Real Escapism: Kentucker Audley and Team Picture
Brian Pera11.03.08
Brian Pera reviews Ketucker Audley’s Team Picture, which started gaining attention at last year’s Memphis Film Festival. Since then it has been featured in New Talkies: the DIY Generation series at IFC, and film scholar Ray Carney included it as part of Independent’s Week: New Independent Cinema 2007 at the Harvard Archives. Team Picture has been embraced by – yet stands apart from – the current laissez-faire Youtube genre trend "mumblecore." Pera argues that Audley wields a unique style that bridges somewhere between the verité of a Cassavettes or Antonioni – the scenes slow and thoughtful, the directing more slight-handed than sleight of hand, and the final product beautiful and with purpose.
Swedish Death Metal by Daniel Ekeroth: a review
Adam Ganderson10.29.08
Fanzine basically took the month off, so we get this review just in time for the remaining days of October – a month of nippy nights that creep up early and announce the Halloween season; behold here Adam Ganderson’s review of Daniel Ekeroth’s Swedish Death Metal. You may have read the Norwegian side of things in Lords of Chaos, or got a taste of other non-Norwegian death metal bands in the excerpt "A Blaze in the North American Sky" from Brandon Stosuy’s forthcoming book that ran recently in The Believer. Here we get the Swedish death metal story, an instant classic, and required reading for music lovers and fanzine fans of varied yet discriminating tastes.
2008 New York Film Festival
Benjamin Strong09.26.08
Benjamin Strong takes us to this year’s New York Film Festival. While overall, perhaps not as strong as festivals past (a committee member was quoted saying the equivalent of the old: you go with the army you have, not the one you wish you had, or whatever it was Rumsfeld said about the Iraq war), but Strong does find some gems amidst the bunch. Read his preview before you purchase your tickets.
Jaws Revisited
Masha Tupitsyn09.15.08
Like a survivor from a good shark gnashing, what we see in a feature film is really the remains of a great deal of cutting and slicing. What happens in the editing room often stays in the editing room. Of course with the advent of DVDs we now get a lot more options in viewing a film, with the outtakes, deleted scenes, etc. Recently a retrospective of Spielberg films aired on TV, and here Masha Tupitsyn revisits with fresh perspective the collector’s edition DVD of the director’s 70’s blockbuster Jaws.
Only Connect: Some Modern Folk
Timothy Cushing09.12.08
There’s a folkload of new folk springing forth again in America, a renaissance you might say; as it happened in 60’s with Guthrie and Dylan and Baez and so on, so it is again, if however tweaked. Timothy Cushing looks at a sample of these new musicians that he, a musician himself, particularly connects with: the Avett Brothers, Ian Thomas and Langhorne Slim. Art By Danny Jock.
Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired
Kevin Killian08.27.08
HBO released a new documentary this summer by Marina Zenovich about director Roman Polanski’s long ago scandalous sexual encounter with a young girl – Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired. An exile from the States ever since this event and the subsequent bumbling, showy court case, Polanski has weathered more storms in his life than most could handle; yet Zenovich, in Kevin Killian’s view here, seems to be letting Polanski a little off the hook (for such a serious charge) in her retrospective cut. Art by Danny Jock.
Review of The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness, and Baseball
Richard Parks08.05.08
Baseball is best viewed live, though it’s also a comforting respite on a lazy day spent sprawled out on the living room couch. Speaking of couches, have you ever talked baseball on the couch at your shrink’s office? Did that baseball talk give you the answers you needed to reconcile a painful love/hate relationship with your father? Well probably not. But if so, or if you at least find the baseball-as-psychological lens interesting, you should check out Nicholas Dawidoff’s latest memoir The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness, and Baseball, reviewed here by Richard Parks.
Review of Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary
Ben Bush08.04.08
Hypertext Lit is no longer a fad but a fact. From the earlier experiments of Shelley Jackson and Robert Coover on to today’s ebooks on iPhones and Kindles, electronic literature is here for the long haul, making its mark in more ways than you’d think. Ben Bush reviews a thorough study of the subject – Professor N. Katherine Hayles’ Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary.
Jacques Tati’s Trafic on Criterion DVD
Jonathan Rosenbaum06.26.08
Critic and scholar Jonathan Rosenbaum has written definitively about French director Jacques Tati over the years; Fanzine is pleased to have Rosenbaum’s take on Tati’s Trafic, newly available on DVD from the Criterion Collection.
A Supposed Return of Disco pt. 1: New York’s House of Slightly Less Jealous Lovers
Nick Sylvester05.29.08
Is disco back in New York? Or did it ever leave? Nick Sylvester covers the flashing floor from Blondie and Sylvester to Holy Ghost, the Rapture and LCD Soundsystem trying to find the answer. Cover art by Danny Jock.
