Sight & Sound. 10/06.

Pro or con, the votes have pretty much been cast in the US with regard to Oliver Stone's World Trade Center, but it's just now crawling across Europe, opening in Germany, for example, just the other day. American audiences didn't exactly embrace it, as B Ruby Rich notes in a piece for the new issue of Sight & Sound that raises all sorts of questions, among them, one that's bound to resonate quite differently abroad than at home: "[I]s it remotely possible to return the imagination, even in a movie theatre, to a time before the US government destroyed world sympathy with its invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, before one disaster became many disasters?... Stone even reminds viewers of that time when the whole world felt for us, inserting a brief montage of ordinary people the planet over weeping in front of their TV screens as the news is announced in a multitude of languages. Ah, those were the days."

In an online-only interview, Ali Jaafar asks Stone, "To paraphrase Nixon, to what extent did 9/11 stop Americans seeing themselves the way they want to be?" Stone: "Ironically, I'm not so sure it did. I think there's a defiance about it.... If they hate us, then fuck them.... If I was al-Qaeda, George Bush is my best friend. What a crazy world."

Philip Kemp considers The Queen in light of screenwriter Peter Morgan's Frost/Nixon, the play Ron Howard will be adapting for the screen, and The Deal, the teledrama, about the stormy relationship between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown that became Morgan and Stephen Frears's first collaboration. And then talks with him about it. "'I like writing about powerful people,' says Morgan, 'and the inner lives of powerful people. I always think my stuff is about friendship and betrayal, but it's also about unlikely love stories between unlikeable people.'"

Reviews:

• Richard T Kelly on on Zidane: A 21st-Century Portrait: "[T]he mystique of Zidane probably deserves a film as elusive and taciturn as [Douglas] Gordon's and [Philippe] Parreno's, one that polishes his enigma rather than penetrates it, now that he has trudged from the pitch and into the pantheon for keeps." More from Paul Myerscough in the London Review of Books: "The point is made: the galáctico, like any modern celebrity, is available to us only through his mediation, and the more pervasive his image, the more frustratedly we recognise that he remains finally opaque, unreachable.... This may be the idea the film starts out with; it is not what makes it compelling." And yet more from Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian.

• Tim Lucas on Six Moral Tales: "Rohmer's brand of morality is subjective and non-judgemental; his characters include students and petits bourgeois and the idle rich, Catholics and atheists, singles and marrieds-with-children, and their standards vary. The point is 'to thine own self be true' as the series depicts the ways in which thoughtful people can meet themselves in the mazes of their own stratagems, and how their true selves are sometimes at odds with the people they think they are or aspire to be."

• Liese Spencer on The Devil Wears Prada, "in which the fun is all to be had on the slippery slide into corruption." More from Daniel Garrett in the Compulsive Reader.

• Tom Charity compares cuts of Keane: "Soderbergh's structure is arguably more rational, while [Lodge] Kerrigan's is both more demanding and more powerful." And then, Keane with Kerrigan's earlier feature: "Almost unwatchable at times, Clean, Shaven is a more extreme, expressionist exercise in paranoia, but it's also inherently schlocky and sensationalist, a bit of a cheap trick."

Posted by dwhudson at September 30, 2006 1:51 AM