Film Comment. July/August 06.

There are more "Online Exclusives" up at the Film Comment site than selections from the new issue, and you'll find no complaints here. Seems to be an interesting experiment; part of Gavin Smith's interview with Richard Linklater appears in print, while the second part's here. You'll find Linklater as relaxed as always, describing the casual way he goes about coming up with ideas for and then realizing some of the most unique American films being made these days. And you'll learn that both his Chet Baker with Ethan Hawke and his "[k]ind of a baseball movie, kind of a college movie, loosely autobiographical," are still on.

Henry K Miller has a longish essay on Peter Whitehead, whose "biography reads a little like the lyrics for 'Sympathy for the Devil,' a string of assignations with key figures at key points in the history of the counterculture. But despite the apparent ease with which he found himself moving and shaking in the right places at the right times, much of the strength of his work derives from the uneasy relationship between his present-tense hipsterdom and a submerged past emblematic of England's default wretchedness."

"As they say in Sequelville: this time it's personal," writes Rob Nelson. "Notwithstanding the auteur's typical bids at catharsis through the blatant bitch-slapping of taboos (e.g., 'interspecies erotica' and, alas, the N-word), Clerks II is unique in the [Kevin] Smith oeuvre for being genuinely bittersweet."

Now here's a pleasantly engaging summer read: a conversation between Elaine May and Mike Nichols which followed a screening of Ishtar - Nichols calls it "a road movie about the Middle East" and a "prescient" one at that. Then they get into trading stories and all. Nice.

Chris Chang calls out for a distributor for Pascale Breton's "hypnotic debut feature," Illumination.

"The New World was picked as the flagship for Smell-O-Vision 2006 not because Malick's complex orchestration of image and sound cried out to be raised to the Gesamtkunstwerk level but because the Japanese distributor saw the film as essentially a love story in a pastoral setting and, as such, ideal for aroma enhancement," explains Chris Fujiwara, who adds, "On the whole, the experience was like watching a movie while an aromatherapy clinic was being held in the lobby."

Besides offering a handy index-card-size guide to François Ozon's oeuvre midway through, Paul Fileri reviews Time to Leave, seeing it, to some extent, as a set-up for volume three of an ongoing trilogy.

Ok, who went and extended an "uncritical embrace" to Ron Rosenbaum's piece in the New York Observer, "The Scott Disorder: Of Brother Directors, Tony's the Great One"? Amy Taubin would like to have a word - several words - with you.

Finally, there's a plug for a July 24 screening of The Descent at the Walter Reade; director Neil Marshall's expected to attend.

Posted by dwhudson at July 13, 2006 6:20 AM