Bright Lights. 57.

"The ways homophobia and heterosexism have structured the visual field has been an explicit theme of queer filmmaking since the 1990s, in particular in Jennie Livingston's Paris Is Burning (1991), and in the films of Todd Haynes, especially Poison (1991) and more recently Far from Heaven (2002)," writes Nicholas de Villiers, opening the new issue of what editor Gary Morris hails, with more than justifiable pride, as the "unsinkable Bright Lights." Then: "But I also want to consider Luchino Visconti's Death in Venice (1971) and John Waters's Female Trouble (1974), so as to challenge the assumption that 'queer' cinema marks a generation gap." What follows is "an account of how the gay closet affects cinematic ways of looking and 'cruising' that goes against chronological order, revisiting some by now 'classic' axioms of feminist and gay film theory with the goal of putting them in dialogue with queer theory."

"[Irene] Dunne's career achievement has long been damaged by two key critical reactions to her work: James Agee's assertion in the forties that she made his skin crawl, and Pauline Kael's assorted bitchy comments about Dunne's performances in her book of short reviews, 5001 Nights at the Movies," writes Dan Callahan. "James Harvey published an insightful rebuttal to these early cavils in his classic book Romantic Comedy... Her critical reputation has improved since, but her films are still so difficult to see that there needs to be a new accounting of who she was and what she did on film."

A gorgeous shot of Jack Nicholson tops Andrew Culbertson's consideration of his early career, particularly Five Easy Pieces: "Perhaps Nicholson, as he says, became a star in Cannes. But it was in playing Bobby Dupea that he became 'Jack Nicholson.'"

I, too, thought of The Waste Land when I heard "Shantih shantih shantih" in Children of Men, but Matt Brennan's taken it and run with it. Then: "If [Alfonso] Cuarón's vision of the world in 2027 is uncomfortably close, it may be because the decline has already begun."

"The Night Porter is an explicit film full of implicators, implications and implicitness," writes Guy Crucianelli, driving towards this: "We may be the perpetrators as well as the spectators."

"In the course of almost three decades - a period ably represented by Outcast Films' five-DVD collection The Films of Su Friedrich - Friedrich has managed to carve a formidable presence in the knotty, overcrowded, and corpse-strewn moonscape of America's avant-garde cinema," writes Tom Sutpen. "And while she draws her work from what seems a narrow resource of human experience (in short: The Life and Times of Su Friedrich), she embroiders this relatively small frame of reference with an astonishing wealth of cinematic technique; a fully absorbed, veritable encyclopedia of long-ago invention that enables her to move from semi-documentary polemic to fractured narrative to structuralist rampage (often within the contours of a single work) without once lessening her focus upon whatever side of her life she chooses to explicate. It is an aesthetic that segments of the movie-reviewing community have, literally for decades, considered the summa of personal expression."

Michael Betancourt presents a critical take on the Perpetual Art Machine: "The organization of this video-presenting system, as an online presence, resembles social networking sites such as MySpace, FaceBook, etc but with more specific membership and target demographic: video/new media artists, galleries, museums - the international contemporary art world and its attendant market.... By translating the artists and their video work into valorized commodities without compensation, [PAM] presents the artists it incorporates as a token of exchange."

"Most concert films, like concert albums, tend to fetishize the live experience itself, to make a talisman out of the simulated feeling of 'being there,'" writes Justin Vicari in a consideration of PJ Harvey and Maria Mochnacz's concert DVD. "[I]t is precisely the communal aspect of the music itself that feels most distrusted by Harvey and Moncasz in Please Leave Quietly, not only the outdated notion of resurrecting a community based around rock music but a larger mistrust of community in general."

"Trueness-to-Life, Reportage, Art - when shall these three meet again? More to the point, were they ever actually as close as they claim?" DJM Saunders's tour of "Amazing Scenes" goes round the world.

"Why isn't film criticism taught by film critics in British universities?" asks Richard Armstrong. "Or to put it another way; why have we never heard of those who teach us how to do film criticism?"

David C Ryan defends 300: "No doubt, historians are concerned about the veracity of historical claims, but they often fail to affirm the role poetry and sophistic rhetoric played in the creation of the historiography of Hellas, for without poetic structures or rhetorical techniques, vast amounts of knowledge would have been lost."

Which leads us to the "parlor of porn," where John Minson offers the first part of a two-part history of "how hard-core porn evolved through the efforts of Jim and Artie Mitchell and other pioneers, with some help from San Francisco's vibrant counterculture" and Lesley Chow considers the work of Tom Lazarus for Indigo Entertainment, "a company known for its unusually ambitious erotica, in which scriptwriting is less about maintaining a plausible 'front' than developing a narrative.... These movies may be considered soft porn, but they show a more relaxed and forgiving 'sensual world' than most studio films."

Reviews of newish movies:

• Brian Wilson: "28 Weeks Later is an important work containing a timely subtext lacking in many contemporary horror films."

• Alan Vanneman has amusing and footnote-laden reviews of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Ocean's Thirteen and Ratatouille. He also reads Ronald Reagan's letters to Nancy "describing Ronnie's shoot from Hell, Cattle Queen of Montana."

• Reviewing I Don't Want to Sleep Alone, Ian Johnston "can't help feeling that there's something slightly airless about Tsai [Ming-liang]'s aestheticism here, a loss of the vitality that marked the early films' engagement with character and environment." Also, a very favorable take on Aki Kaurismäki's Lights in the Dusk.

There are more interviews than usual this time around, and three of them are by Karin Luisa Badt, who talks with Kadri Kousaar about Magnus, with Michael Moore about Sicko and with Carlos Reygadas about Silent Light.

Damon Smith conducts the fourth - with Paul Verhoeven.

Two festival reports: Megan Ratner looks back on Tribeca, " the brashest of the New York movie fests," and Gary Morris revisits QDoc: The 2007 Portland Queer Documentary Film Festival: "Much of the focus today remains on the fight for rights as queers set the bar ever higher, merrily pushing that famous 'agenda' (read: equality) that so unhinges the haters. But increasingly there's cause for celebration too, and the docs are reflecting that."

The issue wraps with Gordon Thomas's massive DVD roundup.

Posted by dwhudson at August 6, 2007 1:20 PM