Bright Lights. 47.

It's a jolt to discover an Oscar issue of Bright Lights Film Journal. Surely, it wasn't intended that way, but there they are, the two main contenders, up top and large, Tony Macklin's interview with Clint Eastwood and Paul Brand's entertaining survey of Howard Hughes's Hollywood years. And they're reviewed, too: Macklin on Million Dollar Baby and Alan Vanneman on The Aviator.

More hopefuls appear in the "recent cinema roundabout" as well: Megan Ratner covers Vera Drake, albeit more from the perspective of Mike Leigh's oeuvre than Imelda Staunton's. Vanneman dislikes Sideways in the most amusing of ways and isn't exactly won over by Closer, either.

Beyond that batch, we venture into the BL territory we know and love. The chunkiest piece? It comes from Andrew Grossman, your brain's enduring personal trainer and champion close reader, whose monograph-length "The Rape-Revenge Film and Queer Theory," despite its global reach from Tsui Hark to Michelle Pfeiffer, is only halfway there yet.

The punchy notes are struck by editor Gary Morris in his intro, a variation on Beckett's "I can't go on. I'll go on," only played for laughs, and in his traditional round-up, "Little Stabs of Happiness (and Horror)."

What else:

• Matthew J Iannucci's contextualization of Taxi Driver.

• Mark GE Kelly's unique take on Training Day as "a metaphor for the Iraq Invasion."

• Ian Johnston on Wong Kar-wai's 2046.

• Boris Trbic on Emir Kusturica's Life is a Miracle.

• Manfred Weidhorn on High Noon.

• Interviews: Cleo Cacoulidis with Hirokazu Kore-eda, Dorna Khazeni with Mania Akbari and Scott Thill with Bill Plympton.

• Robert Keser on seven films seen at the 40th Chicago International Film Festival.

• DVDs: Ratner on Miles Electric: A Different Kind of Blue; Johnston on Renoir's Les Bas-Fonds and Kurosawa's Donzoko, both based on Gorky's The Lower Depths; Matthew Kennedy on Criterion's Cassavetes set; Morris on Bresson's A Man Escaped and Lancelot of the Lake.

• Marilyn Ferdinand pleads for a release for Kent MacKenzie's The Exiles.

Posted by dwhudson at February 4, 2005 1:11 AM