The Bowdoin Orient

Dear Readers, As the semester is quick in closing, I've decided to leave you not with a film, but a list of books that you might peruse at your leisure over Winter Break.

Brunswick—Brunswick, Maine: approximate pop. 23,000. Every college town needs a watering hole where the fanciful bond between enlightened manners and democracy diminishes in drink. These are places we go to live vicariously, speak crassly and porch-philosophize about how life is absurd. This week, I learned it's best to do it with a clown.

Brunswick - Brunswick, Maine. Approximate pop.: 23,000. But that number needs revising if we consider those whose bodies dwell in Brunswick but can't be said to live here. It's (why not?) a rainy night. You're puddle hopping Maine Street in a mad dash to reach Gelato Fiasco before 11 p.m.

What happens when David Lynch produces a film directed by Werner Herzog with a supporting cast of cult classics Brad Dourif, Udo Kier and Grace Zabriskie?

In the 1950s, television combined film with the radio and the log-burning fire: a device emitting light, security and nightmares. Now, the laptop and headphones combine the film with the radio and the codex: for the first time, private viewing has become a widely assessable option.

In deference to a sensible student who publically denounced my use of the term "townie," I shall experiment with a few other words.

The editors requested that the first article of the film column directly relate to the Bowdoin community. By this request do they assume that there is a Bowdoin film community? Suffer me to ask another question: Why do I hear war drums reverberating beneath this simple observation, which I didn't intend to be accusatory? Why does a college need to be, like a prospective high school senior, well-rounded, diversified and in all categories excellent?

If you're walking down Maine Street toward the Androscoggin, turn left on Lincoln Street, pass the Church of Scientology, and find yourself standing in a pebble-packed courtyard. This is the antechamber of The Book Barn: a cluttered den of "trash" antiques, yellowed paper-backs, chipped enamels, tin gimcracks, a "Manhattan-Billiards Table," and, most fascinating of all, the owner himself —Richard Fisco. He's a townie you should meet.

I was in the movie theater recently, and in a moment of too little or too much drama, turned my eye to the screen itself; and so started thinking about rectangles

Each war or conflict acquires its own Hollywood aesthetic. Each aesthetic is susceptible to revision following how subsequent conflicts shaped the remembrance of previous ones: for instance, "Saving Private Ryan" dragged the mechanics of death back into the cold morning light following the hallucinogenic murk of Nam films

Werner Herzog's "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans" tanked in theaters weeks ago, so why am I talking about it now?

I want to make horror films for animals. I want to investigate an animal's world—how it appraises the visual field for predators, reacts to ominous noise, heights, bright lights, and optical illusion. I want to direct a film integrating my research into a virtual horizon that will accelerate the heart beat of a jungle pig.

After Billy Bob Thornton's moronic adaptation of All the Pretty Horses, we had to wait seven years for a director to brave one of McCarthy's moody, demotic bloodbaths. With No Country for Old Men, the Coen Brothers slyly improved the author's fatalist Regan-era gun-porno. Next on the list, I prayed, Terrence Malick would announce his involvement in a cinemascope framing of Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West.

When a captivating premise and a star-studded cast do not save a film, one must stand back and wonder what has gone horribly, horribly wrong. "The Men Who Stare at Goats" is like the unformulated subconscious of a rich artistic hippie who couldn't be bothered with newspapers, who awoke one morning and decided today was the day he should do his patriotic duty and bash the government. So he makes a film.

So often these days you register that moment when your interlocutor believes he or she has sized you up and dismisses your argument with a punchy phrase: "I know where you're coming from." They know your theory, and they know your life's work. Everything is illuminated. Time-tested arguments sizzle out like a flash in a pan.

Don't get me wrong. I abhor the wastefully prolonged marketing gimmick known as "childhood." To shelter children from the horrors of the world is to train them to turn a blind eye on the systemic violence that underpins their way of life. When Woody Allen imagined his adolescent avatar outside the principal's office dismissing human achievement as worthless muddle because of the impending supernova of our sun, we laughed at the absurdity.

A long, long time ago in the context of a Judeo-Christian symbolic field conceptual galaxies away, the 'Apocalypse' signaled a definitive rupture in space, time and human activity. Nobody 'survived' the apocalypse. Survival in terms of prolonging terrestrial life and preserving social systems wasn't even the point. 'Post'-Apocalypse, you'd be stuck in either heaven or hell with no hope of social mobility. The thought that a ragtag collective would continue to plod over a world abandoned by deities was heretical—plain and simple. It just wouldn't make sense.

Revolution! Paris! The 1960s! Repulsed by bourgeois propaganda, documentary filmmakers decided that truth was a matter of technique. Studio production values were out, guerilla film making in. A director’s greatest ambition? To become that “fly on the wall”: an objective observer minimally influencing his surroundings.

An inevitable drawback of a newspaper's commitment to the timely surfaces in the film reviews. With so many extraordinary movies doomed to commercial failure and oblivion, how can a responsible columnist capitulate to review the most recent, but lesser, material—passing over its predecessors in silence? Two gifts bestowed to the bride are something old and something new. They bless a happy marriage.