4 x Film Comment 1989

January-February 1989

TORCHING THE CLOSET
Test: how many nationally well-known public men are gay and wear a dress to work? Harvey Fierstein, a gay crossover figure with breakout potential, has the sass and sashay to send men running—into their closets for dressup time
After seeing Torch Song Trilogy, Jay Scott talks to the man about gender bending and pride
Harlan Kennedy adds a chapter to the ongoing saga of the Battle for Britatin. This round: The Gay Film Festival. Goodies: Its organizers. Baddies: Thatcher and the Legion of the Damned Stupid

FROM TRUFFAUT’S TYPEWRITER
By Annette Insdorf
François Truffaut may be gone, as we keep telling you, but his work lives on. His last screenplay La Petite Voleuse (The Little Thief) is now a film by Claude Miller. C’est si bon says Annette Insdorf, who introduces two scenes excerpted from the original script. Zut alors! Magnifique!

MIDSECTION: ARGH—THE ’90S
Crystal ball time. The ’90s are soon upon us—so why wait a year to moan about man’s fate. Let’s get it over with now:
Beverly Walker mulls the fate of the director—will he be auteur or airline pilot?
Acting may veer away from realism to teleprompterism fears Gavin Smith
Armond White diagnoses reviewers in critical condition and prescribes a purge
Jon Jost laments the fate of indie films
Karen Jaehne romances the stone cold future of love in the Bush decade
We draw up a list of the decade’s passing fancies
Jack Barth previews Film Comment of the ’90s—given the low state of the art and our standards
Plus: Meanwhile, argh—1988. Ten New Faces from Lawrence O’Toole, Oscar silly questions from Anne Thompson, and two scoundrels, Richard Corliss and Steven Harvey, summarize the dirty, rotten year we all just had

SERGEI AND VERA GET LAID
By Anne Williamson
The Russians are coming! But it’s make love, not war as those sex crazed Sovs plaster the screen with candid scenes from Moscow’s box office hit, Little Vera

BIGMOUTH STRIKES AGAIN
By Richard Corliss
Corliss sees a movie about Talk Radio and reflects on this year’s media model of the body politic

TV: BANG BANG WE’RE BORED
By Amy Taubin
Gross, says Taubin, after sitting through a new low in tabloid tack TV, Manhunt—a live hunt for a serial killer. Yuk

JOURNALS
Let’s get Latin for a while. Graham Fuller stayed in New York and saw a cross section of Sandanista and not-so Sandinista films
Laurence Kardish took in some Caribbean films at the San Juan festival, in between rum coctels

March-April 1989

DUNCAN’S DOUGHBOYS
By Karen Jaehne
In the never ending saga of the war that wouldn’t die, Vietnam vet turned filmmaker Patrick Duncan loads the viewer into his backpack in 84 Charlie Mopic. A stunning victory, reports Karen Jaehne, who also records a peace parley in Hawaii where U.S. and Vietnamese directors traded war stories

“WHAT A DUMP”
By Richard Schickel
It is with the profoundest admiration that the Film Society of Lincoln Center honors a lady of lightning, Bette Davis, and sincerely hopes she does not pronounce the above judgment upon our house

MIDSECTION: BORROWED IMAGES
The film record is permanent, the membrane is permeable. For seven decades hair-dos and baby names have slid through the screen. Our habits and needs have been absorbed and reflected back. But the film aesthetic, the way of seeing and moving, has radiated out into the arts
Senior editor Marlaine Glicksman charts the outward ripples into architecture, as observed by Leon van Schaik
Music, by Armond White
Multi-media art, explained by artist Robert Longo
Dance, by Bob Morris
Photography, by Rick Woodward

OSCAR DE LA YENTAS
We poll our savvy jury, 12 blind mice and two alternates, to handicap the Academy Awards. Their guess is as good as yours. How ’bout the best foreign film? Howard A. Rodman explains why the one you did see isn’t nominated

HOT HANKS
Tom Hanks interviewed by Beverly Walker
So Big. That’s Tom Hanks, angry young wiseapple. Beverly Walker goes to his comedy store and takes inventory

RIFF OF SCANDAL
Can’t recognize the players in Scandal, the new film about the granddaddy of modern-day sexploits, the 1963 Profumo Affair, without our team giving you their numbers
Graham Fuller on the deep threat
Gavin Smith grills John Hurt
Marlaine Glicksman unwraps Roland Gift

14TH ANNUAL GROSSES GLOSS
By Anne Thompson
New meaning for the Indie 500: the number of little companies that crashed and burned last year

BOOKS: GOLDWYN
By Andrew Sarris
Grappling with Sam Goldwyn, rethought in two new bios

ORBITS: RICHARD ROUD
By Richard Corliss
The first director of the New York Film Festival, remembered

JOURNALS
Ace cartoonist Chuck Jones thinks back to when he was six (1918), remembers his finicky neighbor, Charlie Chaplin, and draws his own conclusions
Marsha McCreadie returns from Arizona to the Slaves of New York

LETTERS
Roger Ebert and Armond White thumb wrestle

September-october 1989

MIDSECTION: LORDS OF THE LENS
With sharper eyes trained on “the look” of film now—as in everything else—the shock troops are cinematographers. Five years ago, Film Comment’s “Behind the Camera” Midsection surveyed Hollywood’s cinematography talents and identified a pantheon of twelve. Where are they now and who’s on next?
Todd McCarthy picks up where he left off and digs the New Breed—the Eurolensers. Add five to the World Class category
Carol Rutter interviews the king of color, Vittorio Storaro
Armond White talks to Sven Nykvist, master of natural light and Bergman’s right arm turned DP-for-hire
White considers the evolving aesthetics of cinematography and the role of the DP over 80 years of checking for hairs in the gate and making sure all’s clear. But is the camera candid?

BACK TO THE WALL
By Jay Scott
Norman Jewison’s In Country—the Last Vietnam Movie? Can a liberal Canadian vet the collective conscious once and for all? Jay Scott admires the film and concludes with a verity: that we lost the war but must win the peace of mind

AU REVOIR LES ENFANTS
By Marcia Pally
Isabelle Huppert’s best performance yet as an abortionist executed to assuage France’s WWII-wounded ego. Marcia Pally mines Claude Chabrol’s current Story of Women for its present-day applications

LORD LARRY
By Richard Schickel
Sir Laurence Olivier was more than the embodiment of British Acting Tradition: at once matinee idol, thesp, and character actor, he found both Archie Rice and Hamlet inside himself, and therein lay the rub

D.W. GRIFFITH, LADIES MAN
By Miriam Hansen
Miriam Hansen traces the path from revision to restoration of David Wark G’s landmark Intolerance and finds a context for a classic

HELLO, DOLLY
On the occasion of Steel Magnolias, we present y’all with The Quotable Dolly by Karen Jaehne

EUZHAN YOUR HEAD
Euzhan Palcy interviewed by Marlaine Glicksman
Euzhan Palcy brings a Third World edge to her apartheid film, A Dry White Season

WHITTLE AWAY
By Lois P. Sheinfeld
Capitalism steals another idea from the Revolution—subversion in the classroom

AUSSIES ARE COMING
By Harlan Kennedy
Remember the Australian New Wave, followed by the Eighties No Wave? Young filmmakers Down Under are back and this time they aren’t offering nostalgia

JOURNALS
Anne Thompson explains how Jacques Annaud tamed The Bear
Gavin Smith commends a film student-in-Hollywood opus, The Big Picture
Marc Mancini seeks the creator of Freddie and Shocker, Wes Craven, lit. prof

November-December 1989

MIDSECTION: LORDS OF THE LENS
With sharper eyes trained on “the look” of film now—as in everything else—the shock troops are cinematographers. Five years ago, Film Comment’s “Behind the Camera” Midsection surveyed Hollywood’s cinematography talents and identified a pantheon of twelve. Where are they now and who’s on next?
Todd McCarthy picks up where he left off and digs the New Breed—the Eurolensers. Add five to the World Class category
Carol Rutter interviews the king of color, Vittorio Storaro
Armond White talks to Sven Nykvist, master of natural light and Bergman’s right arm turned DP-for-hire
White considers the evolving aesthetics of cinematography and the role of the DP over 80 years of checking for hairs in the gate and making sure all’s clear. But is the camera candid?

BACK TO THE WALL
By Jay Scott
Norman Jewison’s In Country—the Last Vietnam Movie? Can a liberal Canadian vet the collective conscious once and for all? Jay Scott admires the film and concludes with a verity: that we lost the war but must win the peace of mind

AU REVOIR LES ENFANTS
By Marcia Pally
Isabelle Huppert’s best performance yet as an abortionist executed to assuage France’s WWII-wounded ego. Marcia Pally mines Claude Chabrol’s current Story of Women for its present-day applications

LORD LARRY
By Richard Schickel
Sir Laurence Olivier was more than the embodiment of British Acting Tradition: at once matinee idol, thesp, and character actor, he found both Archie Rice and Hamlet inside himself, and therein lay the rub

D.W. GRIFFITH, LADIES MAN
By Miriam Hansen
Miriam Hansen traces the path from revision to restoration of David Wark G’s landmark Intolerance and finds a context for a classic

HELLO, DOLLY
On the occasion of Steel Magnolias, we present y’all with The Quotable Dolly by Karen Jaehne

EUZHAN YOUR HEAD
Euzhan Palcy interviewed by Marlaine Glicksman
Euzhan Palcy brings a Third World edge to her apartheid film, A Dry White Season

WHITTLE AWAY
By Lois P. Sheinfeld
Capitalism steals another idea from the Revolution—subversion in the classroom

AUSSIES ARE COMING
By Harlan Kennedy
Remember the Australian New Wave, followed by the Eighties No Wave? Young filmmakers Down Under are back and this time they aren’t offering nostalgia

JOURNALS
Anne Thompson explains how Jacques Annaud tamed The Bear
Gavin Smith commends a film student-in-Hollywood opus, The Big Picture
Marc Mancini seeks the creator of Freddie and Shocker, Wes Craven, lit. prof