Brooklyn Rail. April 08.

"Starting with Repo Man, director Alex Cox has successfully subverted mainstream culture (and the studio system) with several definitive cult films," writes David Wilentz, introducing his interview in the new issue of the Brooklyn Rail.

Also, Two-Lane Blacktop "thematically and stylistically bears the trait that defines the greatest heroes of the West: restraint. Two-Lane replaces both the horse and the gun with the cars; the drag races that move the narrative are metonymical gunfights. Curiously, the journey has been inverted - our protagonists travel west to east, and their path seems to have neither goal, nor an end in sight. The quest has been reduced to nothingness: these characters go just to go."

Christian Parenti on a video installation by Peter Garfield:

Throughout the 17-minute piece, one witnesses the political logic of the last two or three decades - a market economy run amok, culturally sensitive advertising, the military-industrial economy, dotcom bullshit, the biomedical moment, and a political culture contained by fear, surveillance, and a growing police state.... The underlying politics are what gives Garfield's work its traction. Deep Space One is technically proficient, perfectly scored, and complete with Foley sound and remixed; in other words it is cinematic in that big-budget, epic fashion we all like, but it maintains a deeply subversive, critical defiance towards what can otherwise seem to be a juggernaut of defeat.

"Take a particularly clammy chunk of Magic Realism - Gabriel García Márquez's The Autumn of the Patriarch will do - cut it up into the discontinuous array of William S Burroughs's Nova Express, and you might come close to the incantatory and mesmerizing extravagance of Catherine Sullivan's sprawling, multi-screen installation, Triangle of Need," writes Thomas Micchelli.

"Although replete with structuralist narrative complexities, Sullivan's ambiguity of intent is also a throwback to the most primitive forms of cinema, as described by Stanley J Solomon in The Film Idea (1972): before directors began to make editorial choices determining the narrative and emotional thrust of a film, scenes were shot by a static camera as if on a theatrical stage 'in which all subjects are visible from head to toe and in which the audience... selects the area to concentrate on.'"

Robert A Haller kept a diary will attending the opening of the Jonas Mekas Center for the Visual Arts in Vilnius last November. Diplomats from around the world and reps from the Guggenheim and the Hermitage were on hand: "At least ten news photographers were flashing pictures through all of the introductions, and continued as the crowd looked at the graphically powerful and often puzzling [George] Maciunas art and documents, and Jonas's kinetic film clips and frame enlargements."

Williams Cole reviews Oren Jacoby's Constantine's Sword, a doc based on James Carroll's book subtitled The Church and the Jews. And it "does bring up important historical and contemporary questions about how religion is used for war and persecution - issues that are especially relevant given that the present 'global war on terror' is sparked and fuelled largely by religion."

Jesi Khadivi on Funny Games US: "While script, shot sequence, production design and score are virtually the same, something gets lost in cultural translation. When Funny Games is divorced from its cultural context, it takes on the air of a beautifully constructed, Germanically pretentious exploitation film." Also: "In a historic cameo, pulp director Samuel Fuller tells Ferdinand that 'a film is like a battleground; It has love, hate, action, violence and death. In one word, emotion.' Pierrot Le Fou proves Fuller's definition of cinema to be spot-on."

"Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park is triumphant throughout," declares Sarahjane Blum. "Every shot is a masterpiece. The screenplay improves on an already tremendous book. The casting is phenomenal. The sound design is haunting, humorous, and never cute. Any of these is cause enough to see the film (especially the cinematography and editing), but there's more. The film manages to dissociate words from meaning, truth, and beauty without naively asserting that images conjure these abstractions."

My Blueberry Nights "is classic Wong Kar Wai: swaggering cowboy rebellion meets pin-ups, meets poetry, meets philosophical meandering, with a dash of David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, and Wim Wenders's Don't Come Knocking," writes Makenna Goodman. "The director addresses America as both a visual buffet of downtrodden, sexy loners searching for purpose in their places of worship (the bar, the poker table, the café whose owner always knows your order), and the ground upon which it stands—both desolate craggy rock and cities crammed with metal. In Blueberry Nights, style saves the day."

Tessa DeCarlo on Married Life: "I love the idea of this movie, of codependence so extreme that it can see murder as an act of tenderness, of profound selfishness blindly insistent that it cares only about what's best for everyone else.... Sadly, the execution doesn't live up to the premise. What should be a mordant Hitchcockian romp clumps along with the slow tread of an art flick, but minus insights that might justify the leisurely pacing."

"If you watch Peter Greenaway's introduction to The Draughtsman's Contract, an alarm may go off as he reveals how he conceived the film," writes Rachel Balik. "A fine artist by training, Greenaway had a teacher whose mantra was: 'Draw what you see and not what you know.' The Draughtsman's Contract is Greenaway's cinematic elucidation of that theory."

And Melina Neet revisits A Zed & Two Noughts, "Greenaway's discourse on death and decay, replete with an introduction in which the director mentions his admiration for Darwin, a 'very good storyteller.' Despite the multilayering of metaphors, though, the film's story doesn't really satisfy; it's so dry it could have been delivered in a lecture hall."

"I am not a big fan of reality TV, but VH1's Rock of Love resonated with me from the beginning," confesses Mary Hanlon. "Now in its second season, Rock of Love continues to be a looking glass into the world of those desperate to join the C-List."

Posted by dwhudson at April 6, 2008 11:38 AM