Reverse Shot. Winter 04/05.

Reverse Shot is on a roll. The staff has recently launched a series of unique weekly reviews at indieWIRE (one writer opens the floor and two respond), where they've also recently put together a top ten and, just today, their list of 11 Annoyances of 2004," followed by "a handful of resolutions we'll be keeping in mind as we look forward to the films of 2005."

In the meantime, they've also managed to get a new issue together, the weighty center of which is a symposium on Tsai Ming-liang. Michael Koresky introduces the issue:

If American films were more honest (a concept in Hollywood now so rare as to seem absurd), we'd be seeing the same pop culture-infused images of distanciation and self-obfuscation that now permeate so much of the cinema of the new Asian auteurs. We Westerners look for a mirror of our own cultural displacement and can only find it in Japan's Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Hirokazu Kore-eda, Thailand's Pen-ek Ratanaruang and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Taiwan's Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang... Tsai's output thus far have been composed of remarkably lucid, stringently funny, deathly terrifying minimalist spectacles of suspended misery and tacit longing.

Jeff Reichert and Erik Syngle interview the director, who seems like a pretty amiable, self-aware and, of course, very sharp man. Rounding out the symposium are pieces on each of his works and rounding out the issue is a collection of reviews held over from the New York Film Festival ("it's out of necessity that we cover our own local festival," notes Koresky) and reviews of half a dozen new theatrical releases.

Posted by dwhudson at January 4, 2005 9:11 AM