Filmmaker. Fall 05.

It's not as if Nicolas Roeg has really done anything of great note recently; it's got to be those recent Criterion releases that have many, like Scott Macaulay, reaffirming the notion that "no assessment of cinema in the 70s, no reconciling of that social era with the films of the time, can be complete without considering the work of Nicolas Roeg... In fact, re-watching Roeg's films again recently, with their free-associative editing, restless camera eyes, dense musical collages and deeply inquisitive engagement with the world around us, they seem, to me at least, some of the important films of the era."

That piece may be the last clickable item on the contents page of the new issue of Filmmaker, but it sort of leapt out at me. Scrolling back up to the top, we find that the three online features are snugly rooted in the present moment, that is, they're about movies that aren't about the present at all. If, pretty soon after 9/11, we found ourselves swamped with films bent on reimagining ancient tales on a grand scale, we're presently seeing quieter, smaller, though certainly no less visually engaging films bent not on reimagining, it seems, but on really doing their darnedest to grasp the mid-20th century. The scale here is intimate; this is a period so close we can still feel its reverberations, yet far enough, too, to give us permission to watch them through a comforting veil of objectivity:

• Matthew Ross talks with George Clooney about, naturally, Good Night, and Good Luck, and again, he proves himself to be a sort of male Jodie Foster: his smarts are a solid match for his looks.

• Peter Bowen talks with Bennett Miller about Capote, about capturing the look, but most of all, about capturing the character.

• Ross's second interview is with Christopher Doyle who, of course, is most known for his work with Wong Kar-wai, conjuring a more-beautiful-than-life Hong Kong of a period more or less in the same temporal vicinity. But this conversation, like most with Doyle, evidently, is all over the place and a blast.

Also:

• Richard Shepard tells us what it's like doing time in Movie Jail - and what it's like to get out. After 14 years.

• Thom Powers has also had a tough time - rewarding a single filmmaker with a fellowship and rejecting 42 others.

• Once again, Graham Leggat examines the friction between gaming culture and Hollywood.

• Anthony Kaufman on the NYC indie scene.

• Toronto.

• Ross, briefly, on Matthew Modine's Full Metal Jacket Diary.

Posted by dwhudson at October 18, 2005 4:14 PM