Daily Briefing. Kiarostami, Polanski, StoryWorlds

Photo: Laurent Thurin Nal / MK2

"The most important thing is how we make use of a string of lies to arrive at a greater truth. Lies which are not real, but which are true in some way." That's Abbas Kiarostami, as quoted in Tina Hassannia's introduction to In Review Online's collection of reviews of nearly all the films by the Iranian director.

With Carnage set to open the New York Film Festival on Friday, both Press Play and This Recording will be spending all week revisiting past work by Roman Polanski.

Building StoryWorlds: the art, craft and biz of storytelling in 21C is the title of both the book Lance Weiler is working on and the class he's teaching at Columbia. "I'm especially interested in the changing role of authorship and its impact on the birth of a collective narrative. In this spirit I'm bringing the class in to this tumblr to share all things story."

Moneyball and The Blind Side, both based on nonfiction books by Michael Lewis, have done pretty well at the box office, so it was only a matter of time before someone would remember that Liar's Poker, his 1989 account of working as a bond trader at Salomon Brothers, has the potential to become, if not necessarily a better movie than either of them, a more relevant one. Warner Bros is that someone and, according to the Hollywood Reporter, Lewis will be writing this one himself; John Requa and Glenn Ficarra (Crazy, Stupid, Love) will direct. By the way: "In his new book, Boomerang," writes Michiko Kakutani in today's New York Times, "he actually makes topics like European sovereign debt, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank not only comprehensible but also fascinating — even, or especially, to readers, who rarely open the business pages or watch CNBC."

Steven J Ross reviews J Hoberman's Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War for the Los Angeles Review of Books.

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