Cineaste. Summer 06.

"In many respects, the critical controversy generated by the Hollywood version of V for Vendetta is more fascinating than the film itself," writes Richard Porton in the summer issue of Cineaste:

It's especially astonishing that debates once confined to esoteric political sects and academic journals are now surfacing in more accessible form in the popular press. For example, whether consciously or not, those critics who decry the hypocrisy of a multimillion dollar film, seemingly endorsing terrorism and revolution, hark back to the Situationists' more convoluted assertions that superficially radical gestures within mainstream culture are usually little more than self-negating manifestations of the 'society of the spectacle.' Conversely, the unabashed fans of the film seem to unwittingly channel the rants of academic pop culture cheerleaders who argue that knee jerk condemnations of mainstream movies and television reek of self-defeating snobbism.

Porton also interviews Nathalie Baye, whose "talent lies in working beautifully in concert with costars such as Gérard Depardieu, Philippe Léotard and Sergi López, not with stealing their thunder."

Criterion's release of Ugetsu, with its accompany 1975 doc on Mizoguchi, "make one seriously wonder how he managed to pull off such an achievement," writes Catherine Russell. "If his film tended to confirm an Orientalist conception of modern Japanese art, it was also open to a wealth of interpretation that is far from exhausted 53 years later."

In a brief online sample from the print issue's special section, "New Perspectives on Iranian Cinema," the editors argue that now is "an ideal time to revisit the cinema of Iran. We need to renew the hope of conciliation that it offers, or at least to deepen our understanding of the country and its people before our perceptions are further obscured by the rhetoric of war."

Posted by dwhudson at June 18, 2006 1:38 PM