Aug 132010
August 2010 | Issue 69
From the Editor
ARTICLES
Sex and the City: The Way We Were, the Way We Fucked: Carrie and Her Crew Party Like It’s 1999!They can never really knock you off your feet as long as you’re wearing Blahniks
“In our devotion to realism-as-catharsis, we’ve become so obsessed with psychologizing fictional characters that we forget we are the ones who need humanizing.”
Maximum Security: Film Noir, Domesticity, and the Female Captive“While films about men with dangerous jobs showed them returning home to supportive, contented wives, films that focused on domestic settings showed women caught in oppressive relationships or warped by the narrowness of their emotional lives.”
“They rapin’ everybody out here.” — Antoine Dodson
You Can’t Go Home Again: Mad Men and the American Memory“In Mad Men, as in modern American politics, the past is a pre-lapsarian paradise to which it is imperative to return, and the fantasy is of those exiled from history itself.”
That still finds musicians easier to rob
By Alison McKee
“Whose stories do these films really tell?”
Spade Work: Four Autobiographies and an Elegy: My Winnipeg; Of Time and the City; Hommage; Gloria!; and (nostalgia)By Jacob Mikanowski
“Because they assume that memory is fallible and experience inassimilable, they’re more like inquests or excavations than diaries or memoirs. Instead of reminiscing, they dig.”
By Lesley Chow
“Aldridge’s shoot is so striking because it purports to discover glamour in the mind of an unhinged woman: an associative path that has been cut by cinema.”
“There remain only intimations of squalor and suffering, of rough beasts stumbling across the landscape without any stability or security in sight.”
By Dorian Fox
Wonder Boys is a wonder; The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, not so much
By Ron Capshaw
“Being Marxist in the Groucho rather than Karl sense would have required the Ten to not take themselves or their politics so seriously.”
MOVIES
Out of His Head: Vikram Jayanti’s The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector“I’m dealing in rock ‘n’ roll. I’m, like, I’m not a bona fide human being.” — Phil Spector
By Joseph Natoli
“What entertains us may be shaping us.”
“She came at me in sections . . . she was bad . . . she was dangerous . . . she was my kind of woman.”
By Ian Johnston
“The good news from Bellamy is that Depardieu gives one of his best performances in years.”
All-American Medea: The Radical Pleasures of Beyond the ForestBy Jacob Mikanowski
“Today’s Rosa Moline would treat her lack of sophistication as a resource and her isolation as a launching pad.”
The Pervert’s Guide to The Birds: Of Hitchcock, Žižek, the Maternal Superego, and Critical Confusion
By Jonathan Simmons
“It is the search for explanation itself and the experience of the alien, disturbing, and frightening that thrills audiences.”
“It is a protean film, and changes radically depending on how you approach it.”
By Brian Grady
“While a teen’s emotional landscape can indeed defy reason, the filmmakers insist that a teenager’s need to attack supersedes any moral dilemma, even if their behavior results in the expulsion of one of their peers.”
The Energy of an Era: Revisiting Ken Russell’s The DevilsBy Ron Capshaw
“How else is one to approach a historical episode involving humpbacked, sexually frustrated nuns; crippled autocrats; hammer-wielding exorcists; doctors armed with holy water enemas?”
By Jacob Mikanowski
“The doubled Hitchcock mirrors the Hitchcock double, who in turn reflects Hitchcock pretending to play himself.”
By Scott Thill
“Most of the major speaking roles are indeed pwned by people without color, to put it indelicately. But the rest are thankfully brought to life by a rainbow coalition of talent.”
By Brian Libby
“Sanshiro is ultimately after spiritual gain — to achieve the purity he found in the moonlit flower.”
By Vlad Dima
“Ford creates a unique cinematic experience in which the visual, the aural, and even the olfactory mix to produce a powerful synesthetic experience.”
Translated by Bert Cardullo
Excerpted from an article titled “The Faith That Sustains: Cannes 1952,” published in Cahiers du cinema #13 (June 1952), pp. 13-16.
INTERVIEWS
By Steve Ryfle
“Yes, I’ve been there, and I can draw on that.”
By Steve Ryfle
In which the author talks about being a lifelong SF movie freak and updating his seminal SF compendium Keep Watching the Skies! for the new millennium
“Being middle-age rock and rollers, just trying to pay the bills, isn’t an easy lifestyle.”
STARS
DIRECTORS
By Phillip Leers
“Tashlin’s tenure at Warner Bros. did not provide him with a ‘cartoon aesthetic’ that could be applied, ready-made, to his features; rather, it allowed him to develop a feature filmmaking aesthetic through cartoons.”
COLUMNS
An ongoing column that looks at some of the most intriguing of recent, under-the-radar releases
FESTIVALS
By Kristen Anderson Wagner
“Even the most obscure titles drew impressive crowds, and the premiere events boasted sold-out houses.”
Love, or Something Close to It: Four Films from the 50th Thessaloniki International Film Festival“There is always some madness in love; but, there is always some reason in madness.” - Nietzsche
BOOKS
Let Me Tell You How I Really Feel . . . The Uncensored Book Reviews of Classic Images’ Laura Wagner, 2001-2010, by Laura Wagner
Reviewed by Gary Morris
“Wagner’s takedowns are thorough and unforgiving, as they should be.”
Errol Flynn: The True Adventures of a Real-Life Rogue, by Lincoln Hurst
Reviewed by Ron Capshaw
“Plagued by bad health (he suffered a heart attack at the age of 33), he nevertheless was able to create the impression of animal vitality.”
Scandinavian Blue: The Erotic Cinema of Sweden and Denmark in the 1960s and 1970s, by Jack Stevenson
Reviewed by Gary Morris
Do we believe in Swedish sin? Yes, we do. Also, American.
Film Noir: The Encyclopedia, 4th edition, edited by Alain Silver, Elizabeth Ward, James Ursini, and Robert Porfirio
Reviewed by Matthew Sorrento
“The Encyclopedia, especially in its new revised edition, reflects the vertiginous feeling of noir itself.”
