Links: Fifteen years in the wilderness, THIRTEEN & the womb of fear

Time keeps on slippin' and the internet expands fast as the universe itself, which means we should all link to each other, lest distance grow long. I've had transcendence on my mind as I sink into the mire of a late November cold, and lo, there is Mickey Rourke, The Guardian, Kim Morgan and old favorites... please join me on a link tour deep into the realms of cool:

Becca at No Smoking in the Skull Cave has an excellent left-hand side list of Overlooked Movies, many of which I haven't seen, some I saw when a child or under bad circumstances and have since recoiled from, but she makes me want to give them another chance, especially when she checks personal favorites like Myra Breckenridge, Big Trouble in Little China, Flash Gordon (1977), and Night of the Iguana! She doesn't rant on and on about what she likes in the film, so much as lay out the history and sweet photos, and then pack in some good quotes and trivia. That's fine by me, baby!

I love the cheeky, Emperor's New Clothes-bustin' British, and I love them extra when they write for the Guardian! Listen to this long and lovely sentence from their just-posted Mickey Rourke interview by Carole Calwalladr:

Before meeting him, I had honestly no idea what to expect; in the event, he's the kind of interviewee you wish for but almost never get: he's just so happy to talk and he's so refreshingly un-up-himself that it makes you think that all Hollywood actors could do with a bracing 15 years in the wilderness.

"Un-up-himself." I love that, and incidentally, yes, I am sure she does mean Tom Cruise. The fifteen years in the wilderness reminds me of Josh Brolin talking about taking time off to travel around with his kids when discussing his own big year, 2007, and I'm thinking Hollywood needs to have an actor boot camp, somewhere deep in the wilderness, where we send stars who... shall we say... need to get out(side the biz bubble) more? Dig this winky put-down of the "Leo diCaprio persona," by Xan Brooks. Thank god I'm not the only one who sees the problem:

a hardball CIA operative on a mission to the Middle East. He hurries through the carnage sporting a bum-fluff beard and the irritated air of a youth who can't find his trousers and is running late for the high-school prom. He's going to catch hell from Mary-Anne and Biff.

Kim Morgan's Sunset Gun, the pink and black and white mecca of sun-tanned sin and impeccable insight, keen journalistic phrasing and genuine balls-out, tell-it-like-is brilliance, has posted a Ten Troubled Teens list: Foxes? Freeway? Over the Edge? Pretty Poison? Thirteen? All in one list? And no Leo to be found (though here is where he belongs, he's fine as a juvenile ["Gilbert!"], but unlike Dick Powell, can't convincingly move into hardboiled detective roles). Morgan knows the deal; dig this sentence from her paragraph on Thirteen:

Some parents should watch this hard-hitting film -- it's more sobering than going through your teenager’s diaries (unless your daughters are Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme, in which case you should be impressed and scared for your life) and though it does play over-the-top at times, teenage girls are over the top.

Damn right, sis! And why is she able to be calm in the face of Hell, of chaos, by over the top-itude? She's been there! You can tell. There are so many writers out there practicing "contempt prior to investigation," preferring to get their opinions pre-chewed by the New York Times. They don't like to see pretty, intelligent women truly enjoying themselves, because when young girls get wild--and I don't mean flash your tits to please the frat boys "wild", but wild for themselves-- things get out of hand: blood gets drawn, faces get slapped, drugs, orgies, cthonic blood sacrifices of infants, the drinking of blood and swearing of Satanic oaths, it all follows in a linear progression, so these old NY Times foldin' bourgeoisie fuckers realize as they recoil in horror from Camille Paglia's latest brilliant slap in their tingling faces!

If you wake up in the middle of the night and see a giant tiger staring you in the face, what do you do? Most, maybe 99% of people will freak out, try to get their gun from under the pillow, try and run, try to hide, and end up ripped to shreds and devoured by the grinning demonic jaws of the beast. The survivor 1% pet the tiger. You talk to it, and nuzzle up with it, instantly, automatically, with no fear, it has to be an automatic reflex. The Brits whole "under-playing" attitude stems from this approach to life (Stockholm Syndrome is a delayed version).

How do you get to be in that 1%? Don't run from fear and pursue desire, reverse it! Learn to love your killer even as you stab them back with hell's own fury! Recognize yourself in any and everything and learn to suspend judgment down to the smallest abject atom. Lastly, find a valley of the shadow of death, and walk through it. As Marlon Brando liked to say "not until you look death right in the face...go right up into the ass of death... till you find the womb of fear”." and maybe after you see the Wrestler! Go Mickey!

Smoking in the rain outside the House of Demme

Finally saw RACHEL GETTING MARRIED, which is like a Demme film reunion party that everyone's invited to, but after you leave, you never see any of them again. And there's something about that which makes your own life seem, perhaps, empty by comparison. Unless, of course, you're lucky enough to have a non-dysfunctional artistic, musical, happy joyous and free, affluent family.

One of Demme's strengths has been the concert film and his unique ways of mixing live musical performances into his dramatic films (such as Sister Carol rapping over the end credits to Something Wild). For Rachel, Demme takes all the musicians he can grab and interweaves liberally with the tropes of not less than three indie film genres: the handheld camera Altmanesque overlapping dialogue "happening" fillm (The Anniversary Party and Margot at the Wedding being two other recent ceremony-centric examples); the multi-culti musical call for brotherhood film ((Michel Gondry's Block Party and Be Kind Rewind being recent examples); and the shaky handicam "recovery" film (Clean and Down to the Bone). Most of us can find something to love and relate to in this odd mix. But the question is, will it still love us, tomorrow?

The film begins its story through the eyes of Anne Hathaway's rehab veteran as she returns home to attend her sister's wedding and right there we're off to a cock-eyed start. The attempt to weld "indie recovery drama" to the Jonathan Demme cook-out music fest semi-documentary is valiant, but doomed to leave a lot of us alienated and disillusioned. I know lots of critics loooove this film. I myself loved it, while I watched it. Afterwards, I alienation slowly replace the warm fuzzy, the way a big fun wedding or dance party might leave you depressed--"blue Tuesday"ing it--all the next week. Somewhere in the world there's rich jet set club kids for whom the party never stops. The rest of us have to get back on the bus and go to work. Why give us a taste just to take it all away? Don't we have the right to our cynicism?

As someone in recovery, it's both enlightening and insulting to see how Demme contrasts the "hungry ghost" mentality with the selfless love and open-heartedness of the multi-racial musical everybody else, the stock regulars of past Demme efforts are here: Cousin Bobby conducts the ceremony, Robyn Hitchcock performs at the reception party, Neil Young is even name-checked, right after God. The only person who seems "real" at this wedding--as in anxious to leave--is Debra Winger as the divorced mom. The most ridiculously contrived scene comes when Winger and husband are trying to cut out and Rachel and Kym beg her to stay. Jesus Christ! It's late, the dinner and cake cutting is all over and done with. The only people still dancing are drunk. Let the lady go home for Christ's sake. The camera follows their car as it blurs into the out of focus rain. Somewhere you can feel Garrison Keillor sadly shaking his gentle head; Michael Moore still waving pictures of little dead girls at the grave of Charlton Heston.

There's some enabling/co-dependent undercurrents in the dialogue that could have been explored, but Demme glides right over them. Dad is a living saint, played by SESAME STREET regular Bill Irwin, a Mr. Rogers with a little better dress sense, A Ned Flanders with soul. Everyone who sees the film wants him for their dad, but we can see why Debra Winger's character left him, and part of us secretly wants to go with her. Noah Baumbach nailed this character far less sympathetically in the similar but more realistically acidic Margot at the Wedding in the form of John Turturo as the ex-husband. Demme doesn't seem to have enough dysfunction in his life to know where to dig for it, he can't see the sinner in the heart of the saint and vice versa. The closest he came to getting it right was in the bond between Clarice and Hannibal.


Screenwriter Jenny Lumet comes from a musical and artistic family tree that includes grandma Lena Horne and dad Sidney Lumet; the perceptive, minutely fleshed out party chaos has the smack of a child's eye view, and she deserves a lot of credit for what works here. Yet how can one not feel jealous and a little bit tired after such a love song-packed and color-full union? I admit I was crying in several spots. I was washed up in its brotherly love tide. But now I feel bedraggled and run over. I have to go to a party like Rachel's wedding this weekend, actually, and I'm already dreading the fun I will have.

Seeing Rachel in the Cineplex provided me with a meta-textual shock ending when I came across a poster for an upcoming Disney film, Bride Wars (2009) on my way back out to the lobby; this "return to mall culture" Hathaway move almost flipped me back into a jaundiced cynic right then and there. But I kept my communal love vibe alive through the night. Today though I'm all about the realization that I am who I am--the Debra Winger-Margot type "cold-hearted bitch"-- despite my believing in and hoping in the future of universal brotherly love evinced by the Obama presidency and Rachel Getting Married. Once the smoke clears and the empty cups are swept away, I'm still a cold Nordic drunk, outside the main tent, like John Wayne at the end of The Searchers. It's hard, damn hard, to keep your cynicism alive after walking out of the open-hearted Rachel Getting Married... but somehow we go on.

(Note: The preceding is based on a telephone conference with Kim Morgan of Sunset Gun, to whom some of the observations undoubtedly belong. Her Gun is my bible, amen.)

An Evening With Kenneth Anger

Last night, I had the pleasure of attending a screening of some of Kenneth Anger’s most recent short films - hosted by Mr. Anger himself. The legendary "underground filmmaker" was surprisingly youthful and energetic for a guy born in 1927, looking not much older than he does in the picture at left, taken decades ago. He began the program (in typical Anger fashion, I suspect) by complaining about the quality of the projection at the Disney Concert Hall’s Redcat Theater where the event took place. And he had a point. As he screened footage from a work-in-progress entitled Scarred Faces, Anger noted that the theater’s digital projection was so soft we could not even see the scar on the face of the young man being photographed. This gave Anger an excuse to plug his next DVD release, The Films of Kenneth Anger, Vol. 3 (not yet available) where he assured us the images would be clear and sharp, just the way he likes ‘em.

The first and best new film on the program was Mouse Heaven (2005), a montage of toys and other products from the 1930s featuring the iconic Mickey Mouse - not the "humanized" Mickey introduced by Fantasia in 1940, but the Depression era Mickey whom Anger characterizes as a "demon" and an "imp." The film is a showcase for Anger’s editing skills and use of color, making the toys come alive as it were. (At one point, a puppet Mickey *lip synchs* to a recording from the period.) The irony of showing a film that the Disney company has tried to suppress - for no good reason - at a concert hall named after Disney was not lost on Anger.

The second film on the program, Ich Will (2008), concerns another 20th Century icon, Adolph Hitler, and his Boy Scout-like Hitler Youth. Consisting entirely of footage shot by the Nazis themselves (tinted and otherwise processed by Anger), the film inevitably recalls the work of Leni Riefenstahl (Triumph of the Will) whom Anger knew. As in most of Anger’s films, there is no dialogue or story per se - rather, a series of powerful images brilliantly edited to music, in this case, the Ninth Symphony of Anton Bruckner. The film was commissioned by an Austrian film festival who wanted to premiere an original work by Anger. Accepting the commission and given complete freedom to do as he pleased, Anger decided to throw Austria’s history back into its face.

The remaining new films on the program were comparatively lightweight. Elliott’s Suicide (2007) is a home movie-like tribute to the late musician Elliott Smith, a former neighbor of Anger’s in L.A.’s Silver Lake district. Foreplay (2008) is a montage of young soccer players training for a game. I’ll Be Watching You (2007), scored by the Police song of the same name, is a 5-minute short about a security guard watching a surveillance monitor on which he observes two men having sex in an underground parking garage. Except for the hardcore sex, it’s like something one might find on YouTube.

The program concluded with a screening of Anger’s most famous film, Scorpio Rising (1963), his rock-scored ode to biker gangs that has influenced everybody from Roger Corman and Martin Scorsese to R.W. Fassbinder and David Lynch. (Anger used the song "Blue Velvet" on his soundtrack 20 years before Lynch did.) This taboo-busting experimental masterpiece is available on DVD, and if you haven’t seen it already, I recommend that you get hold of a copy tout de suite.

"Supporting" Babes of Bond - Part One

Critics are mixed and audience feedback wildly disparate over Quantum of Solace, but while you are formulating your opinion or, like me, waiting for the initial crowds to disperse before taking in the second Daniel Craig entry, why not give a 'flix to the Bonds of the illustrious past? Better yet why not look at their hot babes? And better yet, the supporting babes--the ones who usually die, or oft times they turn out to be evil henchmen, seductress-spies and/or the super villain of the film themselves!

The first such babe appears in Dr. No. Zena Marshall plays a sinister-spy secretary, Miss Taro. A buxom, sumptuous babe in the early Playboy tradition, Ms. Marshall oozes libidinal treachery as Taro, but she's an amateur in the spy game and James is a professional. After surviving the ambush set for him en route to a booty call at her hilltop chalet, Bond "takes what's coming to him" as a survivor's fee--letting her think she's stalling him for her second round of assassins to arrive. He's aware of her plan though, and after the post-coitus haze has cleared, he hands her over to the authorities and calmly waits in her darkened bedroom for the next cockblocking killer.

Sexual chessboard spy games would become taboo with the dawn of "political correctness" Bond, where sex must be harnessed to confessions of love with moistened eyes, but seen today, this sort of grudge-f*cking is fresh and totally tantalizing. Why shouldn't male spies be active in the web of counter-seduction, rather than moping around passively like Claude Rains in Notorious or John Gilbert in Mata Hari? That stuff is for chumps! Sean Connery's Bond knows full well that the best intel is won between the sheets, and he's just the man to go after it, letting his target think she's playing him for a sucker all the while. Call it sexism all you like, but I would argue, in hindsight, Bond shows Miss Taro real equality; she's treated like a spy among spies, and not some precious third wave princess who must be showered in jewels and pampered royally just to get it on already.

Happy Birthday, Sandahl Bergman

November 14 marks the birthday of lithe, sinuous dancer, natural beauty and first-rate swordswoman, Sandahl Bergman. She played only two major iconic roles: lead dancer in the 1979 Bob Fosse film All that Jazz, and Valeria, queen of thieves, in Conan the Barbarian (1982), but what a pair of roles! Combining physical grace with naturalistic charm and sultry yet vulnerable sexuality, her performances in these two films are enough to make her a legend forever and beloved in the hearts of millions. Read my full Sandahl ode here.

Life and Death of a One-Shot Auteur

This week's L.A. City Beat has a fascinating cover story by Ron Garmon about one-shot auteur and "gay icon," Tom Graeff. After producing, writing, directing, and co-starring in Teenagers From Outer Space, a 1959 cult favorite (lampooned on Mystery Science Theater) that is simultaneously ridiculous and "sensitive" - in a serious adolescent kind of way - Mr. Graeff took out a full page ad in the L.A. Times claiming to be Jesus Christ. He attempted to join the Quakers, was institutionalized, and eventually committed suicide. Needless to say, he never made another film.

The Amnesiac Bond

I've been revisiting the Sean Connery Bonds lately, on widescreen projection, where the immaculate detail and lush photography of airports, country roads, mosques, and Ealing Studio interiors come alive. But what I am really noticing is the full greatness of Connery's multi-leveled performances. On the small screen you can't really see the subtle darkening of his face when he begins to suspect whoever he's talking to of being a bad guy; the face darkens, his smile gets a shade more patronizing, and his eyes dilate with sadistic anticipation, but that's it, barely ripple on the calm Connery surface. It's nuance I'd never noticed before and I've seen these films zillions of times...

Maybe it's the real sense of aliveness and danger that fits perfectly around the paperback cover imagery in these early films. Bond is completely living moment to moment by his wits; no one is who they seem, and the only gadget he gets (in Dr. No at least) is a freakin' hand gun. None of the spy game's intricacies are spelled out in the dialogue, but they're there and as a result, Connery Bonds keep maturing every year.

A lot of this durability likely stems from our shared collective history of "growing up Bond." Bond movies live in a miasmatic center of the brain along with half-forgotten idylls, dreams, and distorted recollections of first loves. There's always a ground zero with Bond - you can walk in on any of the movies half-way through and be exactly where you left off on the last one; they swim in a timeless primordial sea of espionage, whether dealing directly with the cold war (Connery), brooding impressively over simulcaratic terrorists (Brosnan) or just skylarking with deformed elitist megalomaniacs (Moore).

As a boy, the intricacies of cold war espionage were lost to me. My friends and I lived for the fight scenes and babes. Now the plots are interesting and some of the "action" by contrast looks ridiculous, such as the spider attack in Dr. No. Imagine a cool character like Bond getting all ruffled up by a mere tarantula!? Maybe in 1962 they were scared of them, but now we know that tarantulas rarely bite and if they do it's no deadlier than the average wasp sting. Still, as a kid that was the best part. We couldn't understand the spy talk, but a big ugly spider in your bed? That's the stuff of kid nightmares!

Another timelessly refreshing element of the early Bonds I missed the first dozen times are Connery un-PC seduction strategies: he knows most of these women are spies out to kill him, but he feigns naivete in order to shag them first, kill and/or interrogate second, but we in the audience worry he's letting his guard down. As in pre-code Hollywood, with Connery, sex is not a case of male take all... even in the throes of intimacy both sides have their eyes wide open, waiting for the other to reach for a pistol or put some poison in the other's drink. Bond has to be awake all the time, and sometimes he's caught off guard. Connery even drops his gun occasionally. All the spy stuff is taken seriously and has the ring of some truth, of being based on Ian Fleming's personal OSS experience. It wouldn't be until Diamonds are Forever that we'd see the beginning of the "campy" self-aware Bond era which Roger Moore would come to embody.

It's perhaps Moore's escalating cartoonishness, his mugging for the kiddies--so precious in The Spy Who Loved Me and a little more cheeky and tired in every movie to follow (For Your Eyes Only the notable exception)--that helped spell the end, not of Bond himself but the end of the "real" manly chauvinism embodied by Connery. When Timothy Dalton ushered in the PC Bond era, as Kim Morgan notes, he seemed almost apologetic for Moore's and Connery's sins against Woman. Pierce Brosnan was a healthy breath of brash air after that, yet still too perfume commercial perfect, too arrogantly 1990s; he could sleep around because he wasn't real in the ferociously intelligent way Connery was. But if Brosnan-Bond wasn't real, at least his gadgets were; it was the Age of Microsoft and everything was handheld. But in order to be "real" yourself, as real as your technology, you have to suffer, and the more Brosnan-Bond tried to recapture the gusto-laden tactility of the pre-PC era, the farther away it whooshed... until... Craig, Daniel Craig.

One of the many things which makes Daniel Craig the best Bond since Connery is his pain. He's aware of the lost sense of intimacy that came with having license to both kill and "be a sexual heel." Connery's Bond was always civil to the bad guys until they killed a friend or a girl of his, then his steely eyes hardened and the insults started flowing; underneath the tough veneer he genuinely cared. The later Bonds by contrast put up a caring veneer in addition to a tough veneer; they were all veneer. Daniel Craig comes to us with all veneers smashed; the pain of crushed innocence and the rage of a wounded orphan child in his big deep gray eyes, the "non-veneerial" toughness returned. He's our inner Connery, stifled from a solid three decades spent smothered under a vest of plastic self-reflexivity and now ready to break loose and start fucking shit up. He may have kept Brosnan's M (Judi Dench) but in all other aspects he's starting from scratch, an amnesiac Bond, caught in his loop de loop through time. But first, his eyes moistened with sorrow, Craig's Bond pauses to shed a tear, like the Native American on horseback looking at litter in that 1970s commercial, at how much depth and beauty has been auctioned off to the lowest common denominational bidder since he went into hiding at the crossroads of Lazenby.

But all is forgiven, James! And every time a new Bond movie comes out, its a global event, a pan-historic cultural ripple, and this weekend's Quantum of Solace should prove no exception. So what better week to dust off those old Conneries and slap yourself into a state of exultation? This time Craig has nothing to cry about; the future is rosy. Obama be praised!

Read my post about the first Craig Bond, Casino Royale here and Robert Von Dassanowsky's piece on the "old" Casino Royale here.

"She's Gone to the ends of the universe.... on STP." - Late Tonight, on TCM, do tape it, flower-bama

If you can't remember, I'll tell you, tonight is that greatest of all time travel movies, La Jatee (1961) at 1 AM EST on Turner Classic Movies. It's short, it's in French and black and white and it's the inspiration for Twelve Monkeys, and brother, what else can you say after that?

Then, after that are two of the very best "head" movies ever made - Psych-Out (1968) and The Trip (1967). If you had to watch only one, make it Psych-Out, which features Jack Nicholson and Dean Stockwell as friendly rival hippy bandmates who tangle over a pretty deaf chick named Jenny (Susan Strasberg) and whether or not their band should be a huge success "like the airplane" - or stay true to their 1968 Haight Ashbury "free love and squalor" aesthetic. As the band's leader, Stony (Nicholson) is more or less the same righteous prick he would play in Five Easy Pieces a few years later. Jenny expects him to be a "good boyfriend." Hah! To console the distraught Jenny (she lip reads!), Dave (Stockwell, who wears a long black wig-Native American headband combination clearly lifted from some western) makes the mistake of splitting his STP-spiked kool aid with her; not the right dosage for a first-timer. "That's really cool, Dave," notes Stony sardonically, and they give chase through the crowded Hashbury streets. But the kid is all right. Despite the mind-bending terror, STP's 24-hour nonstop peak gives her a chance to hear colors and see sounds, and finally unravel the damage done to her by her sadistic flashback mom and LSD-freak brother played (in heavy wig and beard) by Bruce Dern. The music sucks but the cinematography is by the great Lazlo Kovacs.

The Trip also has Dern who proves without a doubt he should be banned from any movie where people are trying to relax and groove. He's got "closeted narc" written all over him, and the more he tries to be "gentle" the creepier he gets. Psychotronic's Michael Weldon put it best in 1983: "Would you trust Bruce Dern as a guide?"

Peter Fonda plays a director of TV commercials on the brink of divorce (Susan Strasberg is the wife) who gets Dern to help him score some "tablets" from Dennis Hopper. Jack Nicholson wrote the script. Fonda freaks out and hallucinates his own death and Hopper returns riding a merry-go-round to judge his soul. The pads these people live in are super groovy and the ubiquitous Corman regulars roll right into the punches: Dick Miller as a Walter Paisley wannabe bartender, and Barbara Mourris as a girl who Fonda tries to "relate to" while hiding out in the laundromat.

The scenes with Fonda that actually have sound are the best, but a good third of the movie consists of not terribly psychedelic footage (shot by Hopper; he was assistant director to Corman) of Fonda wandering around Big Sur in various costumes left over from Corman's Poe movies, all shot silent and scored to bad, bad BAD music from "The American Music Band." Good lord! I originally reviewed The Trip and Psych-Out via a DVD review over on popmatters, and my editor changed a parenthetical statement I made about the music from: "Does anyone really want to hear bad dixieland jazz while coming down from an acid trip?" to "Does anyone really want to hear Dixieland jazz?" Apparently, she couldn't get behind me presuming everyone has come off of trips before, but dig, man, it's the vernacular.

Seriously, it sounds like the stuff they used to play over Buster Keaton shorts. Boing! What a drag, man. But all's well that ends in bed, where Fonda winds up with a very groovy chick played by Sali Sachse. AIP made his head crack open before the credits, lest any teens get the right idea about freeing their minds, man. And set and setting are everything, don't forget NOT to invite Bruce Dern. Amen, Praise Obama!

I, Cheé•wa•wa

Granted, “chihuahua” is a difficult word of many of us to decode. Excuse me for not reading Inca! Or Aztec, or Mayan, or whatever. So it’s not too surprising that advertisements for Beverly Hills Chihuahua offer a phonetic spelling—“cheé-wow-wä,” to be precise—along with two pictures of the damn critters. But why do they put an umlaut over the “a” in the last syllable? Do they think that people who can’t read “chihuahua” know, or care, what an umlaut is? Do they think that anyone who can’t read “chihuahua” won’t know that “cheé-wow-wa” is a phonetic spelling of “chihuahua” without the umlaut? Or are they just fucking showing off? This entry is for all of us who don’t care that much about who Obama has chosen as his new chief of staff.*

A funnier version of this bit appeared in my blog, Literature R Us.

Afterwords
The official BHC site, which I’m not going to link to, offers this warning: “Owning a pet is a major responsibility. Dogs require daily care and constant attention. Before bringing a dog into your family, research the specific breed to make sure it is suitable for your particular situation. Learn about and be willing to undertake the serious responsibilities of dog care. Always consider adoption from a reputable shelter or rescue program.” So if you thought you were going to pick up a cute little doggie and stuff him in your purse (yeah, you know who you are), forget it.

*Oh, and who pronounces the middle syllable of “chihauhau” “wow”? Fucking Paris Hilton?

Women We Love - Asia Argento

Photographers' model (above). Talented and charismatic "bad girl" actress. Novelist (I Love You, Kirk). Director and screenwriter of two personal and highly eccentric feature films - Scarlet Diva and The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things - in which she also starred, both quite intriguing in their ways. Daughter of Italian "Master of Horror" Dario Argento, who directed her in Trauma, The Stendahl Syndrome, and Mother of Tears, among others. Pals around with another Italian-director's-daughter-who-also-directs, Sofia Coppola, who cast her as Madame DuBarry in Coppola's Marie Antoinette. Once said, "Sometimes I think my father gave me life because he needed a lead actress for his films."

Glenn Kenny has posted a fine review of her career to date at The Auteurs' Notebook.

Bright Lights 62 posted

Issue 62 of Bright Lights Film Journal is now online.

from the editor

Change you can believe in?

features foyer

Finding Unlikely Ideology in Prokofiev: Polyphonic and Anti-Authoritarian Gestures in The Gambler — "Alexei must be condemned to the pointless, loveless, and finally false freedom of a spinning limbo, as unfinished and unfinishable as the best Bakhtinian polyphony."

articles antechamber

Alfred Hitchcock at the Drag Ball: When Being Blonde and Soulless Is Not Enough — "Mother . . . my mother . . . um, what's the phrase? She isn't quite herself today." — Anthony Perkins, making a colossal understatement in Psycho

Lost Watches and Lost Souls: From New Jersey to Old Istanbul — Fresh Starts Don’t Come Easy

Death, Excess, and Discontinuity: On Lost Highway, Irreversible, and Visitor Q — "All feature reactive heroes hurtling toward death as a means of reconciling the ruptures between them and their objects of desire."

Music, Morricone, and Jack Nicholson's Voice: The Soundscape of Wolf — "Suddenly my senses are all incredibly acute . . . I'm different, more alive, stronger . . ."

Metropolis, Ezra Pound, Mammon — And the Law of Too-Large Numbers nbsp;— "The old world is dying away, and the new world struggles to come forth: now is the time of monsters" — Antonio Gramsci

actors atelier

Japanese Cinema's Uncommon Man: Tatsuya Nakadai's Dissidents, Outcasts, and Shadow Warriors — "Like Hollywood's new postwar men, he offered a multifaceted, ambivalent masculinity far from monolithic wartime ideals."

film festival flying buttress

Music in the Making: Highlights from the 2008 Melbourne International Film Festival — "The surprise musical number can represent a facile avoidance of complexity, a moment of true strangeness, or a way of harmonizing existing, underlying themes."

Queer Angles: The 2008 Portland Lesbian and Gay Film Festival — Feisty orthodox Jewish dykes, globe-trotting ladyboys, fascistic Armani queens — you know, the gang

What's Up, QDoc? Portland's 2008 Queer Documentary Festival — Seeing queer lives from the U.S. and Canada to South Africa and Iran

recent cinema roundabout

Sinful Remake: The Women Problem — "Wife, get a real life for yourself. Career woman, the career isn't everything. Hussy, men still marry ladies. Lesbian, explore your 'male' issues . . ."

Linda, Harry, and the Pseudo-Screw: Burn After Reading: The Coen Brothers' DC Story — "Burn After Reading holds the notable distinction of being the only screwball comedy to leave all of its characters either moderately satisfied or dead."

It Ain't Me Babe: On Dylan and Todd Haynes' I'm Not There — See the incredible vanishing American

An Argento Family Reunion Special: Crying over the Spilled Mother of Tears — Bwaaah!

Vicky and Woody and François: On Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona — The return of Jules and Jim?

Out of Oblivion: Chris Marker and Cinematic Memories of Israel in Dan Geva's Description of a Memory — "It is an opportunity to film people and events that could be recalled at any time to affirm, lament, or challenge a moment in time in this troubled region."

the empty guest room

Dana Andrews: The Forties Hero and His Shadow — "It's not difficult for me to hide emotion, since I've always hidden it in my personal life." — Dana Andrews

Film Criticism as a Man's Job: A Belated Look at the Legacy of Manny Farber — "Farber's writing is the pure antithesis of academic — ornately sophisticated with a vernacular punch, stuffed with contradictory statements and astounding paradoxes."

Norma Shearer: The Primrose Path to MGM Stock — "She hovered somewhere between the realest of realities and the most blatant of impersonations." — F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Crazy Sunday," 1932

interrogation alcove

The Last Mistress: An Interview with Catherine Breillat — "When I make movies, nothing is limited."

revival room

Early Jeanne, Early Louis, Early Miles: Louis Malle's Elevator to the Gallows — "Paris at night in black-and-white with Miles on the soundtrack? It's a perfect fit."

The Volleyball in the Void: Tom Hanks Is Cast Away — Pascal . . . Kierkegaard . . . Nietzsche . . . Zemeckis?

Faust Goes to Hollywood: Revisiting John Frankenheimer's Seconds — "Think, for Pete's sake. What have you got now?"

vale of video

The First-Class Jewels: An American in Paris and Gigi — Two golden-age musicals get the deluxe treatment

bright sights

Bright Sights: Recent DVDs: The Italian, Traffic in Souls, Privilege, Wings, The Ascent, Tropical Malady, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, J'Accuse — An ongoing column that looks at some of the most intriguing of recent, under-the-radar releases

little stabs

Little Stabs of Happiness (and Horror): Random Short Reviews of the Worthy and the Worthless in Recent and Old-School Cinema — "Don't these children deserve the respect of a beautiful film?"

hiding in the stacks

Art in Cinema: Documents Toward a History of the Film Society, by Scott MacDonald

The Impossible David Lynch, by Todd McGowan