The House Next Door

1. "Jules and Jim, Resilience, and Memories of My Nervous Illness": House writer and Slant Magazine editor Ed Gonzalez's inaugural reviews in his more frequent role as a Village Voice film section contributor.

["A woman is a woman to Godard, but Truffaut saw deeper. Catherine is autonomous, using her sex as leverage to claim a man's sense of freedom. Truffaut doesn't typecast Catherine as a feminist or a repudiation of one. She is wild, passionate, maybe even a little mad, but always straight—which is to say, she is more real than anyone in the film's carnival of souls. But she is above all a romantic, and like another famous Catherine familiar to fans of Emily Bront and Kate Bush, her love is potentially metaphysical. Daring us to understand her, Catherine shatters traditional views of women, just as Jules and Jim's visual panache destroyed conventional opinions of film art."]

***
2. "Green Lantern creator dead at 91": From CNN.com.

["Martin Nodell, the creator of Green Lantern, the comic book superhero who uses his magical ring to help him fight crime, has died. He was 91. Nodell died at a nursing home in Muskego, Wisconsin, on Saturday of natural causes, his son Spencer Nodell told The Associated Press on Tuesday. He previously lived in West Palm Beach. Nodell was looking for a new idea for a comic book in 1940 when he was waiting for a New York subway and saw a train operator waving a lantern displaying a green light, said Maggie Thompson, senior editor of Comics Buyer's Guide."]

***
3. "The year women broke": From the Quiet Bubble blog.

["What’s important about 2006 is that it’s the year that women cartoonists reached critical mass, both in the marketplace and in the press. In terms of critical attention, and mostly fawning at that, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Marisa Acocella Marchetto’s Cancer Vixen, Miriam Katin’s We Are On Our Own, and Marjane Satrapi’s Chicken with Plums were clearly the hits of the year. (Bechdel was interviewed and profiled so often that ¡Journalista! started linking to pieces on her as “yet another Alison Bechdel interview.”) It’s telling that, as with nonfiction prose in the country, it’s the memoir comics that get the most attention. In Fun Home, Bechdel intertwines the story of her closeted father with her own coming-out during college. Marchetto’s comic portrays her (successful) struggle with breast cancer in 2004. Katin’s memoir (the best of the bunch in this paragraph) tells the story of her Jewish mother’s fleeing of Budapest during WWII, one step ahead of the Nazis, and with the Russians looming ahead. Satrapi’s work, although a fiction, takes her uncle’s death as its starting point."]

***
4. "Critics say Christian game glorifies violence": Left Behind THE FLAMETHROWER!!! The kids love this one.

["Targeted largely at conservative Christians, it’s a violent video game with a difference: Combatants on one side pause for prayer, and their favored interjection is “Praise the Lord.” Critics say “Left Behind: Eternal Forces” glorifies religious violence against non-Christians. Some liberal groups have been urging a boycott, and on Tuesday they urged Wal-Mart to withdraw the game from its shelves. However, Troy Lyndon, CEO of Left Behind Games Inc., defended the game as “inspirational entertainment” and said its critics were exaggerating. He expressed greater concern about poor reviews from some video-game aficionados, saying the company would offer a free technical upgrade by Dec. 24."]

***
5. "Unwelcome Guest: For Your Condescension": Fernando F. Croce on For Your Consideration, Bobby, Happy Feet, and The Nativity Story.

["Sooner or later, every satirical wag gets lazy and bitch-slaps Hollywood. For Christopher Guest, it was sooner: His 1989 directorial debut, The Big Picture, had a film-school naïf being taught to whore himself in Tinseltown while feigning integrity, and now consider For Your Consideration the result of a lesson well-learned. Ghosts from the past kick things off, a glimpse of Bette Davis flooding a TV screen in Jezebel while a has-been actress (Catherine O'Hara) forlornly mimics the words to herself; O'Hara then drives to the studio, only for a gate guard to clinch her Norma Desmondian role by mistaking her for somebody else, probably a more successful thesp. Human self-delusion in the face of aging and mediocrity has been Guest's theme -- the rock 'n' rollers in This Is Spinal Tap (Rob Reiner directed, Guest provided the authorial voice), the wee community-theatre folks in Waiting for Guffman, and the dog-owners in Best in Show are clueless to their own absurdities, with the ensuing mockery cloaked as oddball-celebration. Guest's previous picture, A Mighty Wind, deepened, expanded this concept by adding heft not just to the characters' achievements (their songs were actually pretty good), but also to their dreams, so that caricature might suddenly give way to reveal flesh and blood. But For Your Consideration is back to snark with a vengeance, a condescending (and not funny) crotch-punch that pretends to deride Hollywood's hype-juggernaut and Oscar hunger while in reality only punishing the schmucks who dare to hope and dream."]
______________________________________________________
"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.