Editor | Nick Dawson

Jeffrey Wells, the proprietor of Hollywood Elsewhere, has a nice post on his blog at the moment about Greenberg. And Wells is unabashedly a fan, going as far to say that "If your girlfriend doesn't like it (and she may not), you may want to think about dumping her. Seriously."

He also declares that "Stiller delivers the performance of his career," and below discusses the movie with Greenberg's star in the first part of a four-part video interview.

You can read Wells' full take on the movie - plus watch the rest of the interview - over at Hollywood Elsewhere.

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Over at Slate, Juliet Lapidos has gone against the advice of Clive's father in A Serious Man, namely to "Accept the mystery." Instead, she has immersed herself in the rich complexities of the Coen brothers' latest, which she terms "enigmatic to the point of inscrutability," a film which "leaves audiences in a state of interpretive uncertainty, popcorn uneaten, wondering what the Coens are getting at."

In the course of trying to make sense of the troubling tale of Larry Gopnik, she poses - and tries to answer - three questions: Why Larry?, Why the Yiddish Prologue?, and What Does the Ending Mean?

You can see what conclusions she reaches here.

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Kevin Macdonald, director of Focus Features' upcoming The Eagle of The Ninth, has talked to The Times of London about and politics, accents and the politics of accents in the Roman adventure movie.

Here are some quotes from his conversation with The Times' Mike Wade:

 - “It was always my concept for this film that the Romans would be Americans. That was my first idea about the movie and it still holds up whether or not we had any money from America, that would have been my approach.”

 - “It’s a film is about a guy who believes wholeheartedly in the values of Rome, and believes everyone else must want to become a part of the great family of Rome. Marcus thinks, ‘It would benefit them so much — can’t they see it is the only way to live their lives?’ He comes to realise there are other value systems, other people have a claim to honour in the same way that he as an American — or a Roman — can claim honour. This is a film which is some way reflects the some of current anxieties and the political questions that we all have.”

 - “That’s what we are doing — not simply reflecting on the Afghanistan or Iraq wars, but a sense of cultural imperialism. ...The parallel is definitely there, and it is part of what you would want the audience to take away from the film."

You can read the entire article here.

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In Berlin for the world premiere of his latest movie, Greenberg, writer-director Noah Baumbach sat down with The Hollywood Reporter's Gregg Kilday. In the following extract from their conversation, Baumbach - who has previously always set his movies in New York - talks about how Los Angeles plays an integral role in this new film.

THR: Is this a character that could only exist in Los Angeles or could you have set it in any city?

Baumbach: I always wanted it to be in Los Angeles. I do not have a good answer why. But simultaneously, I had this character who can't get out of his own way, who makes everything in his life much more difficult for himself. At the same time I wanted to shoot a story in Los Angeles and shoot Los Angeles like a real city. It came together and it seemed like the right character for the right city.

THR: In L.A., you certainly see lots of people who come out to be part of the business, never quite make it and then just drift along.

Baumbach: That's certainly a common experience. There are a lot of pepole who find themselves floating out there, but this story is not about the movie business. He's not looking to get into the business or anything. I really wanted to focus more on L.A. outside of the industry. I feel Los Angeles in the movies is either seen as a Hollywood town or a sort of generic city. I wanted to look at it as city that's unique to itself.

You can read the whole interview here.

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Film journalist Joe Leydon's chat with Joel and Ethan Coen conducted during the Toronto International Film Festival has just gone up on the Cowboys and Indians website. (The main reason they were being interviewed by this particular publication is because they are currently working on a remake of the late era John Wayne western True Grit.) Below is an extract from their conversation in which the filmmaking siblings discuss A Serious Man and their feelings on success:

C&I: It’s a movie about a man whose faith is tested while so many terrible things happen to him. And yet, it’s a comedy — a very dark comedy — and critics and audiences are responding very favorably to it.

Joel: It’s very gratifying when people like your movie. Because it’s a bummer when they don’t.

Ethan: But there’s a funny thing about gauging reaction — it happens so much after the fact. Like, it’s a little odd to be here and hearing what people think of [A Serious Man] because we’re right in the middle of writing something else. It’s strange when you’re sort of whipsawed back to the old thing. Like Joel says, it’s cool when they like it. But it’s sort of like praise for something that isn’t really attached to you at this point. But you think, “Well, okay, yeah, we’ll take the praise anyway.”

C&I: In A Serious Man, your protagonist questions why he must endure so much misery. Consider the flip side of that: Do you fellows ever wonder why you’ve enjoyed so much success?

Joel: Oh, yes. Absolutely. We consider ourselves very lucky. It’s like, sometimes, we do wonder ... 

Ethan: How did that happen?

Joel: Right. How did that happen?

Ethan: It’s very weird. It’s almost like a mistake has been made.

You can read the entire interview here.

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A Greenberg-centric post at The Playlist blog has pointed us towards an entertaining interview from last summer in which actor-writer-director Mark Duplass, one of the leading figures of the Mumblecore movement, chats with Movieline's Kyle Buchanan about his involvement in Noah Baumbach's upcoming movie.

Here's an extract:

Who do you play in Greenberg?

DUPLASS: I play Eric, the ex-best friend and ex-bandmate of Roger Greenberg, Ben Stiller’s character. [Roger] comes out to LA to house-sit for his brother for a while, and we try to rekindle our friendship but there’s kind of a fucked-up past there.

Noah Baumbach has really been dipping into mumblecore lately — Joe Swanberg’s muse Greta Gerwig is in Greenberg too, and Noah produced Joe’s last film…

DUPLASS: He’s a mooch, you know? That’s essentially what it comes down to: He’s not talented. [Laughs] No, he’s very different [than a mumblecore director]. I see why he’s interested, because he has a realist aesthetic and he appreciates all the minutiae in a performance, but he is also a very exacting director. He knows what he wants and he hears the cadence of the dialogue in his head. It was not an improv fest on Noah’s set. It was really great for me to try something different. I actually kind of don’t think I’m as good in that environment as I am when I’m let loose to use the two or three skill sets I have as a writer/director/actor to sculpt something, you know? So it was a challenge.

You can read the entire interview here.

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Last night, Focus Features announced that it had acquired the distribution rights to writer-director Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right, which had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival a few days ago. The film, about two teenage children conceived through artificial insemination who go in search of their biological father, stars Annette Bening, Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo. Cholodenko's movie will be distributed domestically by Focus, which also has international rights for Great Britain, Germany and South Africa.

Speaking about the movie, Focus Features' CEO James Schamus said, “Lisa has made an extraordinary gem of a film that combines comedic surprise with poignant emotional truth. Not only is The Kids Are All Right infectiously funny and touching, but it’s also entirely accessible. We’re confident that audiences everywhere will fall in love with this family, as brilliantly brought to life by a remarkable cast of actors.”

Cholodenko added that “The Kids Are All Right is all about family, and joining with Focus feels like a perfect marriage. I’m proud that the movie has now found such a special home.”

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Three of the short films made by Focus Features' Africa First program winners from 2008 -  are at Sundance - Jenna Bass' The Tunnel, Wanuri Kahiu's Pumzi, and Dyana Gaye's Saint Louis Blues - and indieWIRE's Brian Brooks has a short write-up on them.

Over at Twitch, Todd Brown spotlights Pumzi, on which Simon Hansen acted as producer and special effects man, just as he did on Neill Blomkamp's 2009 hit District 9. Brown writes that "the word is coming back very strong. And judging by the just-released trailer it's easy to see why. Get ready for a wave of African film, people ... if Hansen and his ilk have any say in things it's coming soon."

And if you want the inside line on Sundance / Africa First experience, you must check out Jenna Bass's blog on this very site, as she's been chronicling everything that's been going on in Park City.

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Graphic artist-turned-filmmaker Joann Sfar's first foray into directing, Gainsbourg (Vie Heroique), is released in France today. The Focus Features International movie is a biopic of the legendary French singer-songwriter Serge Gainsbourg, and stars Eric Elmosnino in the title role, with the supporting cast featuring Laetitia Casta as Brigitte Bardot and the late Lucy Gordon as Jane Birkin.

Over at one of our favorite film blogs, The Playlist, they have an extensive preview of the movie, and also feature the following (NSFW!) trailer, which is in French but has closed captioning in English. (You may have to click on the bottom right hand corner and select CC to see the subtitles.)

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Among contemporary film critics, no one has a more original and idiosyncratic perspective than the New York Press' Armond White. And every year, just to underline the difference between how he sees things and the rest of the world does, he compiles a "Better Than" list in which he lists a critical favorite and then puts forward another film which is in some way similar but (you guessed it) "better."

The list for 2009 was released last week, and White starts off by naming Jan Troell's Everlasting Moments ("A mother’s discovery of photography explains the basis of our need for cinema") as the best film of the year.

But he also sets out his stall as a champion of Focus Features movies, picking out two - Coraline and A Serious Man - for special attention.

White deemed Henry Selick's movie as being "better than" the awards season darling Precious, saying that it is "the year’s best stop-motion animation, a dazzling adolescent girl’s fantasy that explored psychological and cultural fears while Lee Daniels’ racist fantasy contradicted political reality with a laughably pornographic view of black female pathology."

And he selects A Serious Man as being superior to Michael Haneke's Palme D'Or-winning The White Ribbon, declaring that Joel and Ethan Coen "redefine Jewish paranoia as existential anxiety. It beats Haneke’s art-house Nazi fetishism any day."

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So, the first week back to work after the holidays seems the obvious/perfect time to note the passing of 2009. But I'm not one to get funereal about these things: 2009 was a great year, and I'm here to honor it, as well as bury it.

And what better way to do that than by remembering the movies of 2009 in a video montage? (Don't worry, it's a rhetorical question.)

So, without further ado, here's Cinescape's take on the past 12 months on the big screen:

And then the perspective on the year from Jim Emerson, of Scanners blog fame.

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Apologies to all Ken Russell fans for the pun in the title, but it seems that everyone who makes a living writing about film is hammering out a list of their favorite films of 2009, or the decade, or somesuch variation on one of the above. 

At his indieWIRE blog, the estimable Tom Hall is counting down his top 23 (why not?) films of the decade (and is currently up to Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation at #17), while the New Yorker's Richard Brody also offers a look back at the past 10 years, provocatively mixing Knocked Up and The Darjeeling Limited in with some seriously highbrow arthouse selections in his top 10. Ex-Premiere critic Glenn Kenny initially offered up 70 films for his faves of 2000-2009 (but has now bumped his list up to an even 100), The Playlist is up to 2004 in its year-by-year breakdown of the decade, Michael Atkinson at Zero for Conduct puts together a decade list also, and Filmmaker magazine is currently reaching out to readers for their best American indie movies of the 2000s. Taking a more novel approach to the demanding art of list-making (or is it a science?) are the boys at the Onion, who are focusing on the best bad movies of the aughts, while film blogger Iain Stott has just finished his mammoth task of completing his Beyond the Canon list, which he describes as "essentially a greatest films poll, only without the greatest films." The 2009 lists are still a little slow to materialize, but there's no better way to get started than with one from none other than John Waters, who picks 10 movies for the year over at ArtForum.

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I'm not the biggest fan of disaster movies, but watching this compilation video of New York's under attack from aliens, tidal wave, giant ape, etc., it's easy to appreciate the wonderful operatic-ness of it all, especially with Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" playing over it all (a nod to the opening of Woody Allen's Manhattan, of course).

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The first trailer for the forthcoming Focus Features release Babies, the documentary from French director Thomas Balmes following the first year of babies on four continents, has just gone up on the Yahoo! Movies site. The movie will be released on April 16, 2010, and you can check out the trailer right now here.

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The IFP's Gotham Awards is being held tonight in NYC, marking the start of the movie award show season. A fact that had somehow escaped my notice until now is that the host of the show will be none other than comedian Kumail Nanjiani, who earlier this year picked his five favorite movies starring stand ups for Five In Focus.

If you're not fortunate enough to be going tonight, you can nevertheless get (almost) the whole experience by watching the show live on the web on Ustream.TV.

Below is Kumail in action:

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One of FilmInFocus' contributors, Mike Plante - who wrote articles for us on animation and short films - is not only a fine writer but a top notch film festival programmer. And through his work with festivals, Mike gets to meet and befriend a lot of directors.

Because of an interesting set of circumstances, Mike started commissioning a diverse group of filmmakers to make a movie for him -- for the price of a meal. Here's an extract from an interview indieWIRE did with Mike a few days ago in which he explains how the director James Fotopoulos came to make the first "Lunchfilm":

We were at the New York Underground Film Festival, eating at some place that didn’t take credit cards. He didn’t have any cash. Filmmakers never have cash - or money at all! We’ve known each other for a long time, and I knew that he churns stuff out really quickly. So I said, “I’ll pay, but you don’t owe me. Instead of giving me another thirty dollar lunch, give me a thirty dollar film.” And he said, “I’ll have it done next week!” And then we wrote something down on a napkin, mostly because I was messing with him. We had both been bitching about something we had seen, so I challenged him to make a film that wasn’t like that. And he did. He made a twisted, weird, avant-garde film.

Check out the Lunchfilm website here.

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Last week, I wrote a blog entry on unofficial film posters, so I thought a logical next step would be to flag up another website featuring great movie-related art. The site in question is the blog of Pasadena-based illustrator Paul Rogers, who has a regular Name That Movie feature where you have to identify films on the basis of six drawings by Rogers, none of which show the actors. Rogers' art is fantastic, and it's an interesting little challenge to try and identify movies in this rather unconventional manner.

For starters, do you know the film above?

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Recently indieWIRE's Anne Thompson went, armed with her trusty flipcam, to sit down with A Serious Man's lead actor, Michael Stuhlbarg, at the Sunset Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles.

Below is the first part of the three-part interview, which you can watch in its entirety over at Anne's blog on indieWIRE, Thompson on Hollywood.

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To coincide with the release of Pirate Radio today, one of our favorite film sites, Cinematical, has turned its attention to other movies involving the radio. (As I did myself in an article on this site, DJs on Film.)

Here's how Monika Bartyzel's piece starts:

I've always been drawn to radio on the big screen. It seems antithetical -- a sound format being so perfect for a medium full of sound and imagery. Video killed the radio star ... right? Nevertheless, radio leads to wonderfully aural expression that gives film that extra little something, whether that be the perfectly pitched voice of a radio DJ delighting in word play or the perfectly placed song that evokes any number of emotions. Word play and great music -- they've always been my weakness.

The list of radio movies includes Pump Up the Volume, a personal favorite, and Focus' own Talk to Me, featuring Don Cheadle's electric performance as Petey Greene.

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A few days, film folk started blogging about the marvelous poster that mashes up those two films of this fall season featuring talking foxes, Lars von Trier's Antichrist and Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox. It was dreamed up by Nashville-based graphic designer Sam Smith and posted on his Flickr page.

But instead of just linking to it again and adding nothing to the conversation other than repeating how awesome it is, I'm also going to link to a really excellent blog of other movie posters that aren't, Not A Movie Poster. The site collects together posters - I presume all fan-made - that take a different approach to pitching a movie to audiences than the official poster. (Among the many excellent "not movie posters" there is, for example, this alternate take on Focus Features' own Sin Nombre.) For those of you interested in graphic design or passionate about movies, it's a well worth a visit.

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