Brooklyn Rail. May 08.

The Flight of the Red Balloon has Ara Osterweil revisiting Hou Hsiao-hsien's oeuvre in the new issue of the Brooklyn Rail: "[A]s anyone who has watched Hou's films knows, history ain't like pornography: you don't always know it when you see it. Distracted by Hou's roving camera, or by objects obscuring the 'action' in the foreground of the frame, it's easy to miss the elephant in the room. What is inescapable for people actually living through violent shifts of political power is almost impossible for belated viewers to see. That, of course, is the point."

"With only four films, Lee Chang Dong has proved himself on the vanguard of the most powerful works in contemporary Korean cinema," writes David Wilentz. "Alongside the shocking sublimity of director Kim Ki Duk (The Isle) or the extremely violent meditations on vengeance of Park Chan Wook (Old Boy), standing out would seem no easy feat. But if we consider cinema as an artistic interpretation of national identity, then the intensity of all these filmmakers attests to how emotionally complex and fervent the Korean psyche must be."

Wilentz also watches his way through Silent Ozu: Three Family Comedies and Late Ozu.

"Written, directed and produced by Sue Williams and planned as the first 'episode' of five documentary films over 20 years, Young & Restless in China records the lives of nine Chinese young adults over a four-year span (2004 - 2007)," writes Lu Chen. "The result is an intimate, in-depth, nonjudgmental portrayal of the coming of age of a unique generation in the country's fast-changing history." Also: The Dragon Painter.

"Judging by three documentary short films screened at Anthology Film Archives in early April, generation 'Pepski' projects a new view of Russia, one that seeks to meld the past with the fast-changing present," writes Ashley Cleek. "The New York screening concluded the end of a two-week US tour of the filmmakers, Maria Miroshnichenko and Sergey Kachkin, and two organizers of prominent documentary film festivals in Russia, Victor Fedoseev and Anna Tarkhova. In today's Russia, Tarkhova explained, 'More and more young people are attracted to documentary films, because they are honest but at the same time shocking, but it is a shocking you can believe.'"

David N Meyer introduces his guide to the Godard's 60s series at Film Forum through June 5: "Godard's oxymoronic, all right: cinema's most self-conscious intellectual and heart-wrenching romantic; its most innovative technician and compassionate charter of the heart; its most deadly political thinker and smartest gag-writer. Godard invented the second half of cinema's first century. And for all of his technical, visual, structural and narrative innovations, a seldom-mentioned reason for his work standing up so well is an entirely different sort of wild intelligence, a wild intelligence JLG never got sufficient credit for: chic." Also: Blast of Silence.

Theodore Hamm's The New Blue Media: How Michael Moore, MoveOn.org, Jon Stewart and Company Are Transforming Progressive Politics: "[E]ven if the film did not swing any of the Red States, [Fahrenheit 9/11's] impact on shoring up the resolve of voters in the Blue States to go to the polls cannot be underestimated. To an extent unmatched in the annals of media history, a documentary film had become a focal point of national debate." And Hamm talks with Glenn Greenwald about his book, Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics.

"Standard Operating Procedure is to Abu Ghraib what Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road is to nuclear war," writes Ryan Hagen. "Both are meditations on apocalypse, whether it takes shape as the spiritual annihilation of individuals in a prison or the atomic immolation of our society."

"So yeah, [Forgetting Sarah Marshall] is an okay movie, and some of the jokes are spot on," writes Makenna Goodman. "But it's been done."

Mary Hanlon tells us about the night she saw Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay.

Posted by dwhudson at May 11, 2008 9:18 AM