Cinema Scope. 31.

31 is the issue of Cinema Scope that wishes a happy 60th to Cannes.. Sort of. "By all accounts, as befitting a place where superlatives are flung about like cheap lingerie in a low-rent strip joint, this was the hottest, stickiest, busiest, and most film-filled Cannes in recent memory.... Cannes at 60 was also widely proclaimed by the major media outlets as the best Cannes in ages." Naturally, editor Mark Peranson does not surprise: "Of course it's left up to me and my (w)rap to assert that this is a bunch of hogwash - but I really mean it."

Because he really, really does, this year's round of target practice is all the more engaging, whether or not you cheer every shot fired (or suspect you will or won't if, like me, you won't have yet seen most or even any of the films he salutes or trashes). There is praise, though, for Gus Van Sant's "exquisite" Paranoid Park and for Lee Chang-dong's Secret Sunshine, "the only other Competition film I saw at Cannes that I'd label great."

"The motto of this year's Competition might as well have been 'running on empty' given the abundance of dubious exercises in style from patented postmodern pastiche (how could anybody take the Coens' last-quarter bid for profundity seriously?) to straight-faced self-parody (Wong, Kim, etc)," begins Christoph Huber. "So all the more ironic that it was Ulrich Seidl's standout Import Export - whose sudden, shocking interest in the real world, mid-festival, dwarved the puny distractions that preceded - opened with this appropriate image: a man in a snowy field in front of some dull concrete slab of architecture trying to start his motorcycle by foot pedal. Again and again."

Kent Jones's piece is labeled as a consideration of Hou Hsiao-hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon and Wong Kar-wai's My Blueberry Nights, and it is, but the first half or so focuses on the intriguing differences between French and American opinions of David Fincher's Zodiac and James Gray's We Own the Night. But: "I'm not going to chide anyone in France for loving a James Gray film." Because: "The cultural one-upsmanship card is played often, and mercilessly, in movie culture." Yes. It is. And of course, national boundaries offer only one of many patterns for the delineations of separate cultures. At any rate, further along this rewarding line of thought, the "beautifully bouyant" Balloon and Blueberry, "hardly the disaster it was cracked up to be," are considered in the light of these ideas.

Dennis Lim talks with Abel Ferrara about Go Go Tales, "his first flat-out comedy," but "also an allegory: a portrait of the artist as a hustler, a gambler, a performer, a dreamer, an addict, a throwback, a holdout, and, of course, a purveyor of good old-fashioned T&A, navigating the screw-or-be-screwed questions common to all exploitative professions, indeed to modern capitalist systems. You could say this one comes from the heart."

Robert Koehler interviews Wang Bing, whose Fengming: A Chinese Memoir he reviewed for Variety: "With virtually a single-camera set-up and absolute attention paid to a woman who survived the horrors of Mao's China, Wang Bing continues his run as one of the world's supreme doc filmmakers." Here, he argues that, by the time the festival wrapped, "there could be no denying that Wang had not only made one of the few Cannes films that mattered, but that this, combined with his stunning short, Brutality Factory (as part of the Gulbenkian Foundation-supported The State of the World), made Wang the best-of-show director at Cannes."

Tom Charity revisits the career of that "compelling and problematic icon," John Wayne.

Andrew Tracy argues the case for the "still underappreciated and misrepresented Cornel Wilde, whose eight-film career as producer and director transformed him from plodding if pleasant leading man to purveyor of blood and gore par excellence."

Once again, Jonathan Rosenbaum offers an invaluable DVD shopping guide, but this time focuses on prices.

Then, Jessica Winter: "Knocked Up is hard to dislike: it's a reliable laugh factory, it really loves babies, etc. But like so many films that gestate in Hollywood, it breathes the uncirculated air of the gated community. Maybe it wouldn't evaporate on contact - maybe it would have been funnier still - if it weren't so bizarrely insulated from some of the gnarled dilemmas that Ben and Allison's flesh-and-blood counterparts face every day."

Posted by dwhudson at June 29, 2007 9:40 AM