Leave a Comment

So -- Where Were We?
The Reeler — ... . It started in Los Angeles for a few weeks in June, continued in my Jersey hovel for a few weeks after that, and then back in the old Reeler HQ uptown since late July. The details are completely uninteresting, even if their chemistry yielded this desperately needed relapse. I promise not to overdose or throw up on your carpet. [image] Which reminds me: Did you read Simon Abrams's piece in the NY Press this week about the New York Film Festival? To borrow the story's headline parlance, "We didn't think so." So let me recap in brief: Simon Abrams is young. The Film Society of ...

NYFF 46 (2008): The Class, Wendy and Lucy, The Windmill Movie, shorts, housekeeping
The House Next Door — By Vadim Rizov Traditionally, the opening night film of NYFF should be a fairly prominent title that can drag in the middlebrows and not alienate an audience coming as much to be part of an "event" as to see a movie. It should also be well-crafted enough that no one could really object to it. (Kind of backfired last year with the idiosyncracies of The Darjeeling Limited, but the string of films before—Look At Me, The Queen, Good Night, And Good Luck—is an immaculate chain.) This year it's Laurent Cantet's The Class. Step back and think about that for a second. Cantet's ...

Film Fest Watch
Thompson On Hollywood — ... On the verge of its opening, every fall the good old New York Film Fest gets the same scrutiny. It's like an annual ritual. Some journalist somewhere asks, is it still relevant? does it only appeal to old people? And someone else, in this case ...