Film Comment. September/October 04.

Well, thanks to David O Russell, we've all had to learn how to make little hearts. Since editor Gavin Smith has chosen to write the cover story about Russell's new film, I ♥ Huckabees, Film Comment is no exception. You'll see little hearts sprinkled all over the page, leading up to Smith's pronouncement, "I ♥ Huckabees is a rarity - a tremendously optimistic film for a truly dark time."

But that simply serves as an intro to Smith's interview with Russell. Great bit on Three Kings: "When I was doing marketing, I said the gold is the McGuffin. And the guy who had just come from McDonald's to run marketing didn't know what a McGuffin is. And I looked at him, and I said, 'You don't know what a McGuffin is, do you? But you know what a McMuffin is.' I couldn't resist."

Chuck Stephens files a must-read:

The astonishing legacy of Hong Kong's legendary Shaw Brothers studios - razzle-dazzle musicals, death-steeped melodramas, huangmei diao Chinese opera adaptations, super-noir swordplay sagas, gristle-ribboned urban thrillers, and some of the greatest martial-arts movies ever made - is risen. And a stool-brown monkey shall lead us; behold, the celestial view.

Or rather, the Celestial Pictures view - the company currently engaged in the biggest cine-archeological dig of all time. From a library of more than a thousand titles, and at a cost somewhere in the range of $75 million, Celestial is now in the midst of a five-year project to restore and reissue some 760 Shaw Brothers films from the studio's mid-Fifties-to-mid-Eighties golden age.

To top it off, the sidebar: "Five Immortals from the Shaw Brothers Crypt."

Then, an update from Li Cheuk-to: "[I]t was 2003, not 1997, that marked the end of an era - both for Hong Kong and its cinema... Much of HK cinema now walks a tightrope between the desire to appeal to Mainland audiences (with the compromises that implies) and the need to express contemporary Hong Kong consciousness."

Alexander Horwath catches the first film by Peter Kubelka in 26 years: "Apart from being great fun, Poetry and Truth adds another layer to the portrait of the artist as archeologist - as a hunter-gatherer of artifacts that, 100 or 500 years hence, may reveal the answers to questions that cannot even be conceived of today."

Anticipating an interview with Mike Leigh which will soon appear, most likely as an "Art & Industry" column, Amy Taubin offers an admiring take on Vera Drake.

Phillip Lopate: "Intelligently framed, well-lit, mobile, crisply edited, and entirely adequate for its purposes, Saraband began as TV film shot on digital video. Bergman is reportedly dissatisfied with the look of the tape-to-film transfer, and his perverse perfectionism has kept him from allowing it to be shown theatrically. What a shame - many of those who have seen it already hail it as a masterpiece."

Finally, at least as for what's available online is concerned, Nathan Lee reviews Catherine Breillat's Anatomy of Hell: "[L]aughable in a movie theater, but it might work up some tawdry Dada vibes as a DVD loop hung between Ingres's Grand Odalisque and the notorious Courbet. Beyond that, her intentions beat me - over the head with the collected works of Foucault?"

Posted by dwhudson at September 20, 2004 8:56 AM