Film Comment. Nov/Dec 08.

November 14. That's this coming Friday, and a glance at the new issue of Film Comment - one eye on a print copy, with Catherine Deneuve on the cover, the other eye on the online exclusives - immediately reveals why this is a red letter day for New York cinephiles: Arnaud Desplechin's A Christmas Tale opens at the IFC Center and Manny Farber, 1917 - 2008, a series curated by Kent Jones, begins its 13-day run.

Online, Desplechin's conversation with Deneuve is the full, uncut version. Among the many topics touched on: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg; Repulsion ("That's the film I feel I helped make"); "I definitely prefer Tristana to Belle de Jour!"; the many directors she's worked with, American actors, tough choices and - well, Desplechin makes this quite a fun read.

Regarding Manny Farber, FC runs two interviews from its archives: Kent Jones's from the March/April 2000 issue and Richard Thompson's with both Farber and Patricia Patterson, from the May/June 1977 issue. On a somewhat related note (at the very least, Kent Jones would be the overlap here), the full transcript of the Film Criticism in Crisis? panel at this year's New York Film Festival is also online.

"Milk is the first movie [Gus] Van Sant has made about adults since Psycho (98)," writes Nathan Lee. "And perhaps it's more accurate to say that the biopic, like the remake, is a reflection or simulacrum of preexistent figures. Milk is clearly motivated by getting its story and message across with maximum clarity. No Béla Tarr abstractions here, no Leslie Shatz soundscapes - and no major improvement over The Times of Harvey Milk except insofar as talented movie stars enacting a colorful historical drama command attention, and this movie deserves it. It's the straightest thing in Van Sant's career, not unlike Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain."

"[B]oth Seventeen and Demon Lover Diary are positively crucial to documentary film history," argues Rob Nelson. "That's in no small part for what these two pioneering films share: a raw, pungent sense that the 70s killed the 60s, that law and order would be here to stay (Seventeen's first words are a home-ec teacher's orders to 'be quiet and sit down'), that the kids who manage to survive will, like the two films, be sent to detention (and won't go quietly)."

Chris Chang on Tulpan: "Rare is the film that captures a landscape and way of life with such veracity, intensity, and poetic empathy."

Paul Fileri talks with Daniel Stuyck and Ross Wilbanks to get the story behind Order of the Exile, the invaluable site devoted to Jacques Rivette.

"Arnold Schoenberg composed his monumental 12-tone opera Moses und Aron during the years 1930 through '32." Online, Allen Shawn is given space to elaborate on the significance of the work before turning to the film at hand: "In 1973, six years after making their extraordinarily beautiful Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet produced a film version of Arnold Schoenberg's great work (which has now been issued on DVD). As they had in the Bach film, the Straubs sought to strip their cinema bare of anything that could be seen to deliberately dramatize the story, establishing with exquisitely subtle, mathematically plotted camerawork and formalized direction, a visual counterpoise to Schoenberg's complex score."

Elisabeth Lequeret on The Secret of the Grain: "[Abdel] Kechiche may subscribe to Renoir's 'Everyone has his reasons,' but here he shoots the action with a nervous tension that's more evocative of Pialat.... In France, Kechiche is often compared to Marcel Pagnol: both undoubtedly share a rare understanding of the degree to which daily speech, much more than language, forms the basis of community."

The furor over Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ "must have induced some anxiety of influence in [Abel] Ferrara," suspects Paul Brunick. "The unexpected conceptual coup of Mary was to turn all these speculations back on themselves: a film-within-a-film structure (meta!) explores the personal and public fallout from the production of a revisionist biblical epic. Call it post-Scorsesean, if you must, but no amount of category-crunching could rescue this film from its own mediocrity."

Posted by dwhudson at November 9, 2008 1:55 PM