Brooklyn Rail. October 08.

"Defining the end points of the continuum of fine art/popular culture, performance artist Mark Tribe's Port Huron Project and actor cum Charlize Theron paramour cum director Stuart Townsend's Battle in Seattle highlight every (should be) obvious parallel between today's wars and corporate oligarchies and those of yesterday," writes Sarahjane Blum. "Both The Port Huron Project and Battle in Seattle offer guilt trips of the highest order, and we should learn a thing or two hundred from the anti-war icons of the Vietnam era, and the thousands of protesters who stopped 1999's World Trade Organization. But if politically engaged filmmakers keep focusing on how little ground has been won, will we lose sight of how much ground has been lost?"

"David Lean is a filmmaker with many prehistoric virtues," writes Lu Chen. "Clearly a sort of a materialist, Lean vests in rich, elaborative visual details and displays a strong belief in assuring their solidity, be it the perfect sunset or the right look of a corn field in 1910s Russia. Only he has proved able to visualize the dark, web-filled Satis House of Miss Havisham with its full gothic splendor or make the cruel grandeur of the Burmese jungle or Arabic desert imaginable on the western screen."

"Ballast is a whole work, that elusive merging of style and content wherein each fuels the other and neither calls more attention to itself," writes David N Meyer. "Like Bresson, so many of the most affecting moments are rendered in pure cinema - no literary work could capture the tiny but profound moments that [Lance] Hammer and his cast achieve."

Mary Hanlon: "What separates The Fabulous Stains from many cult films are its superior aesthetic qualities, its all star/ rock star cast, and, well, the fact that it went on to inspire many, many female garage bands in the 1980s with its ground breaking-style - numerous riot-grrrl bands cite The Stains as a seminal inspiration."

"In Elegy, Isabel Coixet creates a sensually lush adaptation of Philip Roth's inert and insipid story The Dying Animal," argues Camila de Onís. "The film reveals a tone, rather stilted at first, that slowly seeps into the psyche. Elegy conveys a maturity that Roth's novel lacks, and a pathos that he transparently strived for but could not achieve."

"Let's stipulate at the outset that Burn After Reading doesn't match the exultant wigginess of The Big Lebowski, the dark poetry of No Country for Old Men, or the cold-hearted perfection of Fargo," writes Tessa DeCarlo. "It's a lesser work in the Coen canon, a diversion rather than a masterpiece. But it's a neatly crafted, exuberantly mean-spirited little diversion, and what's not to like about that?"

Heidi Howard: "Cecelia Condit's work... creates a poetically ironic narrative that engages the viewer in a psychological puzzle full of paranoia, sensation and joy."

Also: Ben La Rocco on Raha Raissnia, Thomas Micchelli on Leigh Ledare, both John Yau and Claudia La Rocco on John Ashbery's Collages: They Knew What They Wanted and Ellen Pearlman on Art and China's Revolution (through January 11).

Posted by dwhudson at October 20, 2008 3:51 AM