C/D: Film Comment [The Magazine]

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I just picked up a copy of this today at Museum of Moving Image.* The writing doesn't seem too abstruse or pretentious, and I enjoyed Amy Taubin on Melville. I'm a little, er, suspicious that it's published by Film Society of Lincoln Center; I don't know why.. What's the deal?

* - Is that a John Fahey LP in the bin at the record store on the right-hand side of the 2001 score? Also, I never realized that the author character is played by goddamn Patrick Magee!! And he's the whats-his-name in Barry Lyndon! Beckett wrote Krapp's Last Tape for him (and maybe 'That Time,' as well). Hell yea.

― poortheatre (poortheatre), Sunday, 2 July 2006 20:47 (eighteen years ago) link

oh. that should read "at the Museum of Moving Image after seeing Clockwork Orange." yea. that should make a little more sense..

― poortheatre (poortheatre), Sunday, 2 July 2006 22:20 (eighteen years ago) link

Usually the best film publication available, doesn't get as obscure or academic as Cineaste or Film Quarterly. Always about month behind on release dates and TCM showings here, though. I don't know if they release it in-house for a set time and then publish wider, or if my Borders just sucks.

― milo z (mlp), Sunday, 2 July 2006 22:41 (eighteen years ago) link

I get it by mail in NYC as a Film Society member, and it's always late.

― Dr Morbius (Dr Morbius), Monday, 3 July 2006 03:31 (eighteen years ago) link

is this bi-monthly? i've been reading it all day and it's great-- kind of a severe treatment of Altman, though.

― poortheatre (poortheatre), Monday, 3 July 2006 05:06 (eighteen years ago) link

oh, totally classic.

― Roughage Crew (Enrique), Monday, 3 July 2006 07:22 (eighteen years ago) link

i've been a subscriber for years. oh uh, it may be "middlebrow" in that it's the exact midpoint between fawning mainstream movie coverage and unreadable academic crap. nice festival coverage.

― timmy tannin (pompous), Monday, 3 July 2006 14:30 (eighteen years ago) link

it is bi-monthly, poortheatre, think the new one's gonna drop right about now.

― Roughage Crew (Enrique), Monday, 3 July 2006 14:32 (eighteen years ago) link

My favorite film mag--definitely classic.

― jay blanchard (jay blanchard), Monday, 3 July 2006 14:36 (eighteen years ago) link

how does it compare to sight & sound?

― jed_ (jed), Monday, 3 July 2006 14:42 (eighteen years ago) link

(hi!)

it's quite different cos it doesn't try to review every film -- it probably reviews three every two months. but s&s used not to review all the films coz monthly film bulletin did that. so it has more features and isn't as tied to current releases -- may well be more 'international' too, since it isn't tied to the bfi/nft nexus.

― Roughage Crew (Enrique), Monday, 3 July 2006 14:46 (eighteen years ago) link

ok sounds perfect. hi! :)

― jed_ (jed), Monday, 3 July 2006 14:48 (eighteen years ago) link

can you buy it in UK borders?

― jed_ (jed), Monday, 3 July 2006 14:50 (eighteen years ago) link

yeah, after a bit of a delay.

― Roughage Crew (Enrique), Monday, 3 July 2006 14:52 (eighteen years ago) link

As far as 'middlebrow' film mags go, I prefer Cinema Scope, but there's usually at least one or two really great articles in each issue of Film Comment.

― C0L1N B... (C0L1N B...), Monday, 3 July 2006 18:15 (eighteen years ago) link

what c0l1n said

― Eric H. (Eric H.), Monday, 3 July 2006 19:32 (eighteen years ago) link

i have one issue of this from 1972 courtesy of my girlfriend because it had a hitchcock feature. The paper is nice.

I may start getting it from borders, I think i wld prefer features over reviewing everything, i do not like the semi-new layout of sight and sound tho i still get it and enjoy it. Is cineaste available in the uk too?

― jeffrey (johnson), Monday, 3 July 2006 21:32 (eighteen years ago) link

The Glasgow Buchanan Street Borders stocked it, but they seemed to have stopped about 2 years ago. Actually, they probably still stock it, but only about 2 copies and I just miss out on it. I might check tomorrow.

Totally classic, though. I read it religiously in the States.

― The Ultimate Conclusion (lokar), Tuesday, 4 July 2006 01:45 (eighteen years ago) link

I've never read anything by Amy Taubin that I didn't like (look her up on villagevoice.com archives too)

― don (dow), Tuesday, 4 July 2006 02:31 (eighteen years ago) link

i cancelled my subscription a long time ago largely because the design of the magazine was awful. it's improved a lot but i still wish they wouldn't use stock production stills for their cover illustrations.

― Amateur(ist) (Amateur(ist)), Tuesday, 4 July 2006 04:51 (eighteen years ago) link

i do like the faint sense of community that comes from it being attached to lincoln center. i also really like reading chuck stephens, hoberman, dargis, kent jones, and dave kehr when they write for it.

it's about 10x better than "sight & sound"--the only excuse read that magazine anymore is tony rayns.

― Amateur(ist) (Amateur(ist)), Tuesday, 4 July 2006 04:52 (eighteen years ago) link

i have a bunch of old F.C. issues from the dawn of the sirk revival, which are pretty damned interesting.

― Amateur(ist) (Amateur(ist)), Tuesday, 4 July 2006 04:53 (eighteen years ago) link

i think F.C. has about a good a ratio of interesting to annoying articles as cahiers these days... though cahiers LOOKS a lot classier, and probably covers a wider range of stuff simply because paris gets a wider range of stuff in theaters than new york.

― Amateur(ist) (Amateur(ist)), Tuesday, 4 July 2006 04:54 (eighteen years ago) link

I guess my least-favorite aspect of FC is the editor-in-chief's note (more specifically, his picture) at the beginning of each issue.

― Eric H. (Eric H.), Tuesday, 4 July 2006 21:31 (eighteen years ago) link

T/S: FC's year-end critics' poll vs. Village Voice's year-end critics' poll

T/S: the above T/S vs. they're the same thing

― Eric H. (Eric H.), Tuesday, 4 July 2006 21:32 (eighteen years ago) link

I let my Walter Reade membership lapse so I don't get it anymore, but yes, it is a very good magazine, for the reasons others have described.
And yeah, that little picture of Gavin Smith is annoying for some reason- if he is not chomping on popcorn in it, he should be.

― The Player In The Redd Cap (Two-Headed Doge) (Ken L), Tuesday, 4 July 2006 21:39 (eighteen years ago) link

Popcorn nothing, I want my editors-in-chief to be chomping on stogies and thumbing their suspenders.

― Eric H. (Eric H.), Tuesday, 4 July 2006 21:47 (eighteen years ago) link

If not thumbing a belt-and-suspenders combo, like Kirk Douglas's backwater boss in Ace In The Hole. But what I meant, Eric, is that every time I've seen him in real life, in that back corner seat at the Anthology or the Walter Reade, perhaps three seats away for J4ck 4ngstr3!ch, he always seems to be hunkered down with popcorn in hand.

― The Player In The Redd Cap (Two-Headed Doge) (Ken L), Tuesday, 4 July 2006 22:21 (eighteen years ago) link

gavin smith just looks a bit too self-consciously egghead-y in that photo.

― Amateur(ist) (Amateur(ist)), Tuesday, 4 July 2006 22:29 (eighteen years ago) link

btw i always get gavin smith and kent jones confused, i think because they both have (1) generic anglo-american family names; (2) vaguely english (a.k.a. posh in american terms) given names. they both sound like they could have been movie stars in the 1920s.

― Amateur(ist) (Amateur(ist)), Tuesday, 4 July 2006 22:30 (eighteen years ago) link

gavin smith just looks a bit too self-consciously egghead-y in that photo.

That's how he looks in real life!

― C0L1N B... (C0L1N B...), Tuesday, 4 July 2006 22:33 (eighteen years ago) link

He's really just a strange-looking dude.

― C0L1N B... (C0L1N B...), Tuesday, 4 July 2006 22:34 (eighteen years ago) link

Somehow this reminds me to tell you that I saw Geoffrey O'Brien in the lobby at the Film Forum a few weeks ago, during the Film Noir series, at a screening of Slightly Scarlet. I said, "Hey, Geoffrey O'Brien!" and he stopped and was pretty friendly- on the subject of Slightly Scarlet he said, in a barely audible hipster voice, "it's one of my favorite movies, actually." I probably could have talked to him some more, but I sent him on his way before he could use his massive erudition to expose me as the fraud that I am.

― The Player In The Redd Cap (Two-Headed Doge) (Ken L), Tuesday, 4 July 2006 22:40 (eighteen years ago) link

I just re-read Kent Jones' Altman piece in the current issue and it seemed really insubstantial the second time around and I think that's the case with a lot of Film Comment pieces. Except for the one or two long-ish articles each issue, the magazine is filled with these two or three page articles that often hint at something interesting, but don't offer much in the way of argument beyond these hyper-general, overbroad impressions. I like Jones' reading of Altman a lot, but his examples are from, like, five of his films and presented as a comment on his whole body of work.

― C0L1N B... (C0L1N B...), Tuesday, 4 July 2006 22:43 (eighteen years ago) link

And I don't know if that's just a space issue or what, but I wish that every release from a big name filmmaker or the release of a couple films that tread similar ground weren't treated as chances for half-thought out big declarations on what this filmmaker means or what these films say about the zeitgeist. I know this is a banal complaint with every magazine ever, but I think Film Comment is especially bad at this because often the people writing these pieces are GREAT elsewhere.

― C0L1N B... (C0L1N B...), Tuesday, 4 July 2006 22:57 (eighteen years ago) link

I think it's that Gavin Smith looks like he might be related to Moby that I'm annoyed by his arms-crossed, peapod-lipped visage.

― Eric H. (Eric H.), Wednesday, 5 July 2006 01:22 (eighteen years ago) link

I sent him on his way before he could use his massive erudition to expose me as the fraud that I am.

I've had this nightmare about Geoffrey O'Brien before. I'm serious.

― Richard Baez (Johnny Logic), Wednesday, 5 July 2006 01:27 (eighteen years ago) link

but I wish that every release from a big name filmmaker or the release of a couple films that tread similar ground weren't treated as chances for half-thought out big declarations on what this filmmaker means or what these films say about the zeitgeist.

this bothers me a lot too. cahiers du cinéma is a lot worse than F.C. in this respect, however. i remember when "the brown bunny" was their occasion for some serenely flaky meditations on the current state of international filmmaking (it was paired with some other film with which it seemed to share only a superficial affinity, i think maybe ceylan's "distant"?).

― Amateur(ist) (Amateur(ist)), Wednesday, 5 July 2006 03:21 (eighteen years ago) link

five years pass...

cover design is always wonderful:

http://lincolncen.3cdn.net/b2e21751091d452a16_pqm6i6pdg.jpg

― neo-realist shit i ever wrote (schlump), Tuesday, 5 July 2011 11:31 (thirteen years ago) link

four years pass...

super surprised i missed this-
http://www.filmcomment.com/blog/an-announcement-from-film-comment/

― bloat laureate (schlump), Sunday, 27 December 2015 21:51 (nine years ago) link

hmmmmm

― skateboards are the new combover (Dr Morbius), Tuesday, 29 December 2015 15:18 (nine years ago) link

four years pass...

Film @ Lincoln Center has announced the May-June issue will be digital only

Call me sentimental but one might possibly ask for more than a cursory reference to the discontinuance of a print magazine's storied 58-year run in a single sentence in the 8th paragraph of a press release issued at EOD on Friday.
— 𝖇𝖎𝖌 𝖇𝖆𝖑𝖑𝖔𝖔𝖓 𝖆𝖉𝖛𝖊𝖓𝖙𝖚𝖗𝖊 (@NickPinkerton) March 27, 2020

― brooklyn suicide cult (Dr Morbius), Saturday, 28 March 2020 00:35 (four years ago) link

"and then the publication will go on an indefinite hiatus"

completely missed this on first reading

getting easier to imagine moving out of NY if I survive this

― brooklyn suicide cult (Dr Morbius), Saturday, 28 March 2020 00:53 (four years ago) link

Sad--managed somehow to survive until this.

― clemenza, Saturday, 28 March 2020 01:28 (four years ago) link

ugh

― Robbie Shakespeare’s Sister Lovers (James Redd and the Blecchs), Saturday, 28 March 2020 01:32 (four years ago) link

one month passes...

Nick Pinkerton on isolation viewing

https://www.filmcomment.com/article/inside-man-nick-pinkerton-isolation/

― brooklyn suicide cult (Dr Morbius), Friday, 1 May 2020 22:16 (four years ago) link

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