Reverse Shot. Spring 06.

"In this issue of Reverse Shot, we asked our writers to tell us how we can reapply overused words like 'subversive' or 'transgressive' or 'shocking,'" write editors Michael Koresky and Jeff Reichert. "We didn't really want to hear any more about those films that are generally identified as epochal moments (i.e., Psycho, Easy Rider); instead we asked for something more personal—a film that shook, shocked, or socked us right in the gut."

The first "Reverse Shock" to hit the reader is going to be the redesign. The advantage: from each and every page, you can see the latest the latest blog posts and RS reviews at indieWIRE, those weekly rounds in which three RS writers offer their takes on a single new theatrical release. As it happens, today's Tuesday, and there's a fresh round up: Koresky, Kristi Mitsuda and James Crawford are all left slightly dissatisfied with Michael Cuesta's 12 and Holding.

Back to the heart of the new issue, the "Reverse Shock" symposium:

• Reichert was once rattled by Elem Klimov's Come and See, but really, that story he tells as a lead-in is one I won't forget for a while.

• Chris Wisniewski: "The greatest and most heartfelt of all realist American films - Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep - succeeds not through formal rigor but through generosity of spirit.... Conversely, when a filmmaker like Steven Soderbergh sets off to challenge convention conventionally, as he does in his latest film Bubble, he damns himself to a willful disregard for decency and good taste."

• Lauren Kaminsky: "No discussion of shock cinema is complete without considering the films of Catherine Breillat, but her best-known film, 1999's Romance, is also in many ways her weakest and most conventional.... By comparison, A Real Young Girl is a transformative, disorienting experience, difficult and irrational and truthful."

• "Too often, we conveniently forget that the very raison d'être of [trash] films has nothing to with right or left and everything to do with lucre, filthy or otherwise," writes Andrew Tracy, building up to "an appraisal of Vernon Zimmerman's genially sleazy The Unholy Rollers."

• Eric Hynes on A Woman Under the Influence: "I had the sort of experience I often expected to have when encountering works of art but rarely, if ever, actually did. From that night forward, I saw the world differently."

• Nicolas Rapold: "Bigger Than Life is a textbook example of one kind of ventriloquist critique: the manic behavior of drug-ravaged teacher Ed Avery, always dismissible as mere madness, actually illustrates through magnification the accepted behaviors of a diseased society. His illogic is the logic of Fifties America carried out to its end. [Nicholas] Ray's take is so swift, sure, and brutal that, even with the privilege of 50 years' perspective and irony, the movie remains terrifying."

• Michael Koresky: "What makes Eyes Wide Shut truly rock me to my core is not its tastefully cadaverous nudity or its depiction of a nefarious New York sexual underworld, but rather its utter lack of trendiness and its profound humanist empathy, all twisted up as it is in a portrait of suspended moral decay."

• "Though the long takes and lack of narration give the film its distinctly unmediated and objective feel, it is in the editing, the most manipulated and subjective aspect of any documentary, that Titicut Follies made its lasting impact" on Joanne Nucho.

• Leo Goldsmith on Rebel Without a Cause and Bully: "Each addresses a teenage subculture that some do not believe exists or else do not wish to acknowledge, and the motivations of each filmmaker were brought under suspicion as a result. But whatever their inflammatory nature, each film also appeals to a surprisingly conservative ethic of parental responsibility, a strange double-emphasis that paradoxically makes them both sensationalist and moralistic."

• Michael Joshua Rowin on Targets, "a Molotov cocktail thrown to the film's real-life audience - New Hollywood's arsenal would now include examinations not just of violence but of the way we view violence and how the various forms of mass media present it to us."

• Adam Nayman on Funny Games, "a snuff narrative in which the guilty not only go unpunished but wind up free to continue the cycle."

• Travis Mackenzie Hoover: "Pulp Fiction is a movie that hides in nostalgia and poses (not so different from the parents X heartily despised); it had the cool moves to cover the fact that it had no ideas, though it was happy to show you its rebel cred to let you know that it was a hard-bitten cynic. The Doom Generation, meanwhile, called this bluff early and often, showing that attitude and a show of poverty prove completely ineffective in dealing with the real and frightening problems of political life."

For many an online publication, that's an issue and a half right there. But lo, there's more. Three interviews, for example: Nick Pinkerton talks with Terry Zwigoff, Kristi Mitsuda with Nicole Holofcener and Jeannette Catsoulis with Deepa Mehta.

In the "Shot/Reverse Shot" feature, Koresky argues that Three Times condenses Hou Hsiao-hsien's strengths, Andrew Tracy writes, "No matter that I acknowledge his films' beauty (the highest form of beauty, that which issues from a way of seeing), their reconceptions of cinematic (and extra-cinematic) time and space, their engagement with the shaping hand of history and its effects upon the present, nothing changes the fact that they leave me almost completely unmoved, emotionally or intellectually."

And then: fourteen new releases and eight DVDs are reviewed. Get started. Summer's just around the corner.

Posted by dwhudson at May 16, 2006 8:27 AM