Old celluloid, new words.

With the November/December issue, Film Comment finally gets the new site its needed for a while. No more slo-mo Flash stare-off sessions between you and the cover while you decide whether or not to force it to move on and out of the way or continue admiring the audacity of a page without content that insists on hanging around anyway.

In terms of sheer percentage, the online pickings are as sparse as ever, but in terms of selection, I, for one, couldn't be happier. Few writers conjure with mere words what it is that you love about movies like Geoffrey O'Brien, and even though he's writing about a movie I've grown tired of even hearing mentioned, I'm glad to be able to read him again:

A director peculiarly inspired by place, whether the warehouse in Reservoir Dogs or the shopping mall in Jackie Brown or the nightclub in Kill Bill, Tarantino finally needs to invent a cultural space in which his movies can exist. Here he has woven it out of strips of old celluloid, a sort of carnival tent hoisted up in a void: a haunted funhouse for resurrected swordswomen, where they can eternally enact the same unfinished and unfinishable revenge drama.

And then there's Phillip Lopate, writing about this year's New York Film Festival, which is especially sweet in the context of the afterward he wrote in the chapter of 1998's Totally Tenderly Tragically, "The First New York Film Festival - 1963":

This was the first extended film criticism I ever published. It appeared in my college newspaper, Columbia Daily Spectator, on November 1, 1963, two weeks before my twentieth birthday.... I probably should be more embarrassed by it as a piece of juvenilia than I am. Certainly I can see passages which convey a shallow bluff at authority; but what amazes me is how much of the style, the syntax, the argumentation resemble the way I write today. This is a case of either precocious or arrested development!

What else: Olaf Möller on Venice and, online only!, Alex Reeds on "The Screener Fiasco," a primer, sort of.

Posted by dwhudson at November 12, 2003 3:30 PM