Sight & Sound. March 08.

The Frat Pack's in the cover of the new issue of Sight & Sound and Henry K Miller roots out the origins by tracing the many ways Indiewood and Saturday Night Live/MTV have cross-pollinated. For example:

The resemblances between The Cable Guy and Fight Club were not down to personal connections between their makers or to direct influence, but to some more diffuse generational synchronicity. Nonetheless, the comedic tradition [Jim] Carrey, [Ben] Stiller and [Judd] Apatow had all been schooled in flowed through [David] Fincher's film. With its rituals and para-situationist pranks, Tyler's 'Project Mayhem' is as much fraternity as terror cell, and Fincher himself has cited National Lampoon's Animal House (1978) as inspiration, Bluto duking it out with Jake La Motta for paternity rights. Edward Norton has characterised the film's controversial second half as 'so obviously about what goes wrong when a bunch of frat boys start taking themselves too seriously' - and much the same is true of the film that gave the Frat Pack its unfortunate name, Todd Phillips's Old School (2003).

David Thomson on Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist: "[H]ere is the thing that's striking in a film from 1970: Clerici is not brave, reckless, outgoing or charming but is ingrowing, cold, a snob, a coward, a tragic figure who shrugs off his own pain with constant assumptions of superiority. He is a fascist. And I think it's worth noting, if only historically, that there are ways in which the shock of The Conformist - and no one was really ready for it - enabled the ocean-liner team spirit of a film that came only two years later, and for which Al Pacino might have been advised to study [Jean-Louis] Trintignant (I'm just guessing)."

Kim Newman on Diary of the Dead: "While many film-makers have taken the suspense mechanics, gore or panicky-nasty characters of [Night of the Living Dead] as models, its satirical social commentary, which reappears here, remains [George] Romero's own."

"Criterion's handsome high-definition digital transfer, boasting a tumultuous mono mix and fully revealing the film's Panavision vistas for the first time on video, goes a long way towards promoting The Naked Prey as an important chapter in the history of independent US filmmaking," writes Tim Lucas. "Michael Atkinson's notes are a forceful defence of a truly hellbent film which, he writes, is 'not quite politically correct' but 'caring nothing for aesthetics and everything for surviving [its own] experience.'"

Catherine Wheatley on The Edge of Heaven: "Billed as the second instalment in [Fatih Akin's] 'Love, Death and the Devil' trilogy, it offers a technically accomplished and deeply compassionate meditation on loss and consolation, as its mosaic narrative follows the intersecting lives of six characters travelling between Istanbul and Hamburg."

Mark Sinker on Helvetica: "[W]hat's lovely about Gary Hustwit's documentary is that it not only gets across the passions, absurd and detailed, that shape this world [of fonts and such] (passions about effects few of us can name and some never notice at all) but also sketches a timeline in changing technologies and fashions over a half-century."

Posted by dwhudson at February 23, 2008 1:18 PM