His paper having boldly bolstered the director’s worthless penetration-opus 9 Songs into “event” status with a cover story and grab bag of bland-to-dumb essays, Dennis Lim’s appreciative profile of director Michael Winterbottom continues the The Village Voice’s love-in with the shittiest British export since, well, whatever imminently forgettable floater NME last sent across the Atlantic. Winterbottom, a former Oxford English major who scrapes his tattered memory for Great Books to adapt whenever he can’t readily locate a hot button to push, is doing the press rounds for his adaptation of Laurence Stern’s Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story. Lim’s scant article teaches us that “the blurring of reality and fiction has been a recurring theme in recent Winterbottom,” and that “it’s more enjoyable making a film than not working, or finding financing, or sitting around talking about the film you made.” Fine, but there’s one essential oversight here; despite sharing this issue of The Voice with up-and-coming pitchforkmedia.com hack Nick Sylvester’s smug, excruciating “Coke-Rap” thinkpiece (“Clipse appeal to our sense of justice”? Really?), Lim somehow manages to skirt the obvious primary influence on Winterbottom, “fidgety and fast-talking in person,” and his ever-expanding oeuvre:

I recall a Film Comment article by Voice staffer Michael Atkinson, on the director’s work: “Michael Winterbottom: Cinema as Heart-Attack.” It can only be a matter of time…