GreenCine Daily: <i>Brooklyn Rail</i>. September 07.

September 26, 2007

Brooklyn Rail. September 07.

"Realism and fantasy collide in Les Enfants Terribles, the 1950 collaboration between celebrated directors Jean Cocteau and Jean Pierre Melville," writes Jesi Khadivi. "Cocteau adapted the film from his successful 1929 novel which he wrote in a week-long haze of opium withdrawal. He commissioned Jean-Pierre Melville to direct after seeing Melville's directorial debut, La Silence de La Mer. They're an unlikely pair. Cocteau was known in literary circles as the 'frivolous prince' for his willowy line drawings, poetry, and romantic, navel-gazing films featuring a high beef-cake factor. Melville became famous for his war pictures and hard-boiled Zen noirs. The result is like Bertolucci's The Dreamers with no sex."

Also in the September issue of the Brooklyn Rail:

David Wilentz on Exiled: "Johnnie To has taken over; his name is now synonymous with Hong Kong cinema." Also, a talks with Shusuke Kaneko "about Death Note, roman-porno ('romantic porn': Nikkatsu Studios brand of soft-core films), art films, kaiju (rubber monster movies such as Godzilla and the like), Nietzsche and the state of the industry today."
"Viewed together, this summer's romantic comedies show a peculiar obsession with the intersection of romantic love and family loyalty," writes Sarahjane Blum. "With heroines navigating between their own interests and those of their kin, three prominent offerings betray a cultural anxiety about how to be a responsible adult woman in love." And they are: Becoming Jane, No Reservations and 2 Days in Paris.
Sarah Kessler on Patricio Guzmán's "epic documentary" and "rough-edged, open narrative," The Battle of Chile.
Cullen Gallagher on Warner's Film Noir Classic Collection: Vol. 4.
Mark Asch looks back on last month's New Talkies: Generation DIY series at the IFC Center.
And Jed Lipinski on The Young One and The Milky Way: "Though formally quite different, they show Buñuel's affinity for the grey areas between innocence and sin, and his distaste for the easily psychoanalyzable. He was most at home with what he called 'the fundamental ambiguity of all things.'"