Bright Lights. 60.

"The 20th anniversary of the publication of [Roger] Ebert's Two Weeks in the Midday Sun: A Cannes Notebook - perhaps the best book ever written about experiencing the Cannes Film Festival - gives us an excellent occasion to revisit this classic and consider just how the Cannes of today has changed, or failed to change, since the 1980s," writes Kenneth T Rivers in a timely piece for the new issue of Bright Lights Film Journal (in which editor Gary Morris suggests that something big and, above all, bright is in the works, details of which are to be divulged shortly).

"The harshest thing the French have to say about themselves is that they aren't serious," writes Alan Vanneman in a close reading - and reconsideration - of a classic that no longer bowls him over. "The Revolution, after all, which many French still like to believe was the most important event in human history, which was supposed to change everything, actually changed nothing. If the Revolution didn't matter, how can anything matter? In The Rules of the Game, Renoir satirizes this languor, but ultimately doesn't escape it."

Also: "The Circus (1928), though it contains some of Chaplin's funniest scenes, was inevitably a step down from The Gold Rush."

"Say her name out loud, and it even sounds like her: Gloria Grahame, fancy and earthy at once, tart, ungraspable," writes Dan Callahan. "She generally makes her entrance on-screen accompanied by a wail of hot jazz, eating candy, applying lipstick to that puffy mouth, flipping her dirty hair and cheap hoop earrings, extending her toned legs so we can see her shapely feet tied up in ankle-strap high heels. Her perversity knows no limits on-screen; in life, she was capable of sleeping with the 13-year-old son of her second husband, Nicholas Ray (she later married this stepson and bore him sons). She could never deny her impulses, and her wantonness made and then destroyed an exciting career in movies."

"Born in 1921, [Miklós] Jancsó has never ceased to make intensely political films, which may be one reason he is so little known outside his native Hungary," writes Gordon Thomas, reviewing The Round-Up, The Red and the White and My Way Home. "More simply, the biggest reason may be that his films are 'difficult,' even as art-house fare back in its 60s heyday." For more, by the way, see a special 2003 issue of Kinoeye.

Also, an epic DVD roundup: Berlin Alexanderplatz, Harry Langdon: Lost and Found, Postwar Kurosawa, I Am Cuba, The Dragon Painter, The Wrath of the Gods and Georges Méliès: First Wizard of Cinema.

"Twice Upon a Time deals with the irrational associations of language - but it's not a film about rapid thinking, or excited impulses, or sentences that zap past comprehension," writes Lesley Chow in a piece appropriately titled "One Culture, Two Systems." "Spanglish is - or at least it gets closer to that than any recent American film I've seen."

Evert Jan Van Leeuwen examines "how the makers of Eurowesterns employed a cinematic technique I call grotesque perspective in order to subvert the often utopian and mostly nostalgic ideological point view of the classic American westerns of, for instance, John Ford or Howard Hawks."

The Celluloid Liberation Front (explained in a note at the bottom of the page) considers La Grande Bouffe and the "body seen (and filmed) as the last shore of the wreckage, food as the last hope hidden in the despair of living."

Anton Karl Kozlovic on Cecil B DeMille's Samson and Delilah: "In another bravura act of artistic accomplishment, he also made Samson (Victor Mature) a rustic Christ-figure, and his old Story Teller (Francis J McDonald) a John the Baptist figure to further enhance his sacred storytelling. Not surprisingly, DeMille also made his Moses (Charlton Heston) a Christ-figure within his second The Ten Commandments (1956) and John McTavish (Richard Dix) a Christ-figure within the modern portion of his silent The Ten Commandments (1923) for similar holy effect reasons.18 The engineering of these multiple interlocking subtexts whilst staying fundamentally true to the well-known biblical storylines is another impressive feat of DeMillean craftsmanship that remains grossly unappreciated today."

"Learning more about how films are made is one of those quests for which we must take personal responsibility - even when it leads us to demand explanations, immediately, from any passerby who happens to be involved in the process." DJM Saunders does nab a passerby, but the trail leads all over, quickly becoming an entertaining meander.

A documentary potpourri from Karin Luisa Badt: critical reaction to Standard Operating Procedure, an overview of the Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival and interviews with Patricio Henriquez (Under the Hood: A Voyage into the World of Torture) and Doug Pray (Surfwise).

More interviews:

• Felix von Boehm and Alexia Berkowicz talk with Isabella Rossellini about Green Porno.

• Felix von Boehm: "[F]our years after the screening of Tarnation at the Cannes Film Festival, Jonathan Caouette took some time to talk about cinephilia."

• "Charles Burnett on Namibia and His Post-Killer of Sheep Career." With Damon Smith.

• Karin Luisa Badt: "A conversation with two absolutely different directors at the Berlinale - German Doris Dörrie [Cherry Blossoms] and Danish Natasha Arthy [Fighter] - surprisingly began with the same passionate declaration: people in the West are living cut off from their ancestors, pursuing their individual lives as if not part of a continuum of generations. What made this common outburst especially provocative is that neither director's film is apparently centered on that particular theme."

Megan Ratner looks back on this year's Rendez-vous with French Cinema.

Matthew Kennedy reviews that "fabulous read," Mark Harris's Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood.

Double feature:

• "There Will Be Blood is, to be somewhat reductive, about battles: capitalism against Christianity, optimism against pessimism, past against present, gangster against Westerner," writes Matt Brennan. "There may be a clear winner at first sight, but [Paul Thomas] Anderson's epic bristles with layers of meaning, densely allusive and fiercely, almost willfully, strange. In the end, it seems, the film foresees both kings "fast finishing," and watching the violent descent allows a glimpse into America's very own heart of darkness."

• "With its echoes of Greed (1924), Citizen Kane (1941) and The Treasure of Sierra Madre (1948), There Will Be Blood, however towering, is not sui generis, but its themes of family, religion, avarice, and oil have not lost their currency; they're as loaded as ever," writes Robert Ecksel. "Anderson denies any connection between the story he tells in There Will Be Blood and the abomination we find ourselves in, and continue to perpetuate, in the Middle East. But that link, however facile, is too perilous a shadow in his film to be ignored."

"I suppose every critic faces it - leaving a theatre after a positive experience and seeing the object of his affection stoned mercilessly by a raging mob of reviewers," writes Tony Macklin. "Street Kings has been pummeled into pulp until it's almost unrecognizable. I rush to its corner."

Posted by dwhudson at May 11, 2008 1:48 PM