The News: All-Positive Friday!

By S.T. VanAirsdale

As per tradition, some of today's movie news of note from around New York:

--Congratulations, sighs of relief and more than few "What took so long?"s are in order following the announcement of titles to be preserved by the National Film Registry. Among the New Yorkers: Jules Dassin's The Naked City, Sidney Lumet's 12 Angry Men and Ken Jacobs' Tom, Tom the Piper's Son. Among the overdue: Grand Hotel, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Days of Heaven and Now, Voyager. And yes, yes, Back to the Future. You can relax now. The Hollywood Reporter has the full list.

Eight million Stories: Barry Fitzgerald in The Naked City, chosen for preservation by the National Film Registry

--Another reason to love Top 10 lists: This week at indieWIRE, Paramount Vantage director of acquisitions and co-productions Ben Cotner dumps three of his own films in the top... two? Wow -- modest and good at math. To his credit, he also includes Chop Shop; at least you can't say he doesn't have taste.

--We noted this discussion having begun a few weeks ago, but naturally NYT's prolific insomniac wonder Sewell Chan does it better: What is it with cinema destroying New York over and over again? In a blog piece almost reported enough to have run in the paper itself, Chan hears from the likes of Ed Koch, James Sanders and a boatload of commenters who get the conversation going in earnest. My favorite: "(M)any of us are sort of sick of NY as center-of-the-universe and see its repeated destruction as wish fulfillment. My Address: Not There." That's reassuring: Somewhere else can lay claim to the Misanthropy Capital of America for a change.

--Stranger Than Fiction's spring line-up is trickling out, and it's a good one: The New York premiere of A Promise to the Dead opens the series Jan. 8 with subject Ariel Dorfman and director Peter Raymont in person. Subsequent events include Oscar short-lister Please Vote For Me (with director Jean Tsien on hand Jan. 22), the Amos Vogel chronicle Film As a Subversive Art (Jan. 29) and programs comprising work from the McSweeney's DVD journal Wholphin (Feb. 12) and the annual Orphan Film Symposium, the latter of which I'm especially excited about for reasons I'll pass along a little closer to the screening on Feb. 19. Just save the date and $15 for a ticket; you'll be glad you did.

Posted at December 28, 2007 8:06 AM