Offscreen. Vol 10, Issue 6.

Neil LaBute's remake of The Wicker Man, opening September 1, will at the very least generate interest in the original. You may not have guessed, though, how much interest there already is out there. In the latest issue of Offscreen to go online, Donato Totaro reviews Constructing The Wicker Man: Film and Cultural Studies Perspectives, the first of two collections of essays to emerge from an academic conference on the film held in Glasgow in 2003. "Scholars are never one to shut the door on a subject," writes Totaro, "hence the editors conclude with the claim that the two volumes do not represent 'the final word on The Wicker Man.'"

This is a book-heavy issue (one of my favorite kinds), and, in two essays, Daniel Garrett writes about five books; in the first: Charlie Chaplin: Interviews, edited by Kevin J Hayes ("a portrait of an artist, and an outline of twentieth-century film history"), the Library of America's James Agee: Film Writing and Selected Journalism ("Agee's essays on Chaplin are among Agee's finest words and works") and John Wranovics's Chaplin and Agee: The Untold Story of the Tramp, the Writer and the Lost Screenplay ("most noteworthy for chronicling the significant friendship that developed between Charlie Chaplin and James Agee after Agee's published defense of Monsieur Verdoux, and for the book's inclusion of the story-screenplay Agee wrote for Chaplin and his little tramp character about the world after nuclear devastation").

In the second, Garrett reviews George Alexander's Why We Make Movies: Black Filmmakers Talk about the Magic of Cinema - "It seems strange to describe a book as friendly but this book is" - and Michele Wallace's Dark Designs and Visual Culture, "an anthology of her commentaries that spans more than two decades [that] strikes me as a fundamental, though flawed, work of our time." You'll find more Garrett in cinetext (a longish piece on "Popular Film Art" and a review of Friends With Money).

Ryan Diduck interviews Jenni Olson, "perhaps the hardest-working and most humble Lesbian in the film industry." Ok. Michael Guillen spoke with her last week as well. At any rate, Diduck also has a far gnarlier piece on handbags and luxury automobiles that begins with the premise that Marnie "is an apt subject to bisexual critical readings."

Posted by dwhudson at August 7, 2006 10:22 AM