Film Comment. Jan/Feb 08.

Last issue's Film Comment cover boy just edges out this issue's in this year's poll of dozens of top-o'-the-line critics. It's No Country for Old Men with 754 points over There Will Be Blood with 743. And what a season for upsets. Hardly a surprise that Carlos Reygadas's Silent Light (175 points) tops the list of "Best Unreleased Films of 2007"; but Hou Hsiao-hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon comes awfully close (171).

Now FC wants your votes. And "rants, raves or insights on the movies of 2007." There will be prizes. As incentive, they're uttering the magic word: Criterion.

Perhaps the list to get most excited about, though, is "Terra Incognita: 18 Films to Look Out For."

The highlight of the online offerings from this issue will be Robin Wood on George Romero' Living Dead movies, the occasion being Diary of the Dead:

Romero's universe is certainly not a Christian one (the occasional religious references are always negative). Rather, we have an accidental universe, an unholy mess, an experiment not even from the familiar mad scientist but from some strange, blind, confused demiurge that didn't know what it was doing but, in its blind fumblings, produced a species that may be responsible for the death of all life on this planet within the next few hundred years....

Looking back over the five films, one is struck by an inherent contradiction: one cannot believe that they were planned as a sequence, each having its own individual characteristics (there are no carry-overs from one film to the next). Yet the more one reflects upon them the more one is struck by an inherent logic in the overall structure, a logic confirmed by the remarkable new film: the first four in the series cover and demolish, systematically, the central structures of what we still call our civilization, establishing Romero as the most radical of all horror directors.

Chris Norris reviews Koen Mortier's Ex-Drummer, a "cinematic descent into squalor, brutality, and debasement from the cheery European nexus that gave us Man Bites Dog, Funny Games and the stylish nightmare Irreversible."

Chris Chang's call for distribution is issued this time for Béla Tarr: "The festival-circuit party line has proclaimed The Man from London as subpar Tarr. So what? Surely the counterargument is that minor Tarr is superior to most other things."

Back to the "Online Exclusives." "[W]hile Transformers was one of the better action films this summer, it missed its chance to become a landmark in digital effects filmmaking by playing safe," argues Patrick Hebron.

The full, "uncut" version of Harlan Jacobson's interview with Francis Ford Coppola is here: "A happy death is that I will be so lost in all the wonderful things I've gotten to do in my life that when I die, I'm not going to notice it."

Claire Denis "has made five strikingly transformative videos for two Sonic Youth songs," writes Daniel Stuyck. "The collaboration makes sense. Both parties thrive on a rather alchemical combination of elements in their work, cherry picking ingredients from both the experimental and mainstream."

Nicolas Rapold looks back on the highlights of the 25th Turin Film Festival.

Posted by dwhudson at January 10, 2008 2:14 AM