By David Hudson

At some point during the just-wrapped year, I promised myself I'd write up one of those year-end top tens (a first for me), and I have, finally, and it follows, but first, a round of the all but obligatory hemming and hawing. Last year at GreenCine Daily, I wrote a wordy entry on, oh, the state of things in general, and over the past couple of days, I've been wondering if I'd be doing something along that line again. But then I re-read that entry and realized that, with regard to most of the issues raised, not a whole lot has changed over the past 12 months. Let me explain.

Continue Reading Best of 2007: Yep, Another Top 10

"After Mysterious Skin, which was so dark and serious and heavy, I was really looking to do something that was completely different," Gregg Araki tells David D'Arcy. That's when he remembered "the funniest script that I ever read," Smiley Face.

But the stoner comedy would rise or fall on the performance of an actress front and center of nearly every frame. And Araki found her in Anna Faris: "There are so many beautiful 20-something ingées out there, but I think she has a comic gift. In terms of her abilities and the way she uses her face and her body, she's totally unique, like a Carole Lombard or a Lucille Ball."

Smiley Face is out on DVD on January 8.

Continue Reading Gregg Araki's Stoner Comedy

By Cathleen Rountree

"From his home base in New Jersey to Louisiana, Texas, Alaska and Florida, novelist-turned-hyphenated filmmaker John Sayles has crisscrossed the country weaving sprawling stories in such films as City of Hope, Passion Fish, Lone Star, Limbo and Sunshine State," writes Kevin Crust in the Los Angeles Times. "Unique among his peers, Sayles travels his own road dramatizing an Americana streaked with social realism and a touch of the magical.... Changing times are a dominant theme in Sayles' work and most of his films put forth very specific social issues, but in Honeydripper, these matters are mostly percolating beneath the surface. The film evocatively charts a time and place where change has been a longtime coming and buoyantly imagines a turning point where, at least musically, anything is possible."

Looking back on her September conversation with Sayles, Cathleen Rountree notes "he displayed his impressive encyclopedic knowledge of music, expounded on 'comic book movies' and border politics, and shared a liberal's fears about the final days of the Bush administration."

Continue Reading John Sayles' Honeydripper: "I Want My Characters to Be Like Your Friends"

By David D'Arcy

"Persepolis is a simple story told by simple means," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "Like Marjane Satrapi's book, on which it is based, the film, directed by Ms Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, consists essentially of a series of monochrome drawings, their bold black lines washed with nuances of gray. The pictures are arranged into the chronicle of a young girl's coming of age in difficult times, a tale that unfolds with such grace, intelligence and charm that you almost take the wondrous aspects of its execution for granted."

David D'Arcy talks with Satrapi and Paronnaud about the importance of humor, perils of miserabilisme, the current state of comics and animation, and the ways Iran is now perceived - and misunderstood.

Continue Reading Persepolis: A Conversation with Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud

"If an audience is seeing a movie to live another life - which I think is one of the attractions of seeing movies; you get to be out of your own life and live some other life that maybe you [wouldn't] ever really want to live but you're curious about - so, I'm saying, if you're a Nikolai in the movie, then you're going to experience this. I'm not going to throw it away, do it off camera, and do it frivolously. All the hard work and the difficulty of killing someone, if that's what this character has to do, I want you to feel it and see it."

That's David Cronenberg, talking to Michael Guillé/a> about his new film, Eastern Promises. Also on hand to talk about this character, Nikolai, is the man who plays him, Viggo Mortensen.

Eastern Promises is now out on DVD.

Continue Reading David Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen and the Hard Work of Killing

By Sean Axmaker

Berlin Alexanderplatz. Witchfinder General. Killer of Sheep. Duck, You Sucker. It's been a great year for DVD releases, and Sean Axmaker's got no complaints. But he does have dreams. What special editions and box sets could we hope for in '08 and beyond? Sean's drawn up a wish list. And it's based on what's actually feasible, too: "This is no fantasy of lost films found (like the 132-minute version of Magnificent Ambersons, the 40-reel Greed, or magically rediscovered prints of London After Midnight or Four Devils), but a modest proposal to pull out films from the vaults, restore and remaster them where necessary, and give them the presentation they deserve on DVD."

Take this list, he offers, "not as a provocation but an invitation: let us know what is at the top of your wish list."

Continue Reading Dream DVDs: Special Editions and Box Sets That Could Be

By Michael Guillé/p>

"The Godfather - in the months before it came out - there was a general feeling that that film maybe wasn't going to work. Certainly when Apocalypse Now came out it was critically not very well received," recalls legendary editor Walter Murch.

But critics and audiences came around, of course. Will they come around to Francis Ford Coppola's Youth Without Youth? To further wear out a clichéalbeit one that has a certain ring to it when speaking of Youth Without Youth), only time will tell.

It may seem odd to mention a couple of books when introducing Michael Guillé/a>'s interview with a film editor, but Walter Murch is more than simply a superb craftsman. Filmmaker Brian Fleming has called Murch's In the Blink of an Eye "one of those books about one topic that, like Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, transcends its original purpose and becomes a useful filter for considering a range of subjects." Certainly Michael Ondaatje's The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film belongs on any cinephile's top shelf but also within reach of anyone who cares about any art. And we just have to mention two immediately clickable nuggets, talks with Murch in the Transom Review and BLDGBLOG.

For now, though, the subject at hand is Youth Without Youth. Take it away, Michael...

Continue Reading Walter Murch: "Follow Your Interests Wherever They May Lead"

From our award-winning blog, GreenCine Daily, we cross-post a new and hefty compendium of what people are saying about new and recently released DVDs.

"Released in 1971 by the newly created youth division of Universal Studios, Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop is both a generational artifact and a movie that seems to exist out of time," writes Dennis Lim in the Los Angeles Times. "Richard Linklater has called it the last film of the 60s and the first film of the 70s.... Despite its period specificity, Two-Lane Blacktop, out this week in a director-approved edition from the Criterion Collection, is a strange, even abstract film."

"No cultural testimony tracks our national alpha waves as eloquently as road movies," adds Michael Atkinson at IFC News. "Blacktop might be a definitive American expression of roadness - uncompromised, Rorschach-inconclusive, mythic, yet as real as highway weeds, and so eloquent in its mumbling way about basic existential identity and destination dilemmas that every frame has the poignant and needy ache of a child fruitlessly asking about God. It has little competition as the great lost and found movie of the much-missed American New Wave."

Continue Reading Spotlight on DVDs: 12/11

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

He's only 28, but James McAvoy has already played roles originally conceived by a mini-pantheon of British literary greats: Shakespeare and Jane Austen, for starters. Evelyn Waugh and C.S. Lewis. And contemporaries such as Zadie Smith, Giles Foden, and now, Ian McEwan.

In screenwriter Christopher Hampton and director Joe Wright's adaptation of McEwan's widely acclaimed novel Atonement, James McAvoy plays Robbie Turner, a young man whose promising future is decimated by a single lie.

Jeffrey M. Anderson talks with him about class, war and getting into "the zone" for one very long, very celebrated shot.

Continue Reading James McAvoy: "I Am Very Lucky"

By Brian Darr

If you're anywhere near Chicago over the holidays, you might consider catching Doctor Atomic at the Lyric Opera. Composed by John Adams, with a libretto by director Peter Sellars, Doctor Atomic is an intense countdown to the very first test of the nuclear bomb - in short, the dawn of a new age.

The making of the opera was not without its drama, either. That story's told by Jon Else in Wonders Are Many. Brian Darr talks with him about revisiting the themes of his widely lauded The Day After Trinity: J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb and about why Wonders would make for a good double feature with his friend Steven Okazaki's doc, White Light/Black Rain.

Continue Reading Jon Else: Wonders Are Many