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Under discussion:

My Winnipeg  (2007)

Heavy Metal in Baghdad  (2007)

Filth and Wisdom  (2008)

• Jurgen Fauth has nothing but praise for Heavy Metal in Baghdad (we felt pretty much the same when we saw it in Toronto), the screening of which, Jurgen says, “was so oversold that I ended up in the front row, effectively watching a distorted fun house mirror version of Suroosh Alvi and Eddy Moretti’s documentary.”
• “Most of the European critics came down pretty hard on Petri Kotwica’s Black Ice, a film in competition from Finland,” notes Filmbrain, “But I found this deliciously dark drama about dangerous deceptions to be a good bit of trashy fun.” Mr. Grant is far less enthusiastic about In Love We Trust and Just Anybody.
• Daniel Kasman is not entirely sold on Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg, but he concedes “Maddin???s humor comes through perhaps stronger in this film than any other (he narrates himself, with dialog by regular collaborator George Toles), pushing an obsessive, if not repetitive, theme of the life of a city and the life of a boy being an inescapable series of traumatic, almost unreal conflicts and co-minglings of unreturnable pasts and their dream-like traces in the present.” Also at The Auteurs Notebook: an extremely memorable one-liner from Klaus Kinski’s “notorious one man show,” Jesus Christ Saviour.
• 3..2…1…and the Filth and Wisdom backlash has arrived.

At the Guardian, Andrew Pulver laments the fall Derek Jarman (and the personal, high-art cinema he made and represented) from cinephile fashion. He blames this in part on the revival of the commercial British film industry:

One problem is the seismic shift of the cinematic landscape since Jarman’s death in 1994, the same year that saw the release of Four Weddings and a Funeral. One of Jarman’s main weapons had been that, in the Thatcher era, there was no one else putting out Britain-centred product so enthusiastically. His small-scale, personalised vision undoubtedly helped him survive the 1980s and, to some extent, prosper. But with the revival of the commercial end of the British film industry, the very people who most resented Jarman’s productivity regained the initiative. After his death, his cinematic influence virtually vanished.

The idea of Jarman as a “Britain-centred” filmmaker reminded me of one of the things I found most frustrating about Derek, Isaac Julien and Tilda Swinton’s collaborative, impressionist doc on their late friend, which I saw at Sundance last month (Pulver mentions both Julien and Swinton but not the film, although I have to imagine this post was in part motivated by Derek’s premiere this week in Berlin).

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Under discussion:

Morocco  (1930)

The Blue Angel  (1930)

Because we can’t *possibly* allow the designated day for the monetization of affection to pass by without comment, let’s spend it living vicariously through romantic triumphs and tragedies of Marlene Dietrich!

Above: watch Marlene reduce a respected professor into a giddy, giggling schoolgirl in The Blue Angel! Below the jump, watch Marlene herself succumb to the madness of obsession, literally throwing caution to the wind, rejecting her life as a kept woman to join the gypsies who trail behind Gary Cooper. Unfortunately, the unadulterated clip doesn’t seem to be online, but that scene is tacked on the end of this crazy fan-created Morocco montage set to Marliyn Manson doing “The KKK Took My Baby Away.” Enjoy!
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