Sundance's Refrain: 'Nothing Great'

"Nothing Great." This is the most common response I hear when I ask my fellow Sundance FIlm Festivaleers what they've seen so far. But that doesn't mean everything is middle of the road. There are plenty of films that I have outright hated, and plenty that were good, but "nothing great."

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Sundance Begins

The Sundance festival is just barely underway, but I've already witnessed a car accident and seen a few good films.

The festival opener, "In Bruges," which I reviewed for Film Threat, is one of the best films I've ever seen at the festival on opening night. That might not say a whole lot, but that doesn't mean the film isn't a great dark comedy.

I wrote a helpful guide to stereotyping your fellow festival-goers and participated in IN's staff's most-anticipated films list, even though I find it's best not to anticipate anything at Sundance, other than that you'll be surprised.

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I Moved, Don't Have the Internet and Sundance is Coming

I moved on Thursday and have since been living a sad, cold, Internet-less existence. It's a lonely world when you aren't wired to everyone else. I'll try to catch up on what I missed (including the apparent death knell for HD DVD) before Sundance starts.

In the last issue of IN, I turned in a second year-end column that touched on my favorite moments. I also lamented the awkward "Romance and Cigarettes."

This week's issue tackles Sundance, but not all the stories seem to be online. Yet they are, if you look in the archive section. I looked over the track record from Sundances past and compared the Salt Lake City and Park City festivals. My column is a list of my favorite films that came out of Sundance's Dramatic Competition category. I'm sure I left out some great ones, but that's how it goes some times. (Sorry, "Manda Bala." On the bright side, you didn't qualify for this list.)

It has the wrong rating on it, by my review of "The Orphanage" should reflect my admiration for the film. I also reviewed "Youth Without Youth," but that's not coming out this weekend any more so I guess we'll pretend that I never wrote about it at all.

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How Does It Feel? Like 2007 Rocked

It's official. Todd Haynes's "I'm Not There" is at the top of my best films of 2007 list. Check it out.

I also reviewed the sometimes outstanding and sometimes obnoxious"Juno" and Mark Forster's increasingly ridiculous "The Kite Runner."

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Utah Film Critics Association announces year-end awards

You'll see my own best-of next week, but here's where my organization landed:

Best Picture: No Country for Old Men
Runner-up: Juno
 
Best Achievement in Directing: Joel and Ethan Coen, No Country for Old Men
Runner-up: Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood
 
Best Lead Performance, Male: Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood
Runner-up: Casey Affleck, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
 
Best Lead Performance, Female: Ellen Page, Juno
Runner-up: Amy Adams, Enchanted
 
Best Supporting Performance, Female: Amy Ryan, Gone Baby Gone
Runner-up: Cate Blanchett, I’m Not There
 
Best Supporting Performance, Male: Javier Bardem, No Country for Old Men
Runner-up: Hal Holbrook, Into the Wild
 
Best Screenplay: Joel and Ethan Coen, No Country for Old Men
Runner-up: Diablo Cody, Juno
 
Best Documentary Feature: The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
Runner-up: My Kid Could Paint That
 
Best Animated Feature: Ratatouille
Runner-up: The Simpsons Movie
 
Best Non-English Language Feature: The Host
Runner-up: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
 
Utah Film Critics Association Top 10 Films of 2007 (alphabetical):
3:10 to Yuma
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
No Country for Old Men
I’m Not There
Into the Wild
Juno
Knocked Up
Michael Clayton
Once
There Will Be Blood

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Need Gifts? Need estranged sisters? Need Cox?

I've met all my holiday deadlines and fulfilled all my voting obligations, and then slept for a very long time. If you haven't seen it yet, you don't have much time to read my holiday gift guide for film snobs, part of IN's last-minute gift issue.

You should also check out my reviews of Noah Baumbach's "Margot at the Wedding," which features Nicole Kidman in one of the best performances of the year, and "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story," a hilarious parody in which John C. Reilly reveals he can sing like nobody's business.

And, don't forget my column about how much motion capture sucks.

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WTF? 12 Best Picture Nominees and No 'Knocked Up'

Judd Apatow's "Knocked Up" received exactly zero Golden Globe nominations. No nomination for its brilliant screenplay or direction. No nomination for Seth Rogen's breakout performance or Paul Rudd's endlessly surprising supporting role.

There must have been a three-way tie for fifth place in the Golden Globes' Best Picture - Drama category, as there are seven nominees: "American Gangster," "Atonement," "Eastern Promises," "The Great Debaters," "Michael Clayton," "No Country for Old Men" and "There Will Be Blood."

With all of those out of the way, you'd think there would be room for "Knocked Up." But the Best Picture - Musical or Comedy category only includes "Across the Universe," "Charlie Wilson's War," "Hairspray," "Juno" and "Sweeney Todd." Why not have six films in this category and nominate one of the funniest and most observant films of the year?

PS Casey Affleck is the lead in "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford."

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AMPTP for Fake

Can you tell which of these sites is the real home of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers and which is a fake (perhaps created by WGA strikers)?

www.amptp.org
www.amptp.com

Be sure to read the FAQ.

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Awards Announced

The first set of critics awards has been coming in this weekend. The New York Film Critics Circle heavily favors the Coen Brothers' "No Country for Old Men," while the Los Angeles Film Critics Association favors Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood," which the New York critics honored with Best Actor and Best Cinematographer. The Boston Society of FIlm Critics also favored "No Country," and gave Best Director to LA's most popular runner-up, Julian Schnabel's "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly."

Amy Ryan took the treble with the supporting actress awards from all three organizations for "Gone Baby Gone" (LA also included her work in "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead"). Other recurring names include Marion Cotillard in "La Vie En Rose (Best Actress in Boston and LA), Persepolis (Best Animated Film in Boston and LA (tied with "Ratatouille"), "Ratatouille" (Best Animated Film in LA (tie) and Best Screenplay in Boston. Janusz Kaminski's cinematography in "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" won top notice from Boston and LA, while Robert Elwit's work in "There Will Be Blood" was New York's top choice and LA's runner-up. Javier Bardem won Best Supporting Actor for "No Country for Old Men" in New York and Boston, but LA conspicuously snubbed the Coens' film in all categories.

New York and LA both went with Sarah Polley's "Away from Her" in their award for young filmmakers, while Boston favored Ben Affleck's impressive "Gone Baby Gone" for its new filmmaker award.

My favorites? I'm still rewatching some stuff (Utah Critics vote next week), but for the most part all these organizations picked respectable contenders.

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Ever Launched a Format Before You Finished It?

Gizmondo has provided an excellent rundown of the current state of the HD DVD format, to compliment their state of Blu-ray Disc piece from last month.

As you may remember, I recently declared my love for HD DVD (as well as my timidity and frustration—thanks format war!) in a column. Gizmondo's enlightening rundowns only make me more confident in the future success of HD DVD. The HD DVD piece juxtaposes the slick and agreed-upon HD DVD standard with the still-in-the-air features of Blu-ray, whose various manufacturers can't agree on anything. A comparison of the user experience of the "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" discs is most enlightening.

"Never mind that you could watch the entire HD DVD with pop-up actor-commentary windows on screen—if Warner had implemented this in the Harry Potter Blu-ray, it would have been compatible with exactly one currently shipping Blu-ray player.

The surprising thing was, even when you compared the exact same experiences, the HD DVD behaved much better. Every so often an icon appears in the top left corner of the screen, indicating a behind-the-scenes featurette about that particular scene. On the HD DVD, you click it, watch what you want to, then click Enter again to return to the point you left off in the main movie. With the Blu-ray, the system had no way of returning you to the movie; it could only dump you in the featurette menu, where you were stuck watching more of those."

Unfortunately, we still have a long way to go in the format war, but it's clear that Blu-ray can no longer be painted as the runaway winner.

And at the current bargain prices available from retailers like Amazon.com, you can get an HD DVD player for similar prices to up-converting DVD players. I'm routinely impress by how well my HD-A3 plays standard-definition DVDs on my HDTV.

NOTE: The Amazon deal linked above now charges $50 more for the player and gives two fewer free discs than it did a short while ago. And it's still a good deal.

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This Compass Points in All Sorts of Directions

When viewed with the wrong attitude, all fantasy is nonsense. Elves, witches, wizards—these things don't exist in real life, and certain people refuse to accept them as fictional constructs as well. These certain people I speak of are rubes, churls, killjoys. So why did writer/director Chris Weitz feel the need to give them "The Golden Compass?" The film lets them sit back and smirk—the film makes their argument for them.

While I'm unfamiliar with Philip Pullman's popular and controversial source novel, there's no denying that the resulting film adaptation is pure nonsense—nonsense posing as repetitive exposition, nonsense disguised as bad computer animation, nonsense as the basis for a cursory plot. The movie takes place in a parallel universe, see, and the worlds are connected through dust. I'd be happy to leave it at that, but the characters are obsessed with it. They want to kill the dust or love the dust or moisten the dust, depending on their outlook and circumstances.

I didn't care about the dust, I just wanted to know what the people in the story felt and what they were trying to accomplish. It's apparent enough that young Lyra (Dakota Blue Richards) is simultaneously running from Miss Coulter (Nicole Kidman), and trying to rescue her friend Roger (Ben Walker), whom Miss Coulter kidnapped. But why exactly is Miss Coulter kidnapping children all the time? To stop the dust, of course.

Miss Coulter is part of the Magesterium, a government organizations who believes they can do whatever they want, but that everyone else shouldn't be afforded the same right. That's all well and good, but the film rushes through the story so quickly that we don't really feel any impact of the oppression. Even the kidnapping is glossed over.

In story's universe, souls are on the outside of bodies instead of the inside. They take the form of poorly computer-animated animals called daemons who have an uncanny knack for stating the obvious. For example, if I lived in this universe and some thugs jumped me in an alleyway, stabbed me, and stole my money, my little chipmunk daemon might declare, "Psst. Hey Jeremy—those people weren't very nice! They stabbed you and stole your money. Also, we're in an alleyway. They jumped you. They looked like thugs to me."

Lyra's shape-shifting daemon, Pan (voiced by Freddie Highmore), excels in this exercise. When Lyra tries to infiltrate an evil lair, he lets his human counterpart know that she shouldn't use her real name. When a character says something that Lyra and the audience know to be untrue, he pipes in, "Liar!"

To aid her in her voyage, Lyra meets a group of anti-Magisterium sea folks, an aeronaut named Lee (Sam Elliot) and a drunken polar bear named Lorek (voiced by Ian McKellen). The quality of Lorek's CG animation almost equals that of the Coca Cola bear. Polar bears don't have daemons, they have armor. When Lyra meets Lorek, he doesn't have his armor because the townsfolk stole it.

Luckily, Lyra has the only golden compass in the world, and is the only person who can read it. She asks it a question, the compass answers by pointing at a bunch of symbols. Turns out her ability to read it fulfills a prophesy or something—whatever, let's keep the plot moving. Where is the armor? Ih the town's most heavily guarded building—what a surprise. With a remarkable disregard for character explanation or storytelling, the film rushes through the motions of Lorek's transformation with the disinterest of a grade schooler writing a report on Andrew Jackson.

The film treats all its developments with the same slap-dash lack of wonder. Eva Green appears twice as a witch who, I'm told, wore very little clothes in the book. In the movie, we don't see enough of her, in both senses of the phrase. It's too bad, as Green's saucy persona might have brought a bit of liveliness to the sterile proceedings. And when a story like this is told without passion, it turns out looking like a bunch of nonsense.

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Sundance Selections, Snubbed Oscar Docs, Women in Film, etc.

I haven't been feeling up to updating this rickety old blog, but I have been able to write columns, including a brief rundown of Sundance's lineup, the five best Oscar-snubbed documentaries of 2007, the obsession with seeing Natalie Portman naked, my enthusiasm for HD DVD, the writers strike, a look at the justifiably delayed release of "Home of the Brave", and Jeff Robinov's decree that no woman will star in a Warner Bros. film.

I also wrote reviews of the mediocre "Martian Child" and the unbearable "August Rush".

Enjoy!

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Lame Movie Theater Entertainment, Some Movies That Aren't Lame

My column covers the latest pre-movie entertainment at the old Megaplex theater chain.

And I also reviewed these movies:

"Into the Wild" ***1/2

"Lars and the Real Girl" ***

"Dan in Real Life" ***

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A Bit of Time in Chicago

So I ended up in Chicago last weekend, saw a few movies about its International Film Festival and wrote my column about it.

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Not Quite Dead

Well, I'm finally feeling much better than I was, having overcome the worst part of mononucleosis, which I've had for the past couple months. There are many interesting movies and other items from the dead-air interval that I hope to discuss, but let's start with the columns and reviews I managed to file during my illness. In general, the writing process was similar to my usual method. I passed out, my head on the keyboard, and ran a word count when I woke up. If the article wasn't long enough yet, I passed out again.

Enjoy!

Columns
Wilder's "Ace in the Hole" makes it to DVD at long last

Digital not there yet

Summer recap

Kenneth Branaugh's "Hamlet" makes it to DVD [NOTE: The headline claim of the DVD matching the film's native "resolution" is incorrect—70-mm film his much higher res.]

Get thee to a DVD release!"

The Iraq movies of the prestige season

Summer movies not about Iraq

An airline movie bill? Please let it prevent airlines from showing movies!


Reviews
Apatow and Rogen continue their roll with "Superbad"

"Becoming Jane": Kinda like a Jane Austen novel, but boring

Frank Oz delivers a harmless but less-than-hilarious farce in "Death at a Funeral"

"No End in Sight" an engaging modern history lesson.

James Mangold helms a traditional western with great performances in "3:10 to Yuma"

"In the Vally of Elah" Features a great performance and a forced third act

"Feast of Love" sucks

So does "The Game Plan"

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What Dylan Sounds Like On Film

It is now possible to imagine what it might sound like to watch Todd Haynes's highly anticipated Bob Dylan biopic, "I'm Not There." Vinyl Fever leaked the list, an the tireless folks at The Playlist continue to put the pieces together.

Artists include Sufjan Stevens, Glen Hansard & Markta Irglov of "Once" fame, Tom Verlaine, Sonic Youth, Antony and the Johnsons, Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, Yo La Tengo, Stephen Malkmus and Dylan himself. The 34-track soundtrack, however, does not include "Visions of Johanna" in any form, giving me cause to question whether Haynes does, in fact, know what he's doing.

The two house-bands seem to be Calexico and "The Million Dollar Bashers, which The Playlist says consists of Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo and drummer Steve Shelley, Dylan bass player Tony Garnier, keyboardist John Medeski, Tom Verlaine and guitarists Smokey Hormel (Beck, Smokey & Miho) and Nels Cline (Wilco).

The full list:

All Along The Watchtower --Eddie Vedder & The Million Dollar Bashers
As I Went Out One Morning--Mira Billotte
Ballad Of A Thin Man--Stephen Malkmus & The Million Dollar Bashers
Billy--Los Lobos
Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window--The Hold Steady
Can't Leave Her Behind--Stephen Malkmus & Lee Ranaldo
Cold Irons Bound--Tom Verlaine & The Million Dollar Bashers
Dark Eyes--Iron & Wine & Calexico
Fourth Time Around--Yo La Tengo
Goin' To Acapulco--Jim James & Calexico
Highway 61 Revisited--Karen O & The Million Dollar Bashers
I Wanna Be Your Lover--Yo La Tengo
I'm Not There--Bob Dylan
I'm Not There--Sonic Youth
Just Like A Woman--Charlotte Gainsbourg & Calexico
Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues--Ramblin' Jack Elliot
Knockin' On Heaven's Door--Antony & The Johnsons
The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll--Mason Jennings
Maggie's Farm--Stephen Malkmus & The Million Dollar Bashers
Mama You've Been On My Mind--Jack Johnson
The Man In The Long Black Coat--Mark Lanegan
Moonshiner--Bob Forrest
One More Cup Of Coffee--Roger McGuinn & Calexico
Pressing On--John Doe
Ring Them Bells--Sufjan Stevens
Señor (Tales Of Yankee Power)--Willie Nelson & Calexico
Simple Twist Of Fate--Jeff Tweedy
Stuck Inside Of Mobile With Memphis Blues Again--Cat Power
The Times They Are A Changin'--Mason Jennings
Tombstone Blues--Richie Havens
When The Ship Comes In--Marcus Carl Franklin
Wicked Messenger--The Black Keys
You Ain't Goin 'Nowhere--Glen Hansard & Markta Irglov
"I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine" - John Doe (X)

(via Shawn Levy)

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Advice from Ed Harris

In his recent Q&A with The Guardian, actor/director Ed Harris lays down a series of blunt answers that reveal his humor, hangups and bitterness. In regards to his new movie, it's mostly bitterness:

What has been your biggest disappointment?

The distribution of Copying Beethoven in the US.

and

What is the most important lesson life has taught you?

Don't let MGM distribute a film you care about.

Also find out the answer to "How often do you have sex?"

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Bergman: The Most Theatrical Hack to Ever Change the Face of Cinema

While I've managed to get most of my writing jobs done on time, illness has prevented me from fulfilling my blogging duties, which undeniably involve diving into such sticky conversations as whether or not Ingmar Bergman is a great film artist. I also still need to contribute to the Antonioni discussion. Since Bergman isn't among the 30 directors about whom I'm most knowledgable, I wouldn't have nominated myself to defend him so verbosely against a piece published in the newspaper of record. But I haven't found any other articles that say what I want for me. So here I go…

The question of whether Ingmar Bergman was in fact a great film artist is one that should undeniably be discussed in the wake of his death. But the discussion thus far has been disappointing, starting with Jonatham Rosenbaum's piece for the New York Times, "Scenes From an Overrated Career," an uncharacteristically presumptuous argument which is almost as smug as its headline. Many of the responses that I read (perhaps I missed the best ones) were equally out of touch with where the real discussion of Bergman's worth lies. While the debate should certainly be going on, it should exist with honesty and actual analyses from both sides.

The premise of Rosenbaum's article is that although Bergman seduced audiences in the 1950s, '60s and '70s with his talent to entertain and ably direct Sweden's supply of hot blonde actresses, he didn't do anything interesting to change the face of cinema. In fact, perhaps his talents were (cue sinister music)…purely related to the theater!

"The stylistic departures I saw in Mr. Bergman’s ’50s and ’60s features — the silent-movie pastiche in “Sawdust and Tinsel,” the punitive use of magic against a doctor-villain in “The Magician,” the aggressive avant-garde prologue of “Persona” — were actually more functions of his skill and experience as a theater director than a desire or capacity to change the language of cinema in order to say something new. If the French New Wave addressed a new contemporary world, Mr. Bergman’s talent was mainly devoted to preserving and perpetuating an old one.

Anyone who's been to film school immediately recognizes the quiet dagger that is the condescending classification of a film or filmmaker as theatrical. (I recently used this infallible critique when I called "The Producers" a giant-budgeted documentary of the stage musical.) It's the equivalent of me setting myself above Rosenbaum by calling his piece "smug" in the first paragraph of my counter-argument. WIthout any elaboration or explanations, he establishes that Bergman didn't do anything new. He was just stuck in the past, practically setting his camera up in the auditorium and shooting the actors a stage. It's as primitive as "L'arroseur arrosé." In fact, Bergman had a different world view and set of goals from the French New Wavers, but that doesn't make his work any harder or easier to discount.

Rosenbaum is willing to declare Bergman a genius of the theater without ever seeing one of his productions, so long as it equates to a cinematic dis. Even when he did something challenging and experimental, like "Persona" (which apparently only experiments with form during its prologue), he only did so in a theatrical manner. Unfortunately, Rosenbaum doesn't really elaborate on how making the film look as if it were burning up in the projector—a move that still leaves post-modernists in awe of the consummate modernist—was purely a theatrical move. Maybe Bergman wanted to set a theater on fire, but didn't have the budget to do so night after night and had to compromise.

Bergman liked the theater, and liked that much of the environment had to be created in the audience's imagination. But he also appreciated the atmospheric capabilities of film. Once, he and cinematographer Sven Nykvist famously spent three days in a small church to study the light throughout the day, only to determine that they'd have to rebuild it in the studio to recreate it.

While Roger Ebert makes a solid effort to defend Bergman, he overlooks Rosenbaum's unsupported claims.

"I think Rosenbaum gives away the game when he says, Bergman’s “movies aren’t so much filmic expressions as expressions on film.” He means form itself is more important (and entertaining, I guess) than narrative, emotional content and performance. Not everyone would agree."

That's true, not everyone would agree, but that's an entirely different debate. Most, Ebert included, would agree that a sense of cinematic form and its differences with the theater are essential to making a cohesive work. Ebert's mistake is to nearly give Rosenbaum's premise a free pass. Bergman's best cinema isn't theatrical in the least. His expressions are personal and cinematic.

While Bergman is one of many film directors who frequently worked in theater (Robert Altman was another), that doesn't mean he was unaware of the differences between the two mediums. In fact, his love of the human face and all the mysteries it contains made film much more his medium—he could put the emphasis where he wanted. To over-simplify, theater is a medium of words, bodies and voices, while cinema is a medium of faces (among many other things). Bergman's 1984 short, "Karin's Face," devoted itself to old family photos (specifically his mother's), emphasizing telling looks and bodily gestures and searching for their significance. Rosenbaum passively mentions such a key component to Bergman's work at the end of his essay, saying, "It doesn’t diminish his masterful use of extended close-ups or his distinctively theatrical, seemingly homemade cinema to suggest that movies can offer something more complex and challenging." But Bergman's genius was in his ability to find something complex and challenging in something so simple as a face.

In "Persona," Bergman leaves the camera on Bibi Andersson's face as she explicitly recounts an unforgettable sexual encounter. A more conventional, classically or theatrically edited piece would have contained a conventional shot sequence, including reaction shots, but Bergman unflinchingly refuses to cut away from his actress's face. This single, fixed gaze was bold and revolutionary, breaking with conventional structure and denying the audience the space that theater by its nature provides and that film usually provides for comfort's sake. The influence of such bold direction can still be seen today—some examples, off the top of my head, include "Boogie Nights," "Magnolia," "Birth" and "Brick."

The face obsession is just one example. Bergman explored his "bitter and pinched emotions" (along with other ones like joy, hope and happiness) in many ways that always struck me as quintessentially cinematic. The haunting, psychological assault of "Persona" owes itself to editing and composition. The comparably more classical "Wild Strawberries" uses odd, dreamy timing to accentuate its study of the worth of a human life. The sweaty atmosphere of the hotel in "The Silence," whose influence can be seen in works by Kubrick and the Coens, relies entirely on cinematic atmosphere for its success. To call these works theatrical and no longer relevant is like calling Benjamin Franklin a hack for inventing the furnace stove when we already had plenty of ways to cook.

Bergman's fascinations and innovations were different from than those of Carl Dreyer and Robert Bresson, whom the article claims are totally more important than Bergman because their films are in more retrospectives than his. Some might justifiably place more value in Dreyer and Bresson's work, because their artistic interests led to more extreme experiments in form. But Bergman's hangups and motifs resulted in several stunning, distinctively Bergmanesque moments. Also, nothing against Dreyer and Bresson, but during my film school career, I probably watched, on assignment, three times as many Bergman films than films by those two directors combined. (I only mention it because Rosenbaum wants to use it as a measure of worth.) And I was enrolled much more recently than Rosenbaum. (In the interest of full disclosure, several students said that one of my professors, William Siska, looked like Bergman-lover Woody Allen, so maybe that has something to do with it.)

If Rosenbaum genuinely believes in the decades-old critique that Bergman was purely a theatrical entertainer who contributed little artistically to the world of cinema, he needs to start by explaining how some of the most memorable images in film history (the hill dance in "The Seventh Seal," for example) are merely theatrical. If he finds that he can't do so, he needs to frame his argument against Bergman in another way, in order to generate some real thought on the subject and allow the director's admirers a chance to defend his legacy.

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Misanthropic in Regards to 'Moliere'

Sorry I haven't posted much, but I've been terribly sick lately. I'll try to weigh in on some of the various happenings of the past week soon. Until then, enjoy my column on trailer fatigue and these reviews:

Stardust ***
Arctic Tale **1/2
Rush Hour 3 *1/2

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So Much to Read—Good Thing You Have Nothing But Time

Wow, Jeremy, you sure wrote a lot of stuff this week, you say.

Yes, I did.

So which stuff can I skip and which stuff is a must-read?

I'm afraid all the articles are must-reads. Sorry.

In Memory of Ingmar Bergman

It’s impossible to sum up Ingmar Bergman’s contribution to cinema by only giving examples of one or two of his films — or even a decade’s worth of his work. So individual and profound are the experiences of so much of his work that only detailed examinations could do each of his films justice. To only note the eerie dream sequence of “Wild Strawberries,” or the chess match between a medieval knight and Death in “The Seventh Seal,” or the intertwining faces of “Persona,” neglects the completeness that all three films have.

"The Bourne Ultimatum:"

No other thrill-offerings this summer have come close to the level of suspense, excitement and propulsion that “The Bourne Ultimatum” pours out with seemingly no effort. The film could get by on its remarkable action sequences alone, but still takes the time to house them in a multi-layered story performed by great actors.

"Joshua:"

While mixing the formula for “Joshua” at the movie factor y, writer/director George Ratliff and his co-writer David Gilbert hit a snag. There was a leak in the credibility-injection machine. The more ingredients editor Jacob Cray-croft poured in, the faster the component leaked them out. There was still a reel of film to be spooled out, and the boys were stumped.

"Bratz:"

One’s a soccer player, one’s a cheerleader, one’s a math geek (and also loves fashion!) and one is a singer, but won’t perform because she’s too shy. At one point, when all four of the girls are holding cards stating their clique, the shy one’s says “journalist,” but she’s never actually shown doing any writing or reporting. In fact, she seems to be completely friendless once the other three ditch her. But no worries—before we can even see what adjusting to high school is like for these four hot shots, a “two years later” title card comes up.

"The Simpsons Movie:"

You might think that “Austin Powers” already adequately sent up the convenient obstruction of genitalia during nude scenes, although you remember that “The Simpsons” did that gag long before Mike Myers, when Marge painted Mr. Burns. But the issue isn’t who did it first, but who does it best, and “The Simpsons Movie” wins hands down with a beautiful, fluid movement and as perfectly absurd a punch line as could be conceived."

And don't forget to catch up on my commentary on the show's greatness from last week!

Or my review of "I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry."

Hope that's enough!

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