August 2, 2008

Bright Lights. 61.

"Remember, when you're reading Bright Lights, you're not worrying about those little irritants like fascist takeovers that happen in the so-called real world," editor Gary Morris assures us. "So bolt the door, don your glad rags, snatch a smart cocktail, repeat your mantra ('Fuck it!') a few times, and get cozy with the sparkly new bauble that is Bright Lights 61!"

A Clockwork Orange

A little over a week ago, Elvis Mitchell and Christopher Nolan were chatting about The Dark Knight and it was hardly a surprise to hear that when Nolan and Heath Ledger were dreaming up their Joker, they took another look at Malcolm McDowell's performance as Alex in A Clockwork Orange. It's a film that "totally and overwhelmingly immerses the viewer in the character's state of mind," writes Joseph Aisenberg in an impressive piece on both Stanley Kubrick's movie and Anthony Burgess's novel. Its such a pleasure following the overall argument that it seems a shame to quote from a brief digression, but here goes:

Up through The Shining, taken together, the films Kubrick made in the 1970s could almost be seen as a dialectic elaboration of each of the three parts of the poetic arguments comprising 2001, though I don't wish belabor that point here. All I want to note is that it's interesting to see how Kubrick assimilates himself to his subjects: the stark vulgarity of Clockwork; the ironic romantic painterly portraiture of his adaptation of Thackeray's picaresque novel Barry Lyndon; the cold bright blinkless trance-out of The Shining. Watching them one after the other, you see how totally and subtly Kubrick immersed himself in the visual and aural problems each new set of narrative themes posed while showing the same artistic concerns throughout.

For Noah Berlatsky, a dynamic "of eroticized male exclusion from, and investment in, female relationships - was the defining feature of a handful of women-in-prison films from the 1970s. In these movies, female sisterhood, generally in the face of oppression, is itself fetishized - feminism is turned into a kind of masochistic male wet dream."

"[A]re we... when all's said and done, just an incorrigibly violent species?" wonders DJM Saunders in his wide-ranging exploration of "Dominant Women in Cinema."

"The Cain archetype is the father of all American archetypes in that it enables our vague antisocial behavior and promotes it to the status of a sanctified rite," writes Jon Lanthier. "The story of American society, and its blithe misogyny, is essentially the story of Cain tweaked and retold a thousand or more times. We can only stop laughing at it, and at ourselves, when the latent knot of oppositions that Cain comprises rages to the surface of the narrative spurting blood from its blowhole."

Psycho "If... queer refers to a process of disturbing the norm, then it seems that Psycho is, at its heart, a queer film," argues Jay Poole. "Not only does it disturb the ordinary, it also uses broad cultural definitions of 'normal' in 1950s America to question what is defined as 'abnormal,' while exposing the presence of darkness and 'madness' in all of us - 'We all go a little mad sometimes.'"

"Iron Man is the first Marvel movie that I've liked," writes Alan Vanneman, "because Tony Stark, thank the Lord, is not a typical Marvel Comics hero." But for Cristobal Giraldez Catalan, "This kind of production that so reflects government doublespeak, that vilifies one race so hatefully and promotes its own so dutifully, carries with it mechanisms of persuasion we have seen throughout history. Within the first fifteen minutes it's clear that Iron Man is far more than playboy fantasy; it is American foreign policy realized without context."

"Gorgeous widescreen cinematography vast enough to encapsulate an era, the sacred pop of the fab four, and a surprising amount of restraint (musicals suffer when lazily milked for irony) made Across the Universe one of the most expansive and unabashedly spectacular yet overlooked and divisive films of the year," writes Alan Jacobson. "Julie Taymor has done the impossible: crafted a jaw-hanger of a clever musical that teeters on the electric precipice but never collapses into self-consciousness."

"[T]hose who dismissed [Boarding Gate] at Cannes last year as a 'limp, sleazy inanity,' as one critic put it, were maligning [Olivier] Assayas's estimable intelligence and failing to scrutinize Gate's intriguing engagement with what, for lack of a better term, I'll call global culture." Damon Smith lays out the argument.

Daniel Hui on Funny Games US: "It is significant that [Michael] Haneke chose to change little from his original version. It is not artistic hubris; it is reasserting the same statement in a different political context.... The most significant question explored in the movie (both versions) is not the evil of violent movies, but rather the audience's willingness to be manipulated. I find it ironic that audiences are so eager to be manipulated, and yet when a film makes the manipulation its text, instead of its subtext, it is criticized for being too didactic."

"There's a lot to admire about Wonderful Town," writes Ian Johnston. "Still, it's not a perfect work by any means, and as much as [Aditya] Assarat's fellow-Thai Apichatpong Weerasethakul will inevitably be invoked as a point of comparison, Assarat is a more conventional director, lacking Weerasethakul's thrilling experimentation with form and narrative."

George Sanders "Here was a man who was adroit even in self-annihilation, but many of his films show other sides of his complex character." Dan Callahan's profile of George Sanders begins and ends with suicide notes - he wrote two, and I won't spoil either. "In Sanders's best work, the mask of The Cad would be dropped, or at least misplaced, and the real, sensitive, preemptively wounded boy underneath would reveal himself."

Interviews:

A John Cassavetes double: Ara Corbett on Faces: "While in part a response to his bitter Hollywood experience, its timelessness lies in its depiction of how conflicted and unresolved Cassavetes was about the direction of his own life." And Jason Mark Scott: "[T]he re-edited [Killing of a Chinese Bookie] is the most fully realized of all Cassavetes' films, and a viewing of both it and its prototype provides a rare opportunity to witness a great director's substantive and formal evolution in the making."

Barton Fink "The Coens in their weird symbiotic connected-twin telepathic genius inscribe the celluloid of [Barton Fink] with the very key to unlocking all their cinema and all of art cinema for those who would be free of the shackles of [a] sort of pretentious 'nodding when you don't really get it'-ism," writes Erich Kuersten. Also, Blade Runner: Final Cut: "Considering the movie takes place in a dystopian future where 'replicants' of humans are given 'implant' memories so that not even they don't know they're not human, there's a whole postmodern hall of mirrors you can wander through with the idea of a digitally re-colored 'final cut' of a 10-year-old 'director's cut' of a 26-year-old movie, especially if you add your own metatextual history as someone who saw the film in different guises over and over during the last 26 years... just looking into this new DVD set is enough to fry your own neural hard drive."

Robert Ecksel: "Before there was Network and Magnolia and Bamboozled, there was only the misunderstood and late-to-be-appreciated A Face in the Crowd."

Imogen Sara Smith on Force of Evil: "The whole film matches [John[ Garfield's performance: taut, restrained and bristling, it gives out static shocks. You need to see it more than once, since it moves so quickly and subtly that you won't get it all the first time." Also, "What does [Robert] Mitchum want? I've come to the conclusion that Mitchum's enduring power lies in the way he leaves that question open." A review of Nicholas Ray's The Lusty Men.

Harlan Ellison's Watching "Who would have thought that [Harlan] Ellison, who reviles the Spielbergians Joe Dante and Chris Columbus and even pans Back to the Future, would champion Ghostbusters?" Matthew Sorrento reviews a reissued edition of Harlan Ellison's Watching.

"Timed shortly after Berlin, just before Cannes and in direct competition with Sundance and the New York Film Festival, the [Tribeca Film Festival] still seems unsure of itself," writes Megan Ratner, looking back on this year's edition. "With fewer venues for non-mainstream and foreign films, New York City needs a wide-ranging, rambling, surprising, provocative festival, a demand TFF could meet if it were just a little less in thrall to the red carpet."

Gordon Thomas's big DVD roundup: La Roue, The Last Emperor, Lost in Beijing, Popeye the Sailor, Satantango and Vampyr.

"Queer media is reaching epidemic levels (in the good sense) in the culture, so we decided to forgo our usual brackish stew of all-over-the-map film and TV reviews to take note of some exclusively queer (or queer-inflected) indies and TV series from the last few years." Gary Morris on The Bubble, The DL Chronicles, Eleven Men Out, For the Bible Tells Me So, Kate Clinton: 25th Anniversary Tour, Kiss the Bride, Laughing Matters: The Men, Married in America 2, Mysterious Skin, Na Kamalei: The Men of the Hula, No Regret, On the Other Hand, Death, Out at the Wedding, Shelter, Strictly Confidential and When I Knew.

Posted by dwhudson at August 2, 2008 1:01 PM