Bright Lights. 58.

"With so many possible cataclysms looming - World War III, eco-armageddon, and our personal fave, violent revolution - it's good to remember that whatever happens, you'll need reading material." Editor Gary Morris, at your service, introduces the new issue of Bright Lights Film Journal.

"Would Hamlet have wallpapered his rooms?" asks Kevin L Furgeson. "What about Bogart's Sam Spade? Or even a character as colorful as Bruce Banner?" Silly questions, maybe, but you've gotta see where he's going with this.

"Is it just an inescapable fact that we're always more interested in and convinced by stories that reveal - and sometimes revel in - a seemingly inexhaustible human capacity for violence?" asks DJM Saunders in a piece on youth and crime. "If so, the best that art and entertainment can ever do is to mirror our worst traits in the hope that - without too much prodding - we'll eventually get the message."

The intro to John Minson's "Wages of Skin": "Having seen how 60s San Francisco spawned a generation of irreverent young celluloid porn barons - 'Before the Green Door' in Bright Lights 57 - we now look at these events from the perspective of exploitation film history. The series concludes in the next issue."

"[D]espite the abundance of technological hooks, the IMAX format seems to be relegated to the fringes of the entertainment world; the theme park ride struggling to find its fan base," writes Nick Goundry.

"Although the uninitiated may be perplexed by this most fucked-up of children's movies, Brand Upon the Brain! abounds with the dark humor, melodramatic excess, eccentric minutiae, heightened sensation, and cryptic archaism so often praised by critics and fans," writes David Church. "Not only is this one of the year's best films, but it stands as perhaps the finest achievement of Guy Maddin's oeuvre."

"Starting with I, the Jury in 1947, [Mickey] Spillane's Mike Hammer mysteries were among the best-selling books ever written. But they were so damn lurid, not to say sadistic, that Hollywood scarcely had the nerve to lay a hand on them." Alan Vanneman revisits Kiss Me Deadly.

Also, Superbad, "the latest 'geeks get pussy' vehicle from the Judd Apatow/Evan Goldberg/Seth Rogen/Greg Mottola money machine," plus a piece on The Gold Rush, "Charlie Chaplin's masterpiece - the one film in which his desire to make the audience laugh and the desire to make the audience love him are held in perfect balance."

"With Wong Kar Wai's remake of The Lady from Shanghai (1948) set for release in 2008, it is a fitting time to re-evaluate Orson Welles's original," proposes Jason Mark Scott. "The editorial mauling that The Lady from Shanghai suffered at the hands of the studio is a great shame, resulting in a film that is, in [Simon] Callow's view, "compromised, butchered, coarsened, cheapened." However, as Chris Justice asserts in Senses of Cinema, 'the film's remaining 87 minutes represent some of the best in American art-house cinema.'"

"A powerful irony becomes clear - as Martin realizes Ethan intends to kill Debbie when he finds her, the audience must puzzle over exactly what is driving Ethan. Revenge? Racism? Duty? Professionalism? Unsuppressable violent impulses? [John] Ford abets the character in this cat-and-mouse game by similarly playing with audience expectations and comprehension of the character." A close reading of The Searchers from Gary Morris.

"Still Life (2006) marks a substantial advance on The World," writes Ian Johnston. "This is not only in the way Jia [Zhang-ke] has deepened his themes and characterisations - once again, his concerns are with individuals whose lives are disrupted and displaced by ongoing societal changes, but for the first time his central characters are older, more mature.... Working with his constant cinematographer Yu Lik-wai in high-definition digital video, Jia has made a film that is as beautiful and as deeply felt as any you are likely to see nowadays, the work of one of the foremost directors working anywhere in the world today."

Lesley Chow on Teddy Chan's Wait 'Til You're Older: "Chan shows us all the maps we use to navigate a regular film - and then makes them redundant. The movie is about the shock of the finite: a narrative that keeps growing to fruition and then drops off. All of the characters are dismayed by the prospect of limited time: partners have been chosen and gestures inhabited on the assumption that there would be time to erase everything and start again. Even the least imaginative people are incredulous about aging: surely this isn't the only story, the only body I get to inhabit." Also, a long look back at the Melbourne International Film Festival.

Matthew Sorrento on this year's Hairspray: "[John] Travolta's failure, along with a moralistic re-imagining of [John] Waters's light-as-air racial angle in the 1988 film (beware of a maudlin march led by Queen Latifah's Motormouth Maybelle), is all the more apparent next to Nikki Blonski, who has nailed an innocent and exuberant Tracy Turnblad."

"After seeing the film, I had dreams about Perfume for a week," writes Kristen Elizabeth Thompson. "Or perhaps they were nightmares. I'm not sure. It is a psychological reckoning I wish more people could experience. Luckily, Perfume is now on DVD."

"Berlin Alexanderplatz in both its written and filmic incarnations is a classic proto-noir, emerging from the same zeitgeist that produced Pabst's Pandora's Box (1928) and Lang's M (1931) in Germany, and Mervyn LeRoy's I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang and Two Seconds (both 1932) in the United States," writes C Jerry Kutner. "Given its length and scope, the best way to approach Berlin Alexanderplatz - to see how certain themes are introduced and developed - is to examine it episode by episode."

Speaking of Pabst, he "apparently was wild to obtain the rights to Threepenny Opera, but he must have known all along that he'd have to jettison a lot of its music, and, to make the movie he wanted, reimagine the entire piece," writes Gordon Thomas. "Narrative films, including Pabst's, most often beg to be mistaken for reality; the Brecht/Weill show does not." Also, a big DVD roundup: The Valentino Collection, True Heart Susie, She, The Call of Cthulhu and El Bruto.

Robert Keser celebrates "the recent find at the Czech National Film Archive of a nitrate print of Her Wild Oat, First National's witty farce released as the studio's 1927 Christmas holiday offering, and a lively vehicle to showcase Colleen Moore, chosen as America's number one box-office attraction in 1926 by the annual Quigley Poll of exhibitors. Refreshingly light on its feet, the film equally makes a muscular argument for the talent of Marshall Neilan, a shameful casualty of the newly consolidating studio system, yet at one time the country's top director (only Ernst Lubitsch commanded a higher salary)."

Also: "Just ask Hou Hsiao Hsien, Jane Campion, Charles Burnett, Abbas Kiarostami, Rolf de Heer, John Boorman, Olivier Assayas and Clint Eastwood. All these luminaries join the dazzling line-up in Todd McCarthy's enterprising new bio-documentary, Man of Cinema: Pierre Rissient, testifying alongside Oliver Stone, Werner Herzog, Dusan Makavejev and other filmmakers to celebrate the cinematic passion of the blunt-spoken but indefatigable Rissient."

Interviews:

• Bert Cardullo with Zhang Yimou: "If in twenty years, after I've made a lot more films, they write one sentence about me in a textbook, I'd be satisfied if they said: 'Zhang Yimou's cinematic style is strongly visual in a distinctly Chinese fashion.'"

• Damon Smith talks with Jennifer Baichwal and Edward Burtynsky about Manufactured Landscapes. Burtynsky on his work: "This is about the other side of our built environment and the other side of our consumer culture. There's this other world that is massive and ever-growing, and it has consequences both to the diminishment of natural resources and to the expansion of China and the externalization of a lot of the dirty stuff that it takes to make the stuff we like."

• Damien Love with Ray Harryhausen: "The astounding is no longer astounding, because you're inundated on television and on the movie screen with the most amazing visuals. So, the spectacular really doesn't have the same connotations as some years ago."

"Bergman vs Bergman." In Autumn Sonata, Dan Callahan sees "less a confrontation between daughter and mother, between nonentity and star... as it is a buried sexual stand off between Ingmar and Ingrid."

"Léon is meant to disturb and challenge our definition of adulthood, but not quite perhaps in the way that critics thought," writes Henry Midgley. "It reminds us that adulthood means accepting constraints, both physical and emotional; and that humanity is empathy."

"For a long time, the New York Film Festival was the inarguable heavyweight in town, practically on a direct feed from Cannes, Venice and Berlin," writes Megan Ratner. "This year, a few new members joined the selection committee, but too many commercial films that don't need the NYFF push still clogged this edition. Aside from the crowd-pleasers, some of the choices were simply perplexing, yet the best of the picks threatened to transform this honorably venerable showcase to its once daringly seminal place in cinema."

Posted by dwhudson at November 5, 2007 7:53 AM