Bright Lights. 49.

Gary Morris introduces the new issue of Bright Lights Film Journal far more wittily, succinctly and helpfully than I'm about to, so you might want to save yourself a bit of time and trouble, click his name and get on with it. Unless, of course, you have a penchant for bullet points.

Click the title, though, and you're hit with a jolting juxtaposition: Margaret Sullavan and SpongeBob SquarePants, their heads tilted at the same angle. The Sullavan piece, by Dan Callahan, is situated in its own rubric, "The Empty Guest Room." Kind of chilling, isn't it. Sullavan's voice, writes Callahan, "haunts the movies still... Sullavan has never become a cult, though she certainly has all the elements necessary." If it ever happens, Callahan knows Gore Vidal will have laid the foundational stone:

Margaret Sullavan was a star whose deathbed scenes were one of the great joys of the Golden Age of Movies. Sullavan never simply kicked the bucket. She made speeches, as she lay dying; and she was so incredibly noble that she made you feel like an absolute twerp for continuing to live out your petty life after she'd ridden on ahead.

SpongeBob, of course, doesn't know the meaning of "petty." In his celebration of The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, culminating in a sadly necessary evisceration of right-wing fundamentalist attacks on "America's favorite sponge," Robert Keser writes, "Call it infantile, call the show comfort food cartooning that wallows in a shiny world of idealized innocence, but what's undeniably striking is SpongeBob's positive energy: he rarely models TV-engendered passivity, but gulps and bravely sails on to negotiate the shoals of reality."

In all, the "Recent Cinema Roundabout" is like a quick review of the Summer of 05:

• Alan Vanneman: "I'm probably not the first to say that Batman Begins, but does it ever end?" As for War of the Worlds, "What, one must ask, is the problem with Mr Box Office?"

• Shari Last on Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith, the film, the myth, the franchise, the community, and The Hitchchiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

• Keser on Seijun Suzuki's "visually lavish and delightfully fractured fairy tale," Princess Raccoon and on Mad Hot Ballroom: "Whatever this rough-and-ready documentary lacks in Hollywood gloss, it makes up in heart and exhilaration."

• Dana Leventhal asks what Sin City "means to our cultural consciousness in light of its contestable portrayal of women."

Then, a jolt: "As the covert bottom-line interests of capitalist film distribution circumscribe our viewing options as much as overt censorship ever could, we should earnestly applaud the arrival of the new INDEX label, an Austrian DVD distributor launched as a collaborative venture of Medienwerkstatt Wien and Sixpackfilm, specializing in the heretofore marginal, seldom spied, and transnationally uncharted corners of the Austrian and international avant-garde," writes Robert M Grossman, who then dives into the collection that spans four decades of work.

The other piece in the "Avant-Garde Atelier" is Morris's appreciation of Jenni Olson's "brilliant 65-minute experimental film The Joy of Life."

Two festival reports: Joanne Bealy on the San Francisco International Film Festival and Cleo Cacoulidis on the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival.

Matthew Kennedy celebrates Criterion's releases of Jacques Becker's Casque d'or, "a gloriously tactile movie," and Touchez pas au grisbi, "an eye-opener for anyone unaccustomed to postwar French cinema."

Polish cinema has suffered and waned since the death of Kieslowski, but Sheila Skaff finds six films made in just the last couple of years worth a view.

To the "Features Foyer"!

• Megan Ratner, who's just contributed the most recent addition to our own primer collection, "Italian Neo-Realism," looks north, to the recent spate of German films which, taken together, are "like a reclamation of the Third Reich from its global definition to one specifically German."

• Vanneman follows up his piece on Chaplin's Keystone and Essanay days: "Given the complete control Chaplin had over the films, the twelve Mutuals are not as Chaplinesque as one might expect." Related online browsing tip. Chaplin collectibles. Via Rashomon.

• Jason Sperb has some fun defending the "quite stunning, quite provocative, and quite unforgettable" On Her Majesty's Secret Service.

Retiring to the "Articles Antechamber":

• Lesley Chow: "The curious thing about Elmore Leonard is that while his books move fast, the films that capture his tone seem slow: they take it easy."

• Robert Castle maps the infiltration of sociologist Erving Goffman's ideas into The Matrix, Dark City and, most of all, The Truman Show.

• "What is easily glossed over about the world of Kings and Queen — as, indeed, it has been glossed over, so effectively does [Arnaud] Desplechin muddy the incidental and causal waters in the manner that life itself does — is how common and almost casual are life's momentous betrayals. Damon Smith not only reviews the film; he also interviews the director.

More interviews: Morris with Darren Stein, one of the directors of the "fascinating" Put the Camera on Me, and Karin Badt with Lars von Trier in Cannes: "What about faith in God, in the world?" "I wish."

Tom Sutpen's urgent call for some sort of distribution for Peter Watkins's 1966 film Privilege is preceded by an account of "the fastest, sharpest rise and fall the British film industry — or any film industry — had ever witnessed."

And from here on in, the terrific rest, it's all Gary Morris:

• "Arthur Dong's documentary Licensed to Kill explores the 'laws' — sometimes written, sometimes simply understood — against homosexuality and the men who take it upon themselves to rid the world of what they've been trained to think of as a weak, disposable group — gay men."

• "[Fred] Halsted's films owe more to the underground fetish-fantasies of Kenneth Anger than to the kinds of commercial narratives that other porn filmmakers aspired to."

• "British documentarian Kim Longinotto, seems ideally positioned for closer scrutiny and wider recognition. Longinotto is unique among contemporary toilers in the genre of 'true cinema,' having built up a substantial body of work comprised of definitive readings of their subjects."

All rounded off with this issue's "Little Stabs of Happiness (and Horror: Random Short Reviews of the Worthy and the Worthless in Recent and Old-School Cinema."

Posted by dwhudson at August 4, 2005 5:36 AM