Cineaste articles from December 2006

Cineaste archives from December 2006

Do we really need movie ratings?(Editorial)
December 22, 2006... Ever since the movies began, this hybrid art form has been considered slightly disreputable. After all, it took until 1952 for the Supreme Court to rule that films deserved the freedom of speech guarantees enshrined in the First Amendment. In...

Defending The Searchers.(Letter to the editor)
December 22, 2006... I suspect that many readers of Cineaste have, as Christopher Sharrett ("Through a Door Darkly: A Reappraisal of John Ford's The Searchers," Vol. XXXI, No. 4), been watching The Searchers since they were young. (I saw it on its release, when I...

What really happened aboard United 93?(Letter to the editor)
December 22, 2006... I thought your review of United 93 (Cineaste, Fall 2006) was especially well written, and demonstrated an impressive knowledge of the generic context in which the film operates so successfully, but I was also disappointed, given the...

Acting in the Cinema.(Letter to the editor)
December 22, 2006... In this celebrity-crazed culture, it's difficult to ignore the supreme irony that Americans seem to be obsessed with the personal quirks and shenanigans of actors (or, to be more precise, stars) and thoroughly oblivious to the craft of acting....

Further insights into acting.(Letter to the editor)
December 22, 2006... I found Cynthia Baron's article on "Performances in Adaptation: Analyzing Human Movement in Motion Pictures" the most fascinating piece in the Fall issue of your magazine. One thing that struck my interest, in particular, was the use of Laban....

Loving Bollywood for itself.(Letter to the editor)
December 22, 2006... Authors Meenakshi Shedde and Thessa Mooij (Cineaste, Summer 2006) treat popular Indian cinema like the fairy tale heroine who must change something essential about herself to be worthy of love. Last year's Bunty aur Babli, with its perfect...

Unseen no more? The avant-garde on DVD.
December 22, 2006... When it comes to home entertainment, the avant-garde is always late--that is, if it isn't left off the guest list altogether. Needless to say, the absence of a reliable niche market for sub-feature-length nonnarrative movies is a major...

MPAA ratings, black holes, and my film: an interview with Kirby Dick.(Motion Picture Association of America)("This Film Is Not Yet Rated, Kirby Dick")(Interview)
December 22, 2006... For just short of forty years the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has been imprinting some version of its iconic symbols--currently G, PG, PG-13, R, NC-17--on films shown in U.S. theaters. In theory these ratings are to alert...

Psycho: the music of terror.(Bernard Herrmann)
December 22, 2006... The most famous cue in movie history, "The Knife" in Psycho's shower scene, has been ripping through our culture ever since Bernard Herrmann secretly created it. This is the cinema's primal scream, deeply imbedded in our moviegoing...

Say cheese! Operation Iraqi freedom on film.
December 22, 2006... The Americans are a very strange people," opines one of Peter Sellers's three characters in Jack Arnold's 1959 satire The Mouse that Roared. "Whereas other countries rarely forgive anything, the Americans forgive everything. There isn't a more...

The ravages of war and occupation: an interview with James Longley.(Interview)
December 22, 2006... James Longley met acclaim early on in his career, when he won a Student Academy Award for his short documentary, Portrait of Boy with Dog, produced while he was a student at the VGIK film school in Moscow, Russia. Intent on making his first...

The art of memory: Andrzej Wajda's war trilogy.("A Generation")("Kanal")("Ashes and Diamonds")
December 22, 2006... Attentive viewers of Andrzej Wajda's remarkable first feature, A Generation, will be struck about midway through the film by a scene that pointedly recalls, even as it distinctively glosses, a historic moment of Poland's tortured wartime...

The Devil Wears Prada.(Movie review)
December 22, 2006... The Devil Wears Prada Produced by Joseph M. Caracciolo Jr., Carla Hacken and Karen Rosenfelt; directed by David Frankel; written by Aline Brosh McKenna, based on the novel by Lauren Weisberger; cinematography by Florian Ballhaus;...

An Inconvenient Truth.(Movie review)
December 22, 2006... An Inconvenient Truth Produced by Lawrence Bender, Scott Burns, Scott Z. Burns, Laurie Lennard; directed by Davis Guggenheim; camera operator, Davis Guggenheim; edited by Jay Lash Cassidy, Dan Sweitlik; original music by Michael Brook,...

Hollywoodland.(Movie review)
December 22, 2006... Hollywoodland Produced by Glenn Williamson; directed by Allen Coulter; screenplay by Paul Bernbaum; cinematography by Jonathan Freeman; production design by Leslie McDonald; costumes by Julie Weiss; edited by Michael Berenbaum; original...

When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts.(Movie review)
December 22, 2006... When the Levees Broke A Requiem in Four Acts Produced by Jacqueline Glover, Spike Lee, Sheila Nevins, Samuel D. Pollard and Bruce Robinson; directed by Spike Lee; cinematography by Cliff Charles; edited by Geeta Gandbhir, Nancy Novack...

Half Nelson.(Movie review)
December 22, 2006... Half Nelson Produced by Jamie Patricof, Alex Orlovsky, Lynette Howell, Anna Boden; directed by Ryan Fleck; written by Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden; cinematography by Andrij Parekh; edited by Anna Boden; production design by Elizabeth Mickle;...

The Black Dahlia.(Movie review)
December 22, 2006... The Black Dahlia Produced by Rudy Cohen, Mosche Diamant, Art Linson, directed by Brian De Palma; screenplay by Josh Friedman, based on a novel by James Ellroy; cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond; production design by Dante Ferretti; edited...

The Complete Mr. Arkadin.(Movie review)
December 22, 2006... The Complete Mr. Arkadin Mr. Arkadin (A.K.A. Confidential Report): Written and directed by Orson Welles; starring Orson Welles, Robert Arden, Akim Tamiroff, Mischa Auer and Michael Redgrave. Three-disc special edition DVD set, B&W, 1955. A...

The 400 Blows.(Movie review)
December 22, 2006... The 400 Blows Directed by Francois Truffaut; written by Marcel Moussy and Francois Truffaut; produced by Georges Chariot; cinematography by Henri Decae; with Jean-Pierre Leaud, Claire Maurier, Albert Remy, Guy Decomble and Patrick Auffay....

Portrait of Jason.(Movie review)
December 22, 2006... Portrait of Jason Directed by Shirley Clarke; with Jason Holliday (himself), Shirley Clarke (off-screen interviewer) and Carl Lee (off-screen interviewer). DVD, B&W, 99 mins., 1967. A Second Run DVD release, www.secondrundvd.com. ...

La Bataille du Rail.(Forbidden Games)(Movie review)
December 22, 2006... La Bataille du Rail Directed by Rene Clement; starring Marcel Barnault, Jean Clarieux, Jean Daurand and Jacques Desagneaux. DVD, B&W, 85 mins., French dialog with English subtitles, 1945. A Facets Video release, www.facets.org. ...

Every Little Thing.(Movie review)
December 22, 2006... Every Little Thing Directed by Nicolas Philibert. DVD, color, 99 mins., French dialog with English subtitles, 1996. Released by Second Run DVD, www.secondrundvd.com. Nicolas Philibert's documentary begins as a woman sings of lost love...

The Rocky Road to Dublin.(Movie review)
December 22, 2006... The Rocky Road to Dublin Directed by Peter Lennon; cinematography by Raoul Coutard. DVD, B&W, 69 mins., 1968. Distributed by First Run/Icarus Films, 32 Court Street, 21st Floor, Brooklyn, NY 11201, www.frif.com. In the major cities of...

The Best of Youth.(Movie review)
December 22, 2006... The Best of Youth Directed by Marco Tullio Giordana; screenplay by Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rullil cinematography by Roberto Forza; edited by Roberto Missiroli; starring Luigi Lo Cascio, Alessio Boni, Jasmine Trinca, Sonia Bergamasco,...

Enthusiasm.(Movie review)
December 22, 2006... Enthusiasm Directed by Dziga Vertov. Two-disc DVD set, B&W, 65 mins., U.S.S.R., 1930. Restored and released by the Austrian Film Museum, www.edition-filmmuseum.de. In so many contexts a pivotal film, Dziga Vertov's Enthusiasm:...

Hands Over the City.(Movie review)
December 22, 2006... Unlike many of Francesco Rosi's other films, which are structured as dramatized investigations into the mysteries and elusive truths of Italian political history, his 1962 Hands Over the City is, as he explains, his "demonstration of a theory"...

I was a teenage movie maker.(Don Glut)(Brief article)
December 22, 2006... In 1953, nine year-old Chicagoan Don Glut, who loved Universal's horror classics, picked up the 16mm movie camera his mother had bought for him and decided to make his own. The first was a disaster, and the camera went back into its case for...

The Naked Spur.(Movie review)
December 22, 2006... Here at last! The Naked Spur is arguably the summit of the brief but glorious collaboration between Anthony Mann and James Stewart, an extraordinary run of eight films in six years, including five of the greatest of all Westerns. While the...

The Spirit of the Beehive.(Movie review)
December 22, 2006... The Spirit of the Beehive, Victor Erice's profound meditation on the desolation of post-Civil War Spanish society, is, perhaps, the most beautiful film in the history of Spanish cinema. Set in a remote, impoverished Castilian village in 1940,...

Troublesome Creek.(Movie review)
December 22, 2006... Jeanne Jordan and Steven Ascher's 1996 essay-portrait of Jordan's endearing Iowa farm family is a revelation, gracefully negotiating documentary's abiding friction between the specific and the general, personal experience and social analysis....

The Final Victim of the Blacklist: John Howard Lawson, Dean of the Hollywood Ten.(Book review)
December 22, 2006... The Final Victim of the Blacklist: John Howard Lawson, Dean of the Hollywood Ten by Gerald Home. Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2006. 360 pp., illus. Hardcover: $60 and Paperback: $24.95. For those readers...

Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image.(Book review)
December 22, 2006... Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image by Laura Mulvey. London: Reaktion Books (Distributed in the U.S. by University of Chicago Press), 2006. 216 pp., illus. Paperback: $24.95. We are familiar with cinema histories that...

The Cinema of the Balkans.(Book review)
December 22, 2006... The Cinema of the Balkans Edited by Dina Iordanova. London: Wallflower Press (Distributed in the U.S. by Columbia University Press), 2006. 288 pp., illus. Hardcover: $80.00 and Paperback: $27.50. The Cinema of the Balkans is a welcome...

Visions of England: Class and Culture in Contemporary Cinema.(Book review)
December 22, 2006... Visions of England: Class and Culture in Contemporary Cinema by Paul Dave. Oxford and New York: Berg. 2006, 288 pages. Illus. Hardcover: $89.85; Paperback: $24.95. Queen Elizabeth II, the personification of the British class system par...

The West in Early Cinema: After the Beginning.(Book review)
December 22, 2006... The West in Early Cinema: After The Beginning by Nanna Verhoeff. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006, illus. 464 pp. Hardcover: $80.00 and Paperback: $32.50. Late nineteenth-century American representational painting might not...

The Toronto International Film Festival.(COMMUNIQUES)
December 22, 2006... As I savored a much-needed glass of wine after an enjoyably grueling day at the 2006 Toronto Film Festival, a slightly manic filmgoer barged in, announced to all and sundry that he had just met Penelope Cruz, and then suddenly left. This...

The Karlovy Vary Film Festival.(COMMUNIQUES)
December 22, 2006... The annual Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, which is held in July in an elegant Bohemian spa town, has positioned itself as a bridge between East and West. It is now well established as the festival to catch up on the latest...

The Montreal World Film Festival.
December 22, 2006... "Politicians, public buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough," comments a wily John Huston during Chinatown. At age thirty, with its near-death experience of 2005 (see the Spring 2006 issue) behind it, the Montreal...

Absolute Wilson.(SHORT TAKES)(Movie review)
December 22, 2006... Susan Sontag once wrapped up an admiring appraisal of avant-garde director and performer Robert Wilson by saying, "Luckily, his own genius is so eccentric and odd, he may never have this commercial success that he would so much like to have."...

Jesus Camp.(SHORT TAKES)(Movie review)
December 22, 2006... In this thought-provoking portrait of the lives of Christian youth, directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady follow Levi, Rachael, and Tory to a camp for Christian Evangelicals in Devil's Lake, North Dakota. Here they are joined by a legion of...

Maid in America.(SHORT TAKES)(Movie review)
December 22, 2006... In an effort to staunch the flood of illegal immigrants entering the United States, the House of Representatives recently approved several security bills that will increase fencing at the U.S.-Mexican border. In this political climate, Maid in...

Out of Place: Memories of Edward Said.(SHORT TAKES)(Movie review)
December 22, 2006... Makato Sato's film is quite moving and involving, though it is long, proceeds slowly, and is sometimes awkward in its mixing of modes--handheld camera takes with on-location sync sound, talking-head interviews with a studio feel, bits of...

The world according to Sesame Street.(SHORT TAKES)(Movie review)
December 22, 2006... Perhaps a more accurate title for this documentary--which uses the tribulations behind producing international versions of the titular show as its narrative arc--would have been Sesame Street According to the World. The film is most engaging...