book of essays and observations, I think the premise itself is flawed."

For Artforum, Isabel Sadumi recommends "Pigs, Pimps & Prostitutes: 3 Films by Shohei Imamura."

Old Hollywood runs an excerpt from Rosalind Russell's "Life is a Banquet."

"Long known as a hardball player of considerable skill, [Ari] Emanuel [Rahm's kid brother], 48, has emerged in the last six weeks as the pre-eminent power player in a Hollywood that has often bemoaned the sunset of colorful moguls from an older generation, including Michael Ovitz and David Geffen," report Michael Cieply and Brooks Barnes in the New York Times. "As the co-chief executive and principal architect of William Morris Endeavor, formed in late April by the merger of Mr Emanuel's Endeavor with the venerable William Morris Agency, Mr Emanuel has finally stepped into their shoes - assuming he can hold his venture together."

"Actor and cult film director Don Edmonds, who helmed 'Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS,' died May 30," reports Pat Saperstein for Variety. "He was 73."

Online listening tip. "Internationally renowned Dutch actor and filmmaker Rutger Hauer ('Blade Runner,' 'The Hitcher') again lends his name and talents to the third edition of the Rutger Hauer FilmFactory (June 18 - 28), a Rotterdam-based workshop program that unites 30 budding auteurs for masters classes with such notables as Paul Verhoeven and Robert Rodriguez." And Aaron Hillis talks with him at GreenCine Daily.

Online viewing tip #1. "Five Favorite Films with Errol Morris" on the Rotten Tomatoes Show. With clips and all, a fun three minutes.

Online viewing tip #2. Cinematical's Erik Davis has David Fincher's ad for the new iPhone.

Online viewing tip #3. "Expialidocious."

[Photo: "For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism," AG Films, 2009]

Tags: Andrew Sarris, Bright Lights, David Bordwell, David Fincher, Errol Morris, Ingmar Bergman, John Wayne, María Luisa Bemberg, Michael Anderson, Paul Schrader, Rutger Hauer, Takeshi Kitano, Tina Mabry