1. "Bigmouth Strikes Again": From The Guardian, a strong-worded interview with the great, neglected filmmaker Terence Davies (Distant Voices, Still Lives; The Long Day Closes; The House of Mirth).
["Now you'll get money to make a film if you're a television comedian because people think lots of people will go. A Cock and Bull Story, a postmodernist comedy! What's that when it's at home? Is it funny or is it not? When I've seen Steve Coogan on television he's about as funny as tertiary syphilis."]
2. "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre": Walter Chaw of Film Freak Central on the new 2-Disc Ultimate Edition of Tobe Hooper's classic horror film.
["More than the typical bumpkin-reckoning horror conceit, it is, along with John Boorman's Deliverance from two years earlier, the classic example of a film that isn't about what it's ostensibly about. Look at the assiduous reduction of wheelchair-bound outcast Franklin (Paul A. Partain), a character who remains for the efforts of Hooper and Partain (apparently so irritating in real life that his cohorts were relieved by his on-screen demise) one of the most unapologetically irritating and pathetic figures in film and find noteworthy not that a handicapped person is allowed to be a self-pitying asshole, but that we're not let off the hook (as it were) for our own prejudices. Franklin is an anchor--and we're glad that he's dead, too.]
3. "Halloween on the Big Screen": See the night HE came home on the night HE came home.
4. "A Desolate Flute is Heard": Writer Chris Fujiwara looks at seven Korean films made during the Japanese colonial period.
["Some of the most exciting films at the 11th Pusan International Film Festival could be found in the Korean Retrospective section, which featured a new restoration of Shin Sang-ok's outstanding 1962 melodrama Arch of Chastity (Yeolnyeomun), along with seven recently rediscovered Korean feature films made during the Japanese occupation. The historical importance of these seven films—the only Korean features from that period that are known to survive—is, of course, inestimable, but all seven are rich and interesting aesthetically, formally, and ideologically. They are all films of ambiguity and internal contradiction. Here are some first impressions..."]
5. "Lane Strikes Out": Eric Kohn takes The New Yorker's Anthony Lane to task for his review of Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. (Be sure and read our own Ed Gonzalez's take on the House main page.)
["Look, Lane, you're totally entitled to hate on movies if it gets you the badass reputation you seem to relish without fail. But at least do your homework."]
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.
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