Reverse Shot. On Demand.

"If each film 'generation' has its own particular point of view, as surely, drastically, the next one will, then what is ours? And how does it aid/impede us?" ask Michael Koresky and Jeff Reichert in the editorial that opens Issue 19 of Reverse Shot: "On Demand." The "us" here are the RS writers themselves, and "most of us came of age as cinephiles in the era of home video... [W]e were the first generation which had access to a wide array of movies all of the time... And as a result, we watched, a lot, and over and over, making us the first on-demand generation." The issue, then, is a collection of pieces on films "seen many, many times, across different periods of [our] lives."

"John Hughes movies don't lose anything on the small screen," writes Eric Hynes, who, "like thousands, perhaps millions of people roughly my age," has seen Ferris Bueller's Day Off "several dozen times." Back to his point: "Hughes's art depends on the quality of the writing, full stop. When his writing is good, as in Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, his films are as funny, exhilarating, and remain as timeless as anything from the post-silent, pre-television heyday of Preston Sturges and Ernst Lubitsch."

Michael Joshua Rowin: "Along with The Simpsons and various other phenomena of the early 90s, Wayne's World met with its audience at the perfect late capitalist moment - a product to satisfy evolving marketing strategies, the film ornaments corporate ideology with self-conscious irony, fostering its audience's dependence on popular culture by selling it as above-it-all satire."

As a child, Jeff Reichert "had grown so into the fabric of [Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi]... that I felt less myself when that tape wasn't playing." Now, of course, he has put away childish things: "George Lucas succeeded so grandly because he figured out a formula to get me, and seemingly everyone else literally hooked on his films. But after a while I stopped buying the junk."

"Bob Fosse's Cabaret is one of those movies - there are too many - that I wish I could see again for the first time," writes Chris Wisniewski. At the same time, "Cabaret is nothing if not a respectable object of obsessive repeat viewings."

David Cronenberg "was also no stranger to censorship battles," notes Travis Mackenzie Hoover, which "makes it all the more perplexing that he would make as his first masterpiece Videodrome, which threw into confusion both the pro-video and anti-video positions while setting them both in sharp relief."

"First impressions are fierce; only upon a replay could I begin to grasp Wild at Heart separate from my sensorial responses to Lynch's visual and aural atmospheres," writes Kristi Mitsuda.

"VHS certainly granted me a certain degree of autonomy over my childhood experience of [Who Framed Roger Rabbit]," writes Brendon Bouzard, "the ability to speed to my favorite scenes, rewatch the dazzling opening cartoon, skip past the scary part..., and above all, try to piece together what the hell was actually going on in this movie."

"[John] Carpenter made movies for crowds, for opening weekends at multiplexes," writes Nathan Kosub. "King Friday. And when he no longer could, his movies suffered.... [N]umbers, not anonymity, made Carpenter great. Something should be said, then, for his most underrated film. Big Trouble in Little China is his lightest success, carefree with its own mythology and expansive in its gifts - the soft-shoe his horror triumphs couldn't inherently manage."

"I first saw 2001: A Space Odyssey at age six - appropriate for a film that makes infants of us all." Michael Koresky: "This was before I knew that 2001 would become my Rosetta stone of movie-watching, that which would subconsciously inform all other film experiences and would provide a template for what narrative cinema should, reach for, crib from, aspire to."

"No grand conclusions... simply some observations" from Andrew Tracy:

• While production and distribution have changed, "the content of what we are watching has not significantly altered."

• Massive availability "has both the invaluable effect of progressively widening our sphere of film knowledge and the more questionable one of driving us to find our own 'territory' to stake out."

• Movie moments are not to the films they're snipped from as songs are to albums.

• "For all the talk about new ways of seeing, there are precious little indications that new forms of criticism are being developed to deal with these presumed 'evolutions.' Ancestor worship reigns in print and online both."

• "[T]he rise of video, and subsequently DVD, has decisively tipped cinephilia into the realm of possession as opposed to experience."

The interviews in this issue: Michael Joshua Rowin with Andrea Arnold, Chris Wisniewski with Jafar Panahi and Adam Nayman with Bong Joon-ho.

New releases reviewed: Jeannette Catsoulis on Grindhouse, Nick Pinkerton on Lonely Hearts, Justin Stewart on The Hoax, Nicolas Rapold on Black Book, Elbert Ventura on Blades of Glory, Nick Pinkerton on On the Bowery, Chris Wisniewski on Offside, Michael Joshua Rowin on Maxed Out, Michael Koresky on 300, Michael Joshua Rowin on Zodiac, Leo Goldsmith on Into Great Silence, Michael Joshua Rowin on What Is It?, Elbert Ventura on The Lives of Others, Sarah Silver on Tears of the Black Tiger, Adam Nayman on The Host, Nick Pinkerton on Private Fears in Public Places and Jeff Reichert on Syndromes and a Century.

DVDs: Justin Stewart on When a Woman Ascends the Stairs and Idiocracy.

Posted by dwhudson at April 16, 2007 2:41 PM