The High Hat. 9.

"Two films stand out not for how cities are depicted as backdrops for telling stories, but how in each the city itself lumbers its massive foundations to center stage in its own dramatized life," writes Shauna McKenna in the new issue of the High Hat. "In Federico Fellini's Roma, the director's home is treated to a genre beyond memoir or documentary, featuring no candid footage at all as actors play the roles of documentarians and their subjects. Wim Wenders's Tokyo-ga morphs a cinematic essay overtly about the process of trying to make one kind of film and getting sidetracked, into a reflection on a city insinuating itself into a director's frame of attention."

Scott von Doviak has a lovely piece on his "home state, as seen in movies based on the work of America's favorite horrormeister," referring, of course, to Maine and Stephen King. He's particularly good on Dolores Claiborne, "perhaps the most successful realization of the Maine landscape - both physical and mental - to reach the screen.... [David] Strathairn totally nails a particular Maine type, possessed of a stony meanness brought on by hard work, little money, boredom and drink; his resentful sneer of an accent is pitch-perfect. (Embarrassingly enough, [Jennifer Jason] Leigh is another recognizable type that hits your faithful movie janitor where he lives: the artsy kid who can't wait to flee the state and start posing as a pale, black-clad urbanite. I'm over it now.)"

"The deaths in the last year of five of our greatest filmmakers - first Danièle Huillet, then Ousmane Sembène, Edward Yang, Ingmar Bergman and finally, Michelangelo Antonioni - seemed to signal a final closing of the door, a confirmation that the art form's death throes are over and all that's left is the sad denouement," writes Gary Mairs. But: "As Jonathan Rosenbaum argues persuasively in Movie Wars, the asininity of current American studio filmmaking doesn't mean the end of cinema: we are, in fact, in a golden age, an era in which great masters are still producing significant work and younger talents are finding it ever cheaper to make films (so long as they don't require real film stock or name actors)."

"George Segal is the forgotten man of the American movie renaissance of the 70s," argues Phil Nugent - at length, too, which is a good thing, because, whether or not you agree with him, Nugent's always an engaging writer. Also: an annotated list of dead TV programs that deserve a second life on DVD.

"In a very real sense, Rescue Me starts after World Trade Center ends with a swell of triumphal music and a hug," writes Erica Jahneke. "What does it mean to be a survivor? What happened after the little old ladies in Iowa stopped sending afghans and cookies?"

"Nature - and I mean the untamed wildness of the world here - is indifferent to us, regardless of love or hate or any other human emotions. Even if we believed in a consciousness guiding Nature (and I do not), people would be meaningless to Nature, naked little monkeys who live and die in a microsecond." Hayden Childs on Gerry, Grizzly Man, Survivorman and Man Vs Wild."

Kevin Fullam examines various ways "movies have had intertwining relationships with societal attitudes and concerns towards the mentally ill."

Posted by dwhudson at November 1, 2007 2:24 AM