From Hell: (The Hughes Brothers 2001) & Ghost World (Zwigoff 2001)

Film Reviews | Regular Feature the viewer of the harm that's being done. This year's academy award nominations suggest that good films, ranging from musicals to fantasy epics and psychological dramas, are still being made along with the potty comedies and action films from which studios make their big money. "Monster" begs the question as to whether Hollywood has ever made predominantly good films in any given era. The documentary lobs out the old doom and gloom axiom that fewer films are being made today than in the "Golden Era" but it doesn't address whether fewer means worse. Frontline also fails to consider the impact ofthe increased quality of television dramas and comedies in recent years. As a narrative form, television provides a very appealing outlet for many of the creative writers in Hollywood and gives its audiences ongoing and engaging story lines, which they can follow in the convenience of their living rooms. It may be that television is providing the thought provoking, serious and even good stories that people used to look to the cinema for. In any case, it makes sense that audiences might be more likely to accept film as an essentially spectacular, ifsomewhat shallow, format. Similarly , the documentary doesn't consider the impact that multinational studios will have on the US market's exposure to foreign films. One would hope that more of a variety of films from around the world could make their way into our theaters via the same corporate structures that distribute their domestic cousins. Finally, one wonders if the current business climate of megacorporations will survive in the post 9/1 1 and Enron world. It seems more apparent that Hollywood has not been completely "eaten," but that it has changed with the times and will change again. Tim Coleman Thomas Jefferson High School, LA From Hell (The Hughes Brothers 2001) & Ghost World (Zwigoff 2001) The movies and comics (both in strip and book form) have long merited comparison to one another. Indeed, the forms share something of a parallel early history, both undergoing their formative years in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Both forms quickly rose to great popularity, and both suffered the slings and arrows of critics leading up to and during the McCarthy period. The infamous 1954 Kefauver hearings in the U.S. Senate, in which the supposed influence of comic books onjuvenile delinquency was investigated, bore no small similarity to earlier similar attacks on the movie industry. In response to these attacks, both mediums instituted comparable self-censorship codes. But more thanjust the parallel history, the two forms have also often been compared aesthetically. In a 1988 essay, "Film and the Graphic Arts," for instance, Richard Shale summarized the frequent comparisons, noting how "both are primarily pictorial , and both employ sequentially ordered individual segments, either frame or panel, for a cumulative effect. . . both create the illusion of motion, convey an often dreamlike state, and are omnipotent in that they can do anything in any situation" (65). He further cites filmmakers who have been influenced by the comics: Alain Resnais, Federico Fellini, George Lucas, William Freidkin, and others. From the other side of the fence, comics scholar Scott McCloud suggested that the distinction between the two mediums was that "Space does for comics what time does for film," that is, that each film frame appears in the same physical space, whereas those of a comic are spatially juxtaposed (7). McCloud nonetheless goes so far as to suggest that "you might say that before it's projected, film is just a very very very very slow comic" (8). Even more notable, a 1973 book designed to instruct young students on how to critically view films was called Moviemaking Illustrated : The Comicbook Filmbook, and in explaining various film techniques used panels from various Marvel comic books, "assuming that a comicbook panel is closely analogous to a film shot" (Morrow and Suid n.pag.) While one might quibble about just how much film and comics are alike, there's no doubt that their similarities have played a part in what has been a long symbiotic relationship. It is no surprise that almost from the beginning the movie industry has...