Cineaste articles from June 1998

Cineaste archives from June 1998

Editorial.(film satire)(Editorial)
June 22, 1998... The recent appearances of Wag the Dog and Primary Colors, for all their entertainment value, only serve to accentuate the lamentable dearth in recent years of incisive film satire in America. When considering cinematic contributions to the fine...

Michael and us: an interview with Michael Moore.(film director)(Interview)
June 22, 1998... Michael Moore first came to public attention in 1972, when, as an eighteen-year-old, he won election to the Flint School Board, becoming the youngest person in the country to serve in public office. Four years later, Moore founded The Flint...

Mountains, monks and mandalas: 'Kundun' and 'Seven Years in Tibet.'.
June 22, 1998... In 1925, cinemas in London's West End were showing the documentary film Epic of Everest. Shot during a recent failed British expedition during which two climbers died near Everest's peak, the film was a paean to the unconquerable "purity" of...

Seven Years in Tibet.(Review)
June 22, 1998... In 1925, cinemas in London's West End were showing the documentary film Epic of Everest. Shot during a recent failed British expedition during which two climbers died near Everest's peak, the film was a paean to the unconquerable "purity" of...

Kundun.(Review)
June 22, 1998... In 1925, cinemas in London's West End were showing the documentary film Epic of Everest. Shot during a recent failed British expedition during which two climbers died near Everest's peak, the film was a paean to the unconquerable "purity" of...

Getting past the violence: an interview with Jim Sheridan.(Irish film director)(Interview)
June 22, 1998... Jim Sheridan is one of the key figures in the renaissance of Irish cinema in the 1990s. He was born in Dublin in 1949 and, after studying English, philosophy, and history at University College Dublin, worked in theater in Ireland throughout the...

Is peace possible? New documentaries on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
June 22, 1998... Critics routinely acknowledge that all films are political, but readily agree that some films are more political than others. When the filmmakers are Palestinian and Israeli documentarians concerned about a lasting peace in the region,...

119 Bullets and Three.(Review)
June 22, 1998... The fault lines created by religious fervor are the subject of 199 Bullets and Three and We Are God's Soldiers, the first dealing with Jewish militants and the second with their Islamic counterparts. The films demonstrate in no uncertain terms...

We Are God's Soldiers.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Hanna Musleh, a Christian Palestinian, takes a slightly more sympathetic look at the Islamic movement in Gaza in We Are God's Soldiers. He shows us a mass movement with a large social service function for a people struggling under brutal...

The Road to Peace: Israelis and Palestinians.(Review)
June 22, 1998... The Road to Peace: Israelis and Palestinians, by Elizabeth Fernea and Yaron Shemer, was completed just a month before Rabin's assassination. It shows how the historic White House signing of the Declaration of Principles on September 13, 1993...

You, Me, Jerusalem.(Review)
June 22, 1998... You, Me, Jerusalem is a paean to Jewish-Palestinian harmony. Jack Cohen, an Israeli actor, is pals with newspaper vendor Khalil Da'aneh, who, for twenty years, has opened his Jerusalem kiosk every day at 3:30 a.m. We see how most Palestinians...

Jerusalem: An Occupation Cast in Stone.(Review)
June 22, 1998... In Jerusalem: An Occupation Set in Stone, produced by the Palestinian Housing Rights Movement, director Marty Rosenbluth shows how Palestinians are pushed out of Jerusalem by Israeli zoning and new settlements. Numerous scenes show Palestinians...

Forbidden Marriages in the Holy Land.(Review)
June 22, 1998... In Forbidden Marriages in the Holy Land, Palestinian filmmaker Michel Khleifi examines a small number of marriages between Palestinian Muslims and Christian Arabs to Jews and one Afro-Palestinian marriage to an Arab-Palestinian. The film opens...

Intezaar.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Rashid Masharawi's Intezaar deals with Gaza in the post-Oslo period. The first scenes shows us the warren of concrete homes in the Al-Shati refugee camp, where the filmmaker was raised, one of eight such camps in Gaza. These are home to the...

On the Edge of Peace.(Review)
June 22, 1998... On the Edge of Peace, directed by Ilan Ziv, was produced by giving video cameras to three Palestinians in the occupied territories and to three Jewish Israelis immediately after the signing of the Oslo Agreement. A kibbutznik speaks of coming...

Words of Writers.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Words of Writers, another film in Gitai's series, depicts three Jewish Israeli writers and one Arab Israeli writer dealing with the struggle for Palestinian-Israeli peace. The late Emile Habibi, the preeminent Palestinian-Israeli writer, and...

Theater for Life.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Gitai's Theater For Life features two Israeli actors going through an Israeli military checkpoint as they head toward a Palestinian refugee camp in the occupied territories to stage a play by Palestinian children. When the driver is asked if he...

Land of Oranges.(Review)
June 22, 1998... In Land of Oranges Gitai takes on the theme of kibbutz development and the universal principles of socialism which inspired the kibbutz movement. The film juxtaposes the relative prosperity of the kibbutz with the poverty of the Palestinian day...

Parcours Politique.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Amos Gitai's Give Peace a Chance is a series of four films offering a multifaceted visual history of the peace negotiations. In Parcours Politique, we move from Oslo and Washington to the Middle East. Heads of state as well as...

Filming a forgotten war: an interview with Bertrand Tavernier.(Interview)
June 22, 1998... Conventional historical accounts hold that World War I ended with the signing of an armistice on November 11, 1918. French director Bertrand Tavernier's latest feature, Capitaine Conan, challenges the conventional historical record by examining...

The thunder lizard speaks! An interview with Godzilla.
June 22, 1998... In an exclusive interview, the 'King of the Monsters' weighs in on family, fatherhood, his internment on Monster Island, and, of course, King Kong. His new film is set for a Memorial Day weekend release. During a production break on his...

Yusujiro Ozu: the subtly observant eye.(Japanese filmmaker)
June 22, 1998... The oeuvre of Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963) tends to provoke a religious hush, making it difficult for the critic to isolate the virtues and defects of individual films. Compounding the problem is Ozu's consistency: on the surface his pictures seem...

Early Summer.(Review)
June 22, 1998... The oeuvre of Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963) tends to provoke a religious hush, making it difficult for the critic to isolate the virtues and defects of individual films. Compounding the problem is Ozu's consistency: on the surface his pictures seem...

Good Morning.(Review)
June 22, 1998... The oeuvre of Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963) tends to provoke a religious hush, making it difficult for the critic to isolate the virtues and defects of individual films. Compounding the problem is Ozu's consistency: on the surface his pictures seem...

Floating Weeds.(Review)
June 22, 1998... The oeuvre of Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963) tends to provoke a religious hush, making it difficult for the critic to isolate the virtues and defects of individual films. Compounding the problem is Ozu's consistency: on the surface his pictures seem...

Lost and found: 'Celine and Julie Go Boating.'.
June 22, 1998... Of the various French directors that one can place within that loosely defined group known as The New Wave, Jacques Rivette is certainly one of the least well-known in the U.S., although his recent La Belle noiseuse (1991) has changed that...

Celine and Julie Go Boating.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Directed by Jacques Rivette; VHS, color, 193 minutes, in French with English subtitles. A New Yorker Video release. Of the various French directors that one can place within that loosely defined group known as The New Wave, Jacques Rivette...

Deconstructing Harry.(Review)
June 22, 1998... While Woody Allen's films have for years won great critical acclaim and delighted audiences worldwide, attention has rarely been focused on his patronizing treatment of female characters or on the angry and bilious man that sometimes coexisted...

The cinema as secular religion.(Deconstructing Woody: A Critical Symposium on Woody Allen's 'Deconstructing Harry')
June 22, 1998... Woody Allen's Deconstructing Harry is one of the least subtle in a string of insistent films that began in 1992, after the dance of the hatchets with Mia Farrow. What is Allen insisting on? Is his subject masculinity? Is Allen, in his...

Woody Allen's reflexive critics.(Deconstructing Woody: A Critical Symposium on Woody Allen's 'Deconstructing Harry')
June 22, 1998... In his last four films, Woody Allen coasted on his talent with small works like Bullets Over Broadway (1994) and Mighty Aphrodite (1995) that are essentially pleasant and inoffensive but impersonal. The artistically ambitious Mien of Annie Hall...

Woody's effort to reconstruct himself.(Deconstructing Woody: A Critical Symposium on Woody Allen's 'Deconstructing Harry')
June 22, 1998... I read the other day that Deconstructing Harry is "one long diatribe against women, wives, and Jews." That's what Molly Haskell called it in an article in The New York Times taking Hollywood to task for its double standard in pairing elderly...

The redemptive power of art.(Deconstructing Woody: A Critical Symposium on Woody Allen's 'Deconstructing Harry')
June 22, 1998... Deconstructing Harry ends with Harry overcoming his creative block by writing about a man "who can't function well in life, but who can function in art." When Harry begins to create, he teals us that his fictional character's writing (and, by...

A feminist's love/hate relationship.(Deconstructing Woody: A Critical Symposium on Woody Allen's 'Deconstructing Harry')
June 22, 1998... If the editors of this critical symposium were looking for a woman to admit, unequivocally, to feeling disgust, contempt, even nausea, at the way Woody Allen has conducted his private life (and one needn't be a compulsive reader of tabloids or...

Boogie Nights.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Produced by Paul Thomas Anderson, Lloyd Levin, John Lyons and Joanne Sellar; written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson; cinematography by Robert Elswit; production design by Bob Ziembicki; costume design by Mark Bridges; edited by Dylan...

L.A. Confidential.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Produced by Arnon Milchan and Michael Nathanson; directed by Curtis Hanson; screenplay by Brian Helgeland and Curtis Hanson, based on the novel by James Ellroy; cinematography by Dante Spinotti; production design by Jeannine Oppewall; edited by...

Men with Guns.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Produced by R. Paul Miller and Maggie Renzi; written, directed and edited by John Sayles; cinematography by Slawomir Idziak; production design by Felipe Fernandez del Paso; costume design by Mayes C. Rubeo; music by Mason Daring; starring...

Waco: The Rules of Engagement.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Produced by Dan Gifford, William Gazecki and Michael McNulty; directed by William Gazecki; written by Dan Gifford, William Gazecki and Michael McNulty; cinematography by William Gazecki and Rick Nyburg; edited by William Gazecki, Richard LaBrie...

The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and its Afterlife.(Review)
June 22, 1998... by Eric Rentschler. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. 456 pp., illus. Hardcover: $60.00, Paperback: $25.00. A generation ago, the handful of scholars who studied Nazi movies acknowledged few ambiguities. German cinema from 1933...

Entertaining the Third Reich: Illusions of Wholeness in Nazi Cinema.(Review)
June 22, 1998... by Linda Schulte-Sasse. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. 347 pp., illus. Hardcover: $54.95, Paperback: $18.95. A generation ago, the handful of scholars who studied Nazi movies acknowledged few ambiguities. German cinema from 1933...

Twentieth Century's Fox: Darryl F. Zanuck and the Culture of Hollywood.(Review)
June 22, 1998... by George F. Custen. NY: BasicBooks, 1997. 435 pp., illus. Hardcover. $27.50. George Custen's hagiographic biography of producer Darryl F. Zanuck takes the form of a biopic (the subject of Custen's last book). Custen encourages us to root...

Documentary Film Classics.(Review)
June 22, 1998... by William Rothman. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 218 pp., illus. Hardcover: $59.95, Paperback: $17.95. "Documentaries are not inherently more direct or truthful than other kinds of films," writes William Rothman in the...

The Last Prodigy: A Biography of Erich Wolfgang Korngold.(Review)
June 22, 1998... by Brendan G. Carroll. Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1997. 464 pp., illus. Hardcover: $34.95. There is a telling moment on page 85 of Brendan G. Carroll's new biography of Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957), brought out in commemoration of...

Agent of Callenge and Defiance: The Films of Ken Loach.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Edited by George McKnight. Trowbridge, U.K.: Ricks Books, 1997. 234 pp., illus. Hardcover: $59.95, Paperback: $24.95. One of the most welcomed trends in the British cinema of the Nineties has been the return of Ken Loach to regular work,...

The Speed of Sound: Hollywood and the Talkie Revolution.(Review)
June 22, 1998... by Scott Eyman. NY: Simon and Schuster, 1997. 413 pp. Hardcover: $30.00. Any history of the early sound era in American cinema labors under the shadow of Singin' in the Rain (1952), the Hollywood on Hollywood musical that etched in granite...

Eye on the World: Conversations with International Filmmakers.(Review)
June 22, 1998... by Judy Stone. Los Angeles, California: Silman-James Press, 1997. 826pp., illus. Paperback: $35.00. Judy Stone's Eye on the World is an engaging and informative collection of over two hundred interviews with filmmakers from around the...

Movies as Politics.(Review)
June 22, 1998... by Jonathan Rosenbaum. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997. 359 pp. Paperback: $17.95. Jonathan Rosenbaum is a film critic for The Chicago Reader and a Cineaste Associate whose analysis eschews both breathless, superficial...

Thessaloniki's first films of merit.(Thessaloniki International Film Festival in Greece)
June 22, 1998... The Thessaloniki International Film Festival prides itself on programs that spotlight first features of political and/or artistic import. The 1997 Festival had four films of this nature that should appeal to American audiences - Vertical Love,...

Jugofilm.(Review)
June 22, 1998... 'Jugo' is a derogatory term some Austrians use to describe Yugoslav immigrants in the way some Americans use 'spic' to refer to Puerto Ricans. Jugofilm is the Work of Goran Rebic, a Serbian who now works as a scriptwriter and director in...

Somersault in a Coffin.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Somersault in a Coffin, by Turkish director Dervis Zaim, won a special award at Thessaloniki. Made on a shoestring budget of just $16,000, the film deals candidly with the marginals of Istanbul, most notably a male car thief and a female heroin...

Lisbon's international encounters in documentary cinema.(International Encounters in Documentary Cinema)
June 22, 1998... Lisbon in November 1997 was a very different place from the capital I first visited two decades ago. Back then a group of antiimperialist officers had toppled the old dictatorship, and thousands of political tourists of the Left like me...

America's new wave cinema of the fifties.
June 22, 1998... Long before American independent filmmakers such as John Cassavetes and John Sayles, Morris Engel was making films outside the Hollywood studio system. Engel's work was much less ambitious and trenchant psychologically and socially than that of...

Little Fugitive.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Directed by Morris Engel, Ray Ashley, and Ruth Orkin; VHS, black and white, 80 mins. Long before American independent filmmakers such as John Cassavetes and John Sayles, Morris Engel was making films outside the Hollywood studio system....

Lovers and Lollipops.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Directed by Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin; VHS, black and white, 82 mins. Long before American independent filmmakers such as John Cassavetes and John Sayles, Morris Engel was making films outside the Hollywood studio system. Engel's work...

Weddings and Babies.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Directed by Morris Engel; VHS, black and white, 81 mins. All three videos distributed by Kine on Video, 333 West 39th St., New York, NY 10018, phone (800) 562-3330. Long before American independent filmmakers such as John Cassavetes and...

Victim.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Directed by Basil Dearden; VHS, black and white, 100 mins. Distributed by Home Vision Cinema, 5547 N. Ravenswood Avenue, Chicago, IL 60640-1199, phone (800) 826-FILM. Victim is a genuine historical landmark in the cinema's treatment of...

Girls Town.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Directed by Jim McKay; VHS, color, 90 minutes; distributed by Evergreen Entertainment, 6100 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90048, phone (213) 634-3000. Since blaxploitation films of the Seventies relied on soulful grooves by groups...

Nostalghia.(Review)
June 22, 1998... Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky; VHS, color and black and white, 120 mins., Italian wIth English subtitles. Distributed by Fox Lorber Home Video, 419 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016, phone (212) 686-6777. Andrei Tarkovsky reminded...

The Struggle for Peace: Israelis and Palestinians.(Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 1998... The Struggle for Peace: Israelis and Palestinians, by Elizabeth Fernea and Steven Talley, depicts the now-legendary Israeli Women in Black, who every Friday, from 1:00 to 2:00 p.m. in twenty Israeli cities and towns, stand, dressed in black, on...

Hanan Ashrawi: A Woman of Her Time.(Review)
June 22, 1998... In Hanan Ashrawi: A Woman of Her Time, Palestinian filmmaker Mai Masri profiles the individual, who, probably more than any other Palestinian, brought the issue of Palestine into the homes of millions of North Americans and Europeans. Archival...

Give Peace a Chance.(Review)(Brief Article)
June 22, 1998... Amos Gitai's Give Peace a Chance is a series of four films offering a multifaceted visual history of the peace negotiations. In Parcours Politique, we move from Oslo and Washington to the Middle East. Heads of state as well as taxi drivers...

Vertical Love.(Review)
June 22, 1998... The release of Vertical Love, a French-Cuban coproduction directed by Arturo Sotto, signals the advent of a new generation of Cuban filmmakers. With a direct reference to Tomas Gutierrez Alea's Death of a Bureaucrat in one scene, Vertical Love...