mike-gilbert.jpgI realize some of this is not the freshest news in the land, but hey … I was in Atlanta, working to grade, of all things, ordination exams. So here is some catch-up news.

Over at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule — Dennis Cozallio’s blog, the name of which I wish I’d thought of — is an absolutely hilarious video. Mike Gilbert on Cinema is an interview with one Mike Gilbert on the subject of, you guessed it, cinema. Who’s Mike Gilbert? It doesn’t matter . . . go watch it. Now.

Speaking of videos, here’s one of the, er, smokier take-offs on There Will Be Blood:

Thanks to Ted Zee for the tip!

One of the most entertaining — and controversial — film critics is retiring. Jonathan Rosenbaum (right) has reviewed films for the Chicago Reader for over two decades. During that time, he has often been ajonathan-rosenbaum.jpg polarizing presence. One of his most recent flaps is over the deaths of Ingmar Bergman and Michaelangelo Antonioni, which I wrote about here. Here’s a snippet from his piece in the New York Times, which caused all the controversy:

Sometimes, though, the best indication of an artist’s continuing vitality is simply what of his work remains visible and is still talked about. 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. 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.

What Mr. Bergman had that those two masters lacked was the power to entertain — which often meant a reluctance to challenge conventional film-going habits, as Dreyer did when constructing his peculiar form of movie space and Bresson did when constructing his peculiar form of movie acting.

The same qualities that made Mr. Bergman’s films go down more easily than theirs — his fluid storytelling and deftness in handling actresses, comparable to the skills of a Hollywood professional like George Cukor — also make them feel less important today, because they have fewer secrets to impart. What we see is what we get, and what we hear, however well written or dramatic, are things we’re likely to have heard elsewhere.

Read the Chicago Reader’s tribute page here.

blueberry-nights.jpgWong Kar-Wai is a filmmaker you either love or hate. Personally, I love him. Peter Nellhaus has reviewed Wong’s newest, My Blueberry Nights. It’s in English, which should expose more folks to Wong’s hyper-hip romanticism, and stars Norah Jones (left) and Jude Law, among others. It’s out on Region 3 DVD; when will it be on Region 1?

Jonathan Lapper has a well-written essay that looks at Tolkien, Sergei Eisenstein and his theories of montage, and the Battle on the Ice sequence from his Alexander Nevsky. It’s true . . . he really does tie them all together. Check it out.

Finally, Kimberly at Cinebeats’ ongoing appreciation of Liz Taylor’s later work continues with a look at Joseph Losey’s Boom. She makes a convincing argument that Taylor’s late-60s collaborations with husband Richard Burton are about more than maintaining their lavish life-styles and super-star celebrity, that they actually attempted to break out of the cinematic molds in which they had been cast.

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