Cinema Scope. 27.

As Mark Peranson returns from Cannes to edit the new issue of Cinema Scope, he's not nearly as "burnt out" as he was last year but just as snarly. His three "specific reasons for the general malaise of 2006" are actually rather constructive, but, defending Richard Kelly's Southland Tales "as positively Pynchonian performance art" and Pedro Costa's "[e]qually misunderstood" Colossal Youth, he does go way out of his way to make sure you understand that his fellow critics, the "international conspiracy of dunces in a dinky French fishing village," are just too stoopid to get these movies. Though it's unlikely you'll miss his point, Peranson hits it again, introducing his interview with Kelly, who'll give you a better idea of what all he's bitten off to chew.

In his editor's note, Peranson, his tongue a bit less acidic, touches on a valid point: critical consensus is formed awfully quickly these days. Also: "A Short Interview with Raya Martin."

Christoph Huber: "[W]hile suffering through one of the most underwhelming competitions in recent memory, it was often the Quinzaine [des réalisateurs] films that kept one going." And Richard Porton reviews the "[p]olitically audacious and formally conservative" Palme d'Or winner, Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes the Barley.

Adam Nayman talks with David Christensen, whose debut, Six Figures, "is the most underrated Canadian feature in recent memory."

Olaf Möller on John Cook: "To truly understand the Austrian fascination/obsession with this ur-typical Canadian realist - imagine a radically vérité-styled mix of Jean-Pierre Lefebvre and Allan King, with a dash of Straub - one needs to understand the 'Realism Complex' of Austrian cinephilia."

Even though this year's Hot Docs International Canadian Documentary Festival was tremendously popular, "only a handful of films this year came close to approaching grand-scale, Herzogian ecstatic truths." David Balzer explains.

Reviewing the exhibition Tomorrowland: CalArts in Motion Pictures, Robert Koehler marvels at the "cultural contradictions" between Disney and the California Institute of the Arts, while Andréa Picard takes measure of the face-off between Jean-Luc Godard and curator Dominique Païni: "Godard wins."

Jonathan Rosenbaum: "We seem to be entering an exceptionally rich period when long-unavailable experimental films are finally coming to light on DVD."

Reviews: Jessica Winter on Strangers With Candy ("once the thickset plot is in place, the movie begins to taste warmed-over") and Michael Koresky: "[T]he feeling of time passing over [A Lion in the House] four-hour and six-year duration is what makes its every emotional rumbling hit with the force of a hurricane."

Posted by dwhudson at June 28, 2006 4:14 AM