Film Comment. Sept/Oct 06.

Magazines face a wide range of choices when it comes to deciding what to do with a website. See, for example, the very different approaches taken by Wired, the New Republic or the Atlantic Monthly. One of the least popular choices to make is to simply dangle tidbits in the hopes that readers will snap the bait and buy the print version, but in the case of the new issue of Film Comment, it's awfully damn effective.

FC is running the Preface and Introduction to "one of the longest published in Film Comment history" at its site, Paul Schrader's "The Film Canon." So, look, it's the weekend. We'll wade back into the buzz emanating from ongoing festivals and fall previews in a bit, but for now, stop, take a few moments, read, take a few moments more, think, and then, yes, when you get the chance, go out and find and buy this issue.

In brief, Schrader explains how the idea for a book constructing a possible film canon, based on the model of Harold Bloom's The Western Canon, came about and then dried up and blew away. In the course of his research, reading books, taking courses, contemplating life, the universe and everything, his horizons, like those of fellow film critic Mike D'Angelo, were blown wide open by the idea of the technological singularity, and he now sees several narratives coming to a close: cinema, art, humankind itself. His heart was no longer in the book, so he's evidently handed the project as he abandoned it to FC and hopes someone else will come along and complete it. A must-read.

Also online from this issue:

• José B Capino on Insiang, Philippine director Lino Brocka's "greatest treatment of the women of the slums."

• Chris Chang issues a call for some distributor to pick up Ngozi Onwurah's Shoot the Messenger.

• Kristin M Jones: "Although Infamous covers the same terrain as Capote, it is a very different film—less freighted with moody gravity but with its own way of conveying how the aftermath of the Clutter murders helped trigger Capote's eventual decline into despair and addiction."

And the online exclusives:

• "The email message from South Korea was not exactly reassuring: 'Missiles or not, the fest will go on!'" Chris Chang looks back at the Puchon International Fantastic Film Festival.

• Grady Hendrix: "Everything you think you know about Bollywood - if you are unaware of Ram Gopal Varma - is wrong."

• And an extended version of Graham Fuller's piece: "The Queen may be Stephen Frears's most subtle film, but it's also a political time bomb that will ignite a firestorm of outrage in Britain."

Posted by dwhudson at September 9, 2006 5:07 AM