"Memento exposes not merely the moral depravity of a single individual...but the defining pathology of contemporary American elite culture at large. Leonard Shelby's inability to acquire new memories after being clubbed on the head is not only a character-deforming individual catastrophe for him. It is also a carefully elaborated metaphor for the obstruction of historical memory about the criminal exercise of American global power—a criminality which, just like Leonard's perverse and ultimately absurdist mission of retaliation, is deliberately masked as a pursuit of justice. "

reviewed by Rob Content

Baise-Moi

Feminist screed or fetish-fuckathon?
Best to flip a coin.

Baise-Moi’s street credentials are impeccable. Codirector Coralie Trinh Thi is a former porn star, as are the two leading actresses. The film has the look and feel of Denmark’s Dogme school; it’s shot in video rather than film; employs natural light; and uses "normal people" instead of high-falutin’ stars. Most daring, it includes many scenes of penetrative, close-up sex, with a particularly brutal rape scene that has brought the wrath of censors around the world. Canada, always free with the scissors, has simply lumped it in with the porn, refusing to let it be shown in Ontario in mainstream theaters despite an enthusiastic reception at last September’s Toronto International Film Festival and testimonials by such luminaries as Atom Egoyan. That it’s getting a release in America at all is more than a little surprising.

reviewed by Gary Morris
Bright Lights Film Journal

Lumumba
Except for Gilles Pontecorvo's Burn, Raoul Peck's Lumumba is the only film to explore neocolonialism in the depth it deserves. But unlike Burn, Lumumba deals with real people and real events—in this case, the conspiracy of US intelligence, the Belgian government and local traitors to keep an African people in chains despite the formal independence won in 1960.

reviewed by Louis Proyect

Office Space
The heart of all comedy is rage, and beneath its broad caricatures, this is an angry film, condemning not just the absurdities of the workplace but its humiliations and cruelty. It's also one of the funniest movies to come out in years.

reviewed by Tim Kreider

Chunhyang
American film reviewers are by-and-large dead to both poetry and to politics. Their fixation upon the elements of romance and adventure has allowed even the most obvious elements of political subtext in a host of films to go unnoticed. Chunhyang dramatizes a view of the world in which the love of justice is even more important than romance. And that's really not such an odd idea — unless of course you've grown up believing American film criticism.

reviewed by Rob Content

Southern Comfort
Kate Davis's recent documentary about a southern man who used to be a woman, and who is dying of ovarian cancer, transcends predictable analysis and forces the viewer to reconsider their most reflexive preconceptions and stock responses about gender roles and relationships.

reviewed by Tim Kreider

Series 7
A reality-based TV show in which six contestants hunt each other to death in order to gain prize money and their freedom may not sound like a subtle or novel concept—and it isn't. But Series 7 is still a funny, brutal and frightening film that manages to pull of the difficult feat of satirizing a genre while compelling an audience to care about the characters and their revelations.

reviewed by Tim Kreider

The Straight Story
Virtually every critic that reviewed this offbeat offering missed the point entirely: nothing—especially a David Lynch film—is ever straight.

reviewed by Rob Content
& Tim Kreider

Eyes Wide Shut:
A Critical Reassessment
"The real pornography in this film is in its lingering, overlit depiction of the shameless, naked wealth of end-of-the-millenium Manhattan..."

reviewed by Tim Kreider

Smoke Signals:
A History of Native Americans
in Cinema
"Now is the time when thoughtful and determined Native Americans are flying over the cuckoo's nest that is Hollywood. Indian filmmakers and actors intend to suffocate the old images and convert the screen Indian into a real Indian. Tonto, you may yet have your revenge."

review essay by Ward Churchill

Pink Flamingos
25th Anniversary Edition
Cinema, like any art form, has its milestones—bringing up the literal rear of the pack is John Waters's Pink Flamingos, which, thanks to an eager star and an accommodating poodle, became the first commercial feature to end with the star eating dogshit.

reviewed by Gary Morris

Film Links we Like FreeSpeechTV BrightLights Film Journal ifilm.com atomfilms Viewing Race

From LiP Magazine [www.lipmagazine.org] Media Dissidence & Uncivil Discourse Since 1996

"The Critics Agree—"

Ever notice how often the critics agree? Ever notice how often they're unperceptive, obtuse, or just plain wrong? Do you get frustrated when they fawn over a film like Forrest Gump, then ignore or make clever fun of films you can't stop recommending to your friends?

LiP's reviewers understand how to watch movies, and how to interpret their visual metaphors instead of blindly listening to dialogue. We take movies as seriously and read them as closely as literary critics do books. Our editors make one promise: After reading our reviews, you'll want to watch the films we review. If you've already seen them, you'll want to watch them a second time, and you won't see them the same way.

"Anyone can involve the audience emotionally," complained George Lucas, who would know. "Just show them a kitten, then wring its neck." Film tends to be an authoritarian medium, ingratiating and manipulative, appealing to the emotions and going for the uncritical response. Like the rest of LiP, our film reviews will resist the authoritarian impulse. We'll be focusing instead on films that respect their audience, that expect us to meet them halfway and actively engage with them as works of art: in short, films that take some interpretative effort to understand.

Of course, they'll have to beguile us into making that effort; that is, they have to be intriguing, beautiful, and fun enough to make us want to see them again and try to figure them out. (The only thing worse than a bad Hollywood blockbuster is a bad independent film—you know the kind—that arrogantly demands that you try harder to understand it while boring you to the point of fury. We will have none of this.) We may also occasionally direct our interpretive methods against films that might prefer to be taken at face value, to expose their hidden agendas and propagandistic messages.

But we're primarily interested in films that, like the great works of literature before them, take on the urgent social issues of their time, specifically the sorts of politically touchy and unmarketable issues that most commercial entertainment takes pains to avoid acknowledging at all—wealth, class, race, gender—the very issues LiP is dedicated to exploring. Which is not to say we'll only review films whose "message" we endorse, or use them as excuses to grind our ideological axes, or bend over backwards to "find" the same predictable agenda in everything. It's not like we're a bunch of dogmatic assholes. But we will be showing you the surprising and subversive political subtexts of films—all the things the critics agreed to ignore.

Submissions from writers who share our critical methods and philosophy are welcome. We're interested in new insights into old films as well as alternative readings of current ones. Reviews should be around 2000 words in length. Send reviews to Rob Content at rcontent@erols.com.

—May 7, 2001, Rob Content, Tim Kreider, Boyd White