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Under discussion:

The Seventh Seal  (1957)

Star Wars [Film Series]  Production Year

The Godfather Saga  (1977)

Ingmar Bergman  (1972)

Persona  (1966)

Michelangelo Eye to Eye  (2004)

Once a month, cultural critic Camille Paglia publishes a lengthy assessment of the current moment in pop culture at Salon.com. This month’s installment went live today, and the meat of it is an Antonioni/Bergman inspired elegy for the art film. The whole piece is, as is the norm for Ms. Paglia, terribly quotable, but the part where she appears to elevate the entire Star Wars series to the status of those late Europeans’ “masterpieces” is probably the most controversial:

On the culture front, fabled film directors Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni dying on the same day was certainly a cold douche for my narcissistic generation of the 1960s. We who revered those great artists, we who sat stunned and spellbound before their masterpieces — what have we achieved? Aside from Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather series, with its deft flashbacks and gritty social realism, is there a single film produced over the past 35 years that is arguably of equal philosophical weight or virtuosity of execution to Bergman’s The Seventh Seal or Persona? Perhaps only George Lucas’ multilayered, six-film Star Wars epic can genuinely claim classic status, and it descends not from Bergman or Antonioni but from Stanley Kubrick and his pop antecedents in Hollywood science fiction.

A lot of bloggers are reading this and doing a double-take, as if to say, “Did she just say George Lucas is as good as Bergman? OHNOSHEDIDN’T!!!” Example, from The Opinion Mill: “Only in the mind of Camille Paglia can Jar-Jar Binks push aside Antonius Block to play chess with Death on the stony beach. I’d always considered the mutual starfucking between George Lucas and Joseph Campbell to be the last word in intellectual vacuousness, but one should never underestimate Camille.”

This is not how I read Paglia’s statement at all — I read it as, “The only films of the last three decades that may in the future be considered classics are the Star Wars films, and that’s evidence of how far from the art house golden era we’ve fallen.” But maybe I’m wrong. For all I know, Paglia really did mean to equate Antoniennui with (let’s all make this joke at once) the travails of Jar Jar Binks. Later, in the very same column, Camille suggests that Kelly Clarkson has the potential to singlehandedly “revive…the American fine arts.” I’m all for being contrarian, but at some point, doesn’t the polemic start to strain credulity?

Under discussion:

The Great Happiness Space: Tale of an Osaka Love Thief  (2006)

Does Your Soul Have a Cold?  (2007)

Xeni Jardin at BoingBoing has a fascinating entry on a documentary called The Great Happiness Space: Tales of an Osaka Love Thief. I don’t know how I managed to make it this long completely unaware of this film, as it played about 100 festivals last year and was even nominated for a Gotham Award for Best Undistributed Film (it lost to Steve Barron’s Choking Man). Regardless: the film is about Japanese “host clubs”, which, as Xeni puts it, are home to “sharp-dressed, good-looking 20something guys who are paid to make women feel loved. No, not to perform sex acts, but to feel cared for.”

The fact that there’s a need for this kind of thing in contemporary Japan seems to be in line with a lot of issues explored in a documentary that I *have* seen, Mike Mills’ Does Your Soul Have a Cold? That film, which explores the relatively recent explosion of anti-depressant use in Japan, is essentially a verite examination of loneliness and sadness. Great Happiness seems to take a more stylized approach to describing similar problems.

As far as I can tell, Great Happiness is still without a distributor, but the entire film is available for viewing on Google Video. I’ve also embedded the trailer above.

Under discussion:

Ishtar  (1987)

Today is Dustin Hoffman’s 70th birthday, and as David Hudson notes, the English-language media doesn’t seem to care (today’s #1 Entertainment story, according to Google News? Drunken British celebutards fight for MTV Award.) But because the internet moves in mysterious ways, while looking for Hoffmanania this morning I discovered a documentary-in-progress called Waiting For Ishtar.The project apparently began when Canadian writer/comedian John Mitchell (who is co-directing the film with Jonathan Crombie), attempted to borrow a copy of the much-maligned 1987 Dustin Hoffman/Warren Beatty flop from his local public library, only to learn that he was #34 on a list of library members waiting to check out the branch’s sole copy of the movie. Mitchell then decided to make a documentary, in which he’d “find and interview the 46 other Toronto Public Library members ‘Waiting For Ishtar’.” The project has since expanded to include interviews with Ishtar director Elaine May and co-stars Charles Grodin and Carol Kane, as well as “film critics, songwriters, Ishtar fans, writers and directors, including well-known Canadian filmmaker, Don McKellar.”Mitchell maintains a spottily-updated blog in connection with Waiting for Ishtar, subtitled “A love letter to the most misunderstood movie of all time.” The comments section on the blog is really amazing. The most recent post was apparently published in February of this year, but it’s still attracting comments from Ishtar lovers who seem overjoyed to learn they’re not alone. In one comment, dated June 28, Dave Elvin describes screening the first 20 minutes of the film at a party; as a result, a few of his friends “don’t speak to me anymore.” Discovering the documentary, Elvin says, “feels like going home.”

If you’re currently on the Toronto Public Library’s waiting list for Ishtar (or have been in the past two years), Mitchell wants to speak with you. You can contact him through the Waiting For Ishtar website. And if you need an Ishtar refresher course, check out the ten-minute YouTube clip above.