Craig Seligman

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  film March 2005

  Mondovino

  JONATHAN NOSSITER’S documentary on the globalization of the wine industry, Mondovino—which opens this month in New York and Los Angeles—deals with its subject intelligently and ardently, but it makes its case against globalization so quickly (and so convincingly) that the ensuing amplification is anticlimactic. And there’s a lot of amplification. Nossiter, a filmmaker and professional sommelier, doesn’t take easy potshots at the internationalizing businesspeople he talks to; he lets the camera do it for him. Still, he listens carefully to both sides in the debate between the small vintners who

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  print March 2002

  PROSE AND CONS: PAULINE KAEL

  Pauline Kael, the New Yorker’s film critic from 1968 until 1991 (save for a brief hiatus in 1978, when she took a short-lived job at a Hollywood studio), died on September 3, 2001. With all of the predictable eulogizing behind us, we asked five critics—Gary Indiana, Annette Michelson, Geoffrey O’Brien, Paul Schrader, and Craig Seligman—to step back and take the long view on Kael’s celebrated if contentious career. Contributing editor Greil Marcus leads off by introducing Kael’s first published essay—inexplicably excluded from her eleven collections of reviews—which we reprint here in its

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  film May 1999

  François Truffaut

  BACK IN MY STUDENT DAYS I caught Jules and Jim practically every time it came around to a repertory house or college film society. I adored it, I knew it by heart, and I always walked out on a cloud, and so I wasn’t prepared, on seeing Francois Truffaut’s masterpiece several summers ago during a revival run at Film Forum, to be so blind-sided. For weeks the story of love derailed and friendship damaged wouldn’t leave me alone. I dreamed about it. I couldn’t get Georges Delerue’s tragic, lyrical music—in my book, the most perfect film score ever written—out of my head. And I puzzled over the

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  books December 1998

  D.A. Miller

  D.A. MILLER LOVES BROADWAY musicals in spite of himself—and the “in spite of himself” is what allows him to write about them without dying of embarrassment. In fact, he approaches his subject with eyes so narrowed that he begins Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical with what is essentially a repudiation of the form. The book belongs to the same subgenre—whatever it is—as The Queen’s Throat, Wayne Koestenbaum’s peculiar 1993 rumination on opera and gay men. Miller, who teaches literature at Columbia, writes from the same gay academic perspective, and like Koestenbaum he has

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  print October 1998

  ALL THAT GLITTERS: TODD HAYNES’ VELVET GOLDMINE

  Next month Velvet Goldmine, Todd Haynes’ cinematic secret history of glam rock, opens in theaters across the country. The most substantial production to date from the director of films including the cult classic Superstar and more recently Safe, Haynes’ new feature reimagines the moment in recent pop history as a libertine fantasy turned ’70s morality play dense with allusions, both musical and literary. Craig Seligman measures the returns against the ambition.

  Velvet Goldmine takes the history of glam rock—that brief, early-’70s burst of glitter that gave the world David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and a