Cineaste articles from September 2004

Cineaste archives from September 2004

Michael Moore's summer blockbuster.(Editorial)(Editorial)
September 22, 2004... It took only three days for Fahrenheit 9/11 to become the highest grossing documentary in history. Opening on Friday, June 25th, Michael Moore's angry satirical broad side against the Bush Administration had by the end of that weekend sold...

Weapon of mass instruction Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2004... Since the American release of Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore has been hailed by the left as the new Tom Paine, denounced by his right wing opponents as the incarnation of Joseph Goebbels and Leni Riefenstahl, and compared by film critics to...

Suggestive intimacies: an interview with Patrice Leconte.(Interview)
September 22, 2004... At a time when one trend in French cinema is aimed at extending the boundaries toward increasingly explicit representations of sex and violence on screen (in films such as 29 Palms, Irreversible, The Piano Teacher, Baise Moi and Fat Girl),...

The Alamo: fact, fiction and the last stand of history.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2004... Considering the intellectual bankrupt cy of our current film culture, with the embrace of the worst rubbish by critics and audiences, the critical and commercial failure of a film such as Disney's The Alamo tends actually to invite rather than...

Straight from the heart: re-viewing the films of Rainer Werner Fasbinder.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2004... From the mid 1970s through the early 1980s, the arrival of a new Fassbinder movie was an event. And with the release of The Marriage of Maria Braun in 1978--the first New German film to achieve worldwide box-office success--Fassbinder's...

Taiwan's poet of solitude: an interview with Tsai Ming-liang.(Interview)
September 22, 2004... Tsai Ming-liang is contemporary cinema's reigning poet of solitude. Reflecting one of the cinema's most distinctive and private sensibilities, his body of work is stubbornly consistent and increasingly refined. While many of the greatest...

Ingmar Bergman the maestro of angst.(Critical Essay)(Biography)
September 22, 2004... As a college student in the Fifties, I sat in the dark watching, with uncritical admiration, such films as Sawdust and Tinsel, The Seventh Seal, and Wild Strawberries. Along with the films of Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc...

Poverty, misery, war and other comic material: an interview with Mario Monicelli.(Interview)
September 22, 2004... Mario Monicelli is the king of Italian comedy. With his proverbial Tuscan sense of humor and social conscience (think of that other anarchical Tuscan, Roberto Benigni), he has laid the pillars of a genre on which others have built flimsier...

Upholding the Palestinian image in Israeli cinema: an interview with Mohammad Bakri.(Interview)
September 22, 2004... Mohammad Bakri was born in 1953 in the village of Al-Bi'ni, Galilee, in the North of Israel. His journey from a small farming village, as one of twelve children born to illiterate parents, has been a long and difficult one. Bakri's film career...

Control Room.(Movie Review)
September 22, 2004... Control Room Produced by Rosadel Varela and Hani Salama; directed by Jehane Noujaim; cinematography by Noujaim and Hani Salama; edited by Julia Bacha, Lilah Bankier and Cahrlie Marquardt; in Arabic and English with English subtitles. Color, 86...

Bukowski: Born Into This.(Movie Review)
September 22, 2004... Bukowski: Born Into This Produced and directed by John Dullaghan; written and edited by Victor Livingston; cinematography by Matt Jacobson, Bill Langley, and Matt Mindlin; sound by Gary Gossett, Paul Hackner and David Silberberg. Color and...

Super Size Me.(Movie Review)
September 22, 2004... Super Size Me Produced by J.R. Morley, Dave Pederson, Morgan Spurlock, Heather M. Winters; written and directed by Morgan Spurlock; editing by Stela Georgieva and Julie Bob Lombardi; original music by Doug Ray; visual effects by Jonah Tobias;...

The Blonds.(Movie Review)
September 22, 2004... The Blonds Produced by Barry Elsworth; written and directed by Albertina Carri, cinematography by Catalina Fernandez; edited by Alejandro Almiron; sound recorded by Jessica Suarez; music by Charly Garcia and Ryuichi Sakamoto; starring Analla...

Errata.(Correction Notice)
September 22, 2004... (At Least Those We're Aware Of) for Cineaste, Vol. XXIX, No. 3 In the review of Dogville, we referred to the performance of "Emma" Watson in Breaking the Waves, when it should have been Emily Watson. A photo caption in the Rotterdam...

The 2004 Cannes Film Festival.(Communique)
September 22, 2004... All of Cannes's fascinating, and frequently infuriating, contradictions were on display at the 2004 edition of the world's most frenetic film festival. Longtime festival head Gilles Jacob aroused the ire of the cinephilic contingent by claiming...

Rediscovering Charlie Chaplin.(Homevideo)(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2004... Although I suspect many would dispute this characterization, I think the period we're now living through may well be the first in which scholars have finally figured out a good way of teaching film history. And significantly, this discovery...

The Merchant of Venice.(Video Recording Review)
September 22, 2004... The Merchant of Venice Written by William Shakespeare; directed by Trevor Nunn with Chris Hunt; a "Performance Company" presentation of a Royal National Theatre production at the Cottesloe Theatre, London, June 1 to November 13, 1999; starring...

Angels in America.(Video Recording Review)
September 22, 2004... Angels in America Directed by Mike Nichols; screenplay by Tony Kushner, based upon his play; starring Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, Emma Thompson, Justin Kirk, Mary Louise Parker, Ben Shenkman, Jeffrey Wright, and Patrick Wilson. An HBO Video...

Halfaouine.(Video Recording Review)
September 22, 2004... Halfaouine Directed by Ferid Boughedir; DVD, color, 98 mins., Arabic with English subtitles. DVD also includes documentary Cinema Arabe. Distributed by Kino on Video, www.kino.com. The newly released DVD of the Tunisian film Halfaouine...

Hollywood Animal: a Memoir.(Book Review)
September 22, 2004... Hollywood Animal: A Memoir by Joe Eszterhas. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. 736 pp. Hardcover: $26.95. "I forgot for a second that screenwriters should be neither seen nor heard. They are at the bottom of the monkey-food...

The Hidden God: Film and Faith.(Book Review)
September 22, 2004... The Hidden God: Film and Faith Edited by Mary Lea Bandy and Antonio Monda. New York: The Museum of Modern Art (Distributed in the U.S. and Canada by D.A.P.), 2003. 300 pp., illus. Paperback: $24.95, Conventional wisdom says that the only...

Alfred Hitchcock: a Life in Darkness and Light.(Book Review)
September 22, 2004... Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light by Patrick McGilligan. New York, NY: Regan Books, 2003. 850 pp., illus. Hardcover: $39.95 and Paperback: $17.95. French novelist and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet likes to recount how a...

Black City Cinema: African American Urban Experiences in Film.(Book Review)
September 22, 2004... Black City Cinema: African American Urban Experiences in Film by Paula J. Massood. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2003. 269 pp., illus. Hardcover: $69.50 and Paperback: $19.95. Can you picture my prophecy? Stress in the...

African Americans in Cinema: the First Half Century.(Product/Service Evaluation)
September 22, 2004... African Americans in Cinema: The First Half Century A Project of the Black Film Center/Archive, Indiana University. Project Director: Phyllis R. Klotman. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2003. CD-ROM: Macintosh and PC compatible....

An American Family: a Televised Life.(An American Family: A Televised Life)(Book Review)
September 22, 2004... An American Family: A Televised Life by Jeffrey Ruoff. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. 184 pp., illus. Hardcover: $59.95 and Paperback: $19.95. In 1973, decades before a group of rowdy college students were chronicled...

Buhle and Wagner vs. 'Martin Brady'.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
September 22, 2004... The anonymous screenwriter who says his "nom de guerre" is "Martin Brady" ("A Litany of Errors" in Letters, Cineaste, Vol. XXIX, No. 3) has proved that the very best copy editor is one who reads with a malicious eye. Thanks to this principle we...

South Africa cinema.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
September 22, 2004... In her positive review of To Change Reels: Film and Film Culture in South Africa (Cineaste, Vol. XXIX, No. 2, Spring 2004), Charisse Louw complains of one "sour note": Ethiopian director Halle Gerima's meditation on the racialized nature of the...

Checkpoint.(Short Takes)(Movie Review)
September 22, 2004... "When the Palestinians come we put on our show," says one of the painfully young Israeli soldiers manning one of dozens of checkpoints that the Sharon government has placed at the entrances to the cities and between the villages in the West...

The Corporation.(Short Takes)(Movie Review)
September 22, 2004... Codirected by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott, The Corporation is the most ambitious film I've seen in years. One challenge of making a film on a phenomenon as omnipresent as the corporation is how to construct the arc of an argument rather...

Everyday people.(Short Takes)(Movie Review)
September 22, 2004... Jim McKay makes small realist films (Girls Town, Our Song,) that deal with the social and psychological dynamics of urban life. His new film focuses on one long day in the life of Raskin's, an aging Brooklyn neighborhood restaurant that is in...

Heir to an Execution.(Short Takes)(Movie Review)
September 22, 2004... In Heir to an Execution, Ivy Meeropol records her efforts to come to terms with the political and personal inheritance of being the granddaughter of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. The result is a heartfelt documentary that probes beyond the...