Cinema Scope. 26.

Editor Mark Peranson explains his leeriness when it comes to lists, then explains the math behind Cinema Scope's first top ten - topped by L'enfant.

While no single theme runs throughout the new issue, the David Bordwell double does stand out. Bordwell himself has a back page column, short, highly readable and to the point: "contemporary film criticism is failing." Because it's actually more inspiring than admonishing, it's the sort of piece you may be tempted to print out and keep somewhere handy, and it confirms Chuck Stephens's assertion in the introduction to his lengthy interview with Bordwell that he's "an increasingly engaging and enjoyable writer who never takes his reader's pleasure for granted whether his topic happens to be the scholarly vagaries of current academic film studies (as in Post-Theory, co-edited by Noel Carroll, 1996), the stylistics of his favourite filmmaker, Ozu Yasujiro (treated at awe-inspiring length in the criminally out-of-print Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema - perhaps the single finest study-in-detail of a major filmmaker ever written in the English language), or the post-Handover hyperbolics of current Hong Kong cinema kingpin Johnnie To."

The other interview online is Christoph Huber's with Cristi Puiu, director of The Death of Mister Lazarescu, the #2 film on that afore-mentioned list.

In the first of three features online, Jason McBride considers Caveh Zahedi: "Fitting descriptive shorthand for all of Zahedi's work, an oeuvre that currently consists of four features and three shorts, and in which the ambitious, provocative I Am a Sex Addict can serve as both summa and introduction."

"American narrative film, or at least that narrow stream of it which pretends to seriousness, is being progressively reduced to the status of fetish object," writes Andrew Tracy. "Which makes perpetual bète noire Miramax's release of a new 'Director's Cut' edition of James Gray's The Yards (2000) both welcome and somewhat incongruous, coming from the studio that produced that almost Benjaminian relic Kill Bill (2003-4)."

Jerry White describes how Kim Longinotto, "a hard-headed progressive, but well aware of the contradictions that characterize every aspect of contemporary life," is "bringing the vérité documentary well and truly into the late-20th and early-21st century."

Two festival reports are due online soon, but for now, there's just one, in which Tom Charity decides to focus on Michel Gondry's The Science of Sleep. For him, at Sundance, it "elicited a giddy exhilaration that had next to nothing to do with character arcs, story construction, or political point-scoring, and everything to do with cinema. When it comes to camera-stylo, Gondry is a virtuoso."

In the two columns besides Peranson's and Bordwell's, Andréa Picard reads Chris Marker's installation, Prelude: The Hollow Men, very, very closely, and Jonathan Rosenbaum delights yet again with his quick and tempting takes on dozens of DVDs he's had shipped into Chicago from all over the world.

There's only one review of a current film online, but George Kaltsounakis's seems necessary: "Hostel merely duplicates current circumnavigations of logistical, legal, and moral impediments to torture."

Posted by dwhudson at March 22, 2006 1:24 AM