MY BROTHER, MY SELF
By Karen Jaehne
David Cronenberg has a thing about warped minds and bodies—but his new Dead Ringers is a case of body doubles (twins to you). Jaehne meets the Creepy Canadian and talks to altered ego Jeremy Irons
“VOICES” IN TIME
Terence Davies interviewed by Harlan Kennedy
The past is tense in Terence Davies’ Distant Voices, Still Lives—an elegy to family rapt with emotion and disillusionment at finding Life ain’t like the Movies. Kennedy meets the man with the memories and the director’s chair
LET’S PARTY
Ring Lardner, Jr. interviewed by Barry Strugatz
Two-time Oscar-winning screenwriter Ring Lardner, Jr. was recruited to the communist party, worked for Selznick, wrote Woman of the Year, then joined the Beverly Hills club, the Hollywood Ten. He talks about before and after the Blacklist
MIDSECTION: CROSS PURPOSES
Cinematic sacrilege? Don’t hold your breath waiting for all that juicy blasphemy in The Last Temptation of Christ: that crazy Scorsese swears on the bible he’s made an authentically religious film about the nature of divinity, and gives Richard Corliss The Word
And the aforesaid writer reflects upon the theological implications, charts Scorsese’s transubstantiation of true faith into film and comes up with a devotion picture for our times
Harlan Jacobson traces the lineage of Scorsese’s tortured visionary from the mean streets of Little Italy upwards and onwards, and argues that it’s all just a question of sacred-secular semiotics
And Michael Singer rounds things off with an exhaustive investigation of film Christs past and present, proving the church hasn’t got the copyright on J.C. But has he got an agent?
nOT SO LITTLE DORRIT
By Graham Fuller
Once was not enough, so here’s two helpings of the same story, told from two points of view. Long is an understatement, but Christine Edzard’s Dickensian epic is the epitome of faithful, detailed narrative construction
(BIG) BODY OF WORK
By Armond White
Orson Welles—the incredibly expanding genius? Armond White attended the NYU/Public Theater retrospective and considers the unfinished works. Did Welles deliver on his talent or disappoint?
BOOKS: FRENCH LETTERS
By Richard Round
Round welcomes a volume of François Truffaut’s letters and remembers a filmmaker who could read and write
JOURNALS
Movies are a labor of love, quoth novelist John Nichols, author of The Wizard of Loneliness; he went to the film’s Vermont set and witnessed the labor pains first hand
Barbara Osborn talks to filmmaker Mira Nair about Salaam Bombay!, her crossover from documentary to drama. An addition to the undiminished cycle of street kids stories, this time the searing images are Indian
And Pat Aufderheide traces the progress of African cinema from Third World film to world class art movie, as seen at the Filmfest D.C.
BACK PAGE: Quiz #33
