A summer on the brink.

Here it is, midsummer, and a gloomy sense of a world on the brink settles over the cinematic landscape. Hardly surprising, given the number of wars we've seen, global and local, before this new century has even gotten up on its toddler feet. Not to mention portents of impending biological catastrophe for which the anthrax and SARS scares are thought to be mere rehearsals. Environment-wise, the planet could blow any decade, evidently, and let's not even get into the economy.

Whether any of this really has anything to do with the resurgence of comic book movies is a question it'll probably take a bit of historical perspective to answer. But it takes a threat of imminent doom to yank a superhero out of retirement and, as widely commented on as the weather, they're back. As Armond White puts it this week, "Marvel Comics is now - unarguably - the leading source of today's cultural myths." That leads, by the way, into a chillingly well-reasoned damnation of the screenwriter-director team of James Schamus-Ang Lee as "a younger, pedigreed, even more pretentious Merchant-Ivory."

Yulie Cohen Gerstel

But to turn the other brow, the movie press is steeped in dread this week, primarily because a mere two theaters in this big wide world, the Film Forum and the Anthology Film Archives, both in New York, of course, have lined up a series of dark and heavy (and long) documentaries. Don't think for a moment that that's unfair. Reading reviews of Anand Patwardhan's War and Peace, Ilan Ziv's Human Weapon and Yulie Cohen Gerstel's My Terrorist by J. Hoberman and C. Carr in the Village Voice and Stephen Holden in the New York Times, I can only hope that they'll do well enough in New York to break out of New York.

It's not a case of "if they can make it there..." It's more that they have to make it there, in what's still, for better and worse, the capital of what a friend (with amusing regularlity) calls the "east coast media establishment," to be given a shot at all at struggling for survival in any other market.

I'm sure it's not pleasant tracing India's devolution from Gandhian nonviolence to its current "nuclear mania," as Hoberman puts it, or gritting your teeth through an explication of why "the privatization of reconciliation" (C. Carr) has become all but the only option in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or coming to terms with the "unsettling conclusions" at the end of a history of suicide bombing, but I certainly hope any of these will eventually be available to me as alternative viewing choices to an evening with a green id.



Posted by dwhudson at June 25, 2003 12:25 PM