This is the year that print film criticism went on life support, online film critics drafted sober eulogies and the rest of the world yawned distractedly while poised over the plug. Into the ill-attended open grave my colleague Lauren Wissot just tossed a meditation on film culture titled, “The Movie-Going Public.”

I dig it because it dares to take filmgoers as seriously as it does cinema itself. Further, it manages, mostly by way of example, to pee all over the very notion of a professional film critic. I use don’t use the term “pee” lightly but with great care, thinking of readers like Anonymous, who responded to Lauren’s post with, “You’re not an elitist. But you are crass, vulgar and unprofessional… Manny Farber is rolling in his grave.” I want Anonymous, if he or she is reading this, to imagine Mr. Farber howling in pain from the beyond at my using such a crude bathroom word as “pee” in reference to the profession he devoted his life to. But another dead 20th Century critic is probably grinning in his grave. James Agee: “I suspect I am, far more than not, in your own situation: deeply interested in moving pictures, considerably experienced from childhood on in watching them and thinking and talking about them, and totally, or almost totally without experience or even much second-hand knowledge of how they are made. It is my business to conduct one end of a conversation, as an amateur critic among amateur critics. And I will be of use and of interest only in so far as my amateur judgment is sound, stimulating,
or illuminating.” (Props to Ryland Walker Knight.)
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• Prodigal Sons review
• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button preview (and backlash)
• Waltz with Bashir review
• Jeff Goldblum, Media Diet interview
• Helen review
• Tulpan review
• O’Horten review
• Learning Gravity review
• Ken Burns, Media Diet interview
• You Must Remember This: The Warner Brothers Story and tribute to Richard Schickel
• ‘Movies Are Over.’ Directors, Distribs & Journos Debate Future of Film & Criticism
• Hunger, Steve McQueen interview
• Slavoj Zizek and Nazi melodrama
• Telluride 2008 photos
• Slumdog Millionaire review
• Adam Resurrected, Paul Schrader interview
• Firaaq review
• The Rest is Silence review
• I’ve Loved You So Long review
• The Good, The Bad and the Weird interview with Kim Ji-Woon
• Revanche review

Documentaries and socially-relevant foreign films are sexy, too! Here are my picks for five international hotties who, no matter the plot, create a private porn of their own.

Sociopolitical Drama: Lior Ashkenazi, Walk On Water

Who is Lior Ashkenazi?  I have no idea.  What I do know is that finally getting around to watching American-born Israeli director Eytan Fox’s 2004 Walk On Water, starring the incredible Israeli hunk Ashkenazi as a Mossad agent who finds himself intertwined in the lives of the grandson and granddaughter of a fugitive Nazi he’s assigned to capture, I realized I haven’t wanted to lay a movie star this bad since I first laid eyes on Daniel Craig’s 007.  The sturdy-bodied, raven-haired Marlboro Man with magnetic eyes and a chin both chiseled and Travolta dimpled is so mesmerizing I can’t get his image out of my head – like a catchy techno tune stuck on endless repeat.  The film itself is a fascinating character study for the first hour – until the characters leave the Holy Land for Berlin, wherein the plot descends into ludicrous soap opera melodrama complete with Deutsche drag queens and Jean-Claude Van Damme damage (and Bruce
Springsteen’s annoying “Tunnel of Love” stuck on endless repeat).  But none of this really matters because it’s also got – Lior Ashkenazi!  (And just to make me more hot and bothered he even gets naked, the camera caressing his hirsute chest – before he soaps up another man.  And the character is straight.  Continue reading while I take a cold shower.)

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“I thought it was a great drag show, like Mrs. Doubtfire. You’ve blown the family, it isn’t working, so you come back in a different costume, and you take custody of the kids. So you come back as Mrs. Doubtfire.”

–Today in Increasingly Arbitrary Movie References From Political Pundits: Chris Matthews’ verdict on Tuesday night at the RNC.

In the Telluride catalog, Slavoj Zizek calls The Great Sacrifice, “the supreme achievement of the Nazi melodrama.” Before the film’s screening at the festival Sunday morning, in Zizek’s inimitable way, he put the work of director Veit Harlan into context. “[Harlan was] one of the Big 3 of Nazi cinema. Number 1 was Leni Reifenstahl, number 2 was Douglas Sirk. These two, I think, they can be redeemed. [With] Leni, the impotence of the analysis starts with, you think she’s a bad girl…but it doesn’t work. Douglas Sirk, I have greater suspicions there. But Harlan, he is the ultimate, he can not be redeemed. But he is a breathtaking visual talent.” For perspective: later Zizek noted that when he “despises” someone or something, he uses words like “brilliant” or “breathtaking”; when he actually respects them, he says “they are not completely an idiot.”

Its maker and its message may have been despicable (and Zizek’s post film lecture, summarized below, left no doubt that Harlan made the film with Nazi ideals in mind), but there’s no question that The Great Sacrifice is a breathtakingly visual film.

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This may qualify as hyperbole, but Richard Schickel’s You Must Remember This––which premiered at Cannes in May, screened here at Telluride as part of a tribute to Schickel and will debut on PBS in slightly different form this fall––is maybe the most appropriately titled made-for-TV Classical Hollywood documentary directed by a working film critic I’ve seen this year.

“You must remember this,” is, of course, a lyric from “As Time Goes By,” the signature song from Warner Brothers’ Casablanca. From the opening montage of a tour through the WB backlot, set to a soundtrack of memorable lines from maybe a dozen and a half classic productions from that studio, Schickel’s film is devoted to anecdotal recall of Warner Brothers’ various signatures, from experts and witnesses who are dishy and not uncritical, but still often as sentimemtal as the song that Rick commands Sam to play again.  From silent doggie star Rin Tin Tin (who, snarked writer and eventual head of production Daryl Zanuck,  had the biggest brain on the lot) to the Busby Berkeley musicals that not so subtly told the viewer that “Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler are gonna get laid, and we’re all part of it,” to the social issue films of the 30s which carried “a vision of the world that was darker, more cynical, and more problematic than any other studio’s,” Schickel finds a surprisingly rich balance between behind-the-scenes trivia and multi-layered criticism. Access to talking heads including Molly Haskell, Neal Gabler, Jeaninne Basinger and former WB contract player Ronald Reagan certainly helps with the gravitas.

Also surprising was the slightly salty candor that ran through Schickel’s Special Medallion acceptance chat, which both the honoree and the audience seemed to find too brief. Still, Schickel managed to get out som zingers involving Manny Farber, Pauline Kael, the youth of America and John McCain. Some highlights after the jump.

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Jeff Goldblum is at Telluride to promote his new film, Adam Resurrected, directed by Paul Schrader. The film follows the story of a Holocaust survivor who also happens to be a clown. Committed to an asylum after the war, he becomes a ring leader of sorts. On the opening day of the festival Goldblum was graciously hugging young fans and striking odd poses for snap-shots. We got a chance to ask him about his media intake, which includes a substantial amount homework from Schrader.

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As I think I’ve mentioned before, I’m a bit addicted to MSNBC, mostly because it’s where loose-canon conservatives go to fade away. So I’ve been watching it, like, a lot. And I know they’re working live without a script, but is that really an excuse for the whole team to fall back on the Chris Matthews gold standard of dragging metaphors out of movies? In the past 12 hours, I’ve heard Brian Williams, Andrea Mitchell and Joe Scarborough all compare Barack Obama’s nomination acceptance speech to The American President, the Rob Reiner/Aaron Sorkin political romantic dramedy starring Michael Douglas and Annette Benning.

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There are few board games that have endured the test of time to still get played today even during the video game craze. Games like Monopoly, Scrabble, Risk, and Clue are still available at your neighborhood store, decades after they came out. In fact, they’ve all seen multiple releases over the years. There’s a billion different versions of Monopoly out there, and you can even Make-Your-Own-Opoly. Scrabble is still as popular as ever, especially given the Scrabulous flap over at Facebook, and Risk just came out with a revised edition that has new rules and pieces. That just leaves us with Clue.

Clue, or Cluedo as it is called in the United Kingdom, where it was invented by Anthony Pratt, was created out of a love for murder mysteries. It was first published in 1949 and still endures to this day in multiple versions. To name a few, there’s The Simpson’s Clue, a Clue DVD Game, and even Clue Express for people with limited time on their hands. Clue also came out with a new edition just a few weeks okay, completely updated with biographies for the characters, new weapons, and a second deck of cards. I’m not sure how I feel about Professor Plum being changed to Victor Plum, a dot com billionaire. That’s like replacing Gumdrop Pass in Candyland with “Bean Sprout Way” to encourage kids to eat healthy. Don’t mess with nostalgia, man.

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Twitter, the popular micro-blogging service, has turned into a powerful tool in the hands of not only consumers but marketers of all stripes as well. Comcast, Paramount Pictures and a handful of others have all latched on to it as a way to communicate with customers, acting not only as a distribution platform but a conversation hub and customer service hub as well. Some of the biggest names in the social media marketing world are spending serious time brainstorming how to use Twitter for marketing, debating its usefulness and otherwise hashing out a series of best practices for utilizing the service.

Media outlets have also turned to Twitter for many of the same reasons. TV Guide, Fox News and even Spout have a presence there to, again, promote their content and, in some cases, even engage in a back-and-forth with readers.

But did you know that Darth Vader is twittering? How about Cobra Commander?

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I never went to a normal college, never lived in a proper dorm or experienced fraternity hazing or even rush week from an inside viewpoint. I went to an urban art school and then a commuter school. And though I grew up in a college town and later worked on the campus of another college I didn’t attend, I feel like I don’t have the proper perspective with which to judge most college movies and college kid characters as being true to life. This probably explains why I enjoy so many bad movies set in colleges and/or involving college students. I bet I could even check out a double feature of The House Bunny and College and have a good time at the movies.

Of course, I do have some semblance of good taste, and I also recognize that none of the following movies are anywhere near the quality of my favorite college movies (including Harold Lloyd’s The Freshman, the Marx Brothers’ Horse Feathers and the Frat Pack’s Old School), or even the beloved Animal House, which I regrettably find to be highly overrated (no, that doesn’t mean I dislike it or think it’s bad or unfunny). The ten movies on today’s list are merely guilty pleasures that I can’t stop appreciating no matter how hard I try or how old I get.

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Forty years after the infamous 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, protesters are looking to repeat history in Denver this week. In fact there’s even a group calling itself “Recreate ‘68″, and if you’re a true internerd, you’ve already seen the popular YouTube clip of the crowd chanting “Fuck Fox News” at a Fox News correspondent (check out the other side here).

After so many attempts at making parallels between ‘68 and ‘08, I’m a little bored of the nostalgia, and I think the retro attitude is past the point of showing its ineffectiveness. Earlier this year, I groaned at the use of a modern (though really, mostly decade-old) soundtrack in the ‘68 DNC-set animated documentary Chicago 10. Yet two years prior to that film’s 2007 premiere at Sundance, I had already seen a failed attempt to callback ‘68 with the Medium Cool homage This Revolution, the trailer for which is today’s clip of the day.

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Ever since the great humanistic film critic Manny Farber died last week at the ripe old age of 91, writer/director (and former film critic and Kael acolyte) Paul Schrader, who so eloquently has been making the tribute rounds to Farber, has been on my mind. I’ve always been a fan of Schrader’s writing – as much for his fearless risk taking as for his Travis Bickle triumphs. American Gigolo, his very-1980 follow-up to Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, in which Richard Gere’s rent boy to rich older women Julian Kaye falls for Lauren Hutton’s senator’s wife Michelle Stratton while simultaneously finding himself a suspect in the murder of a “rough trick,” is typical Schrader, forever probing overlapping lurid worlds with the attention of an obsessive pathologist. Even with mediocre acting, earnest dialogue sometimes bordering on the heavy-handed, and predictable hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold asides, American Gigolo is still a fine slice of celluloid cheese, containing camerawork both sleek and fluid and that sexy sing-along anthem (“Call Me”!) complete with Debbie Harry’s French coos. Incidentally, I’ve always been a fan of male prostitutes as well. So why is it that I’ve never been a fan of this flick?

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We never trust the British tabloids. Ever. But sometimes we wish we could. Like when they tell us that Cher is going to play Catwoman in Christopher Nolan’s follow-up to The Dark Knight.  From the Telegraph:

A studio executive said: “Cher is Nolan’s first choice to play Catwoman. He wants to her to portray her like a vamp in her twilight years.

I don’t buy it. It would be awesome, but I don’t buy it.