Odds: Von Trier's "Antichrist," the Coens' collaborator.

Tuesday, July 29, 2008 | 6:00 PM

Lars von Trier's English-language horror flick "Antichrist" is a go, reports Variety -- funding's in place and casting will be announced soon. The film's apparently "about a couple who move to an isolated cabin after the death of their son, only to find sinister forces at play." Those cabins, always trouble. Von Trier claimed depression was preventing him from working on new projects last year, but has, one would guess, since bounced back to his usual ebullient self.

Stu VanAirsdale at the Village Voice writes on the occasion of MoMA's "Collaborations in the Collection":

Barry Sonnenfeld is known to tell the story of that day in Texas 25 years ago when he walked onto the set of Blood Simple--the Coen Brothers' debut and his first feature film as a cinematographer--and couldn't turn on the camera. Things seemed to work out OK over the next month and a half--and over the next seven years, in fact, when the trio's work on Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, and Miller's Crossing established each of them in careers that would fork dramatically in the decades to come.

Philip Horne at the Guardian on "There Will Be Blood" and Daniel Day-Lewis' nod to John Huston in "Chinatown":

Paul Thomas Anderson's brave, intensely disturbing, all too timely Californian epic of the early days of the oil business is based on Upton Sinclair's novel Oil!, and correspondingly one of its dominant images is of fire; while Chinatown, from Robert Towne's original script, is all about Water - as a source of life, a commodity, a means to power - and as an image that runs right through the film.

And at Greencine, James Van Maanen interviews David Redmon, whose documentary "Mardi Gras: Made in China," out on DVD today, is the first release from Carnivalesque Films, the distribution company Redmon started with producer Ashley Sabin.

[Photo: Lars von Trier on the set of his last feature, "The Boss of it All," IFC Films, 2007]

+ Von Trier's 'Antichrist' moves ahead (Variety)
+ The Coen Brothers were Never Better than with Barry Sonnenfeld (Village Voice)
+ There Will Be Blood relations (Guardian)
+ David Redmon: "Girls and Boys Gone Wild in the Context of the Global Economy" (Greencine)