Public Notice - Self-Styled Siren, Flickhead, Coffee & Cinemarati

We're flattered. If you're not already reading Self-Styled Siren, Flickhead, Coffee, Coffee and more Coffee and Filmbrain on a semi-regular basis, well, you should be. Add to that list the impressive Cinemarati community, where Siren and Filmbrain began contributing recently. Updated links accordingly to right.

With good images and fine commentary, film blogs tend to outweigh music blogs in terms of information and critical heft, contrary to what mainstream critics would have you believe. There's a, dare I say, lingua franca among film critics that doesn't exist in music criticism; the canon is embraced in an entirely different way, although I may be too charitable there. As an auto-didact who's got but nary three years experience with cinema, I have to believe that there's room for us amateurs too. A video clerk's sense of auteur theory, combined with a democratic familiarity with being surrounded by movies, imparts considerable humility when it comes to the expansive catalogue of titles now available on DVD.

As an addendum, I hasten to add that Cinemarati is a site like Daily Kos, except with an aesthetic compass. I can think of few more interesting internet "communities" that actually further critique through recursive processes. This comes as no surprise as they are serious about maintaining their structural integrity: they have by-laws!

Peter Nellhaus at Coffee Coffee, etc. recently looked at Fukasaku's Street Mobster which I saw about a month ago. What I don't understand about Fukasaku was his shift from remarkably realistic crime/yakuza epics to the gory romances of his later movies, exemplifed by Battle Royale. I can see that he might have exhausted the yakuza genre and would want to move on, but films like Battle Royale, while amazingly entertaining for their suspense and bloodlust, really lack Fukasaku's real talent as a storyteller willing to work within the constraints of historical reality.