NEW Mangiotto material can be previewed upon release at:
Film Freak Central
interviews, award-winning retrospectives, reviews (book, dvd, theatrical), festival coverage, and the occasional essay

explore the Film Freak Central interview:

David Cronenberg
a career retrospective featuring capsule reviews of all of his films plus commentary from the master himself

Peter Mullan director of Orphans and The Magdalene Sisters
Cliff Curtis star of Whale Rider
Heather Donahue, star of The Blair Witch Project
Andrew Jarecki, director of Capturing the Friedmans
Scott McGehee and David Siegel, co-directors of The Deep End and Suture
Bruce Beresford director of Driving Ms. Daisy, Breaker Morant, and Black Robe
Alexander Payne, director of About Schmidt, Election, and Citizen Ruth
Valeria Golino, actress
Richard Kwietniowski, director of Love and Death on Long Island and Owning Mahowny
James Foley, director of After Dark, My Sweet, Glengarry Glen Ross, At Close Range and Confidence
George Hickenlooper, director of Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse and Man from Elysian Fields, and author of Reel Conversations
Austin Chick and Petra Wright, director and star of XX/XY
Lisa Cholodenko, director of High Art and Laurel Canyon
Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, directors of Lost in La Mancha and The Hamster Factor
Philip Seymour Hoffman and Todd Louiso star and director of the tragically underseen Love Liza
Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn, directors of the amazing Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner
David Cronenberg personal hero and one of the most influential and innovative genre filmmakers of all time
Sam Jones - director of one of 2002's best documentaries: I Am Trying to Break Your Heart
Paul Schrader - legendary screenwriter/director of such seminal works as Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and his own, underestimated, Affliction
David Gordon Green & Paul Schneider - directer/writer/star of 2000's George Washington and this year's All the Real Girls
Ray Liotta, the star of Scorsese's Goodfellas, Demme's Something Wild, and the upcoming Narc
Phillip Noyce - Aussie director of Dead Calm, the first two Jack Ryan films, and 2002's Rabbit-Proof Fence and The Quiet American
Chen Kaige - legendary Fifth Generation Chinese filmmaker (Farewell My Concubine, Together)
Cory McAbee mad genius writer/director of The American Astronaut
John Sayles perhaps the most important non-Cassavetes independent voice in the history of American cinema
Babak Payami writer/director of the Iranian absurdist/transcendentalist film The Secret Ballot
Cole Hauser new hunk on the block
George Butler director of Pumping Iron and The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Journey
Marlo Poras director of the fantastic documentary Mai's America
Tim Bui - co-writer/director of Green Dragon
Jill Sprecher - co-writer/director of 13 Conversations About One Thing
Phil Alden Robinson - director of Field of Dreams, Sneakers and the upcoming Sum of All Fears
John McKay - writer/director of Crush
Angels in the Multiplex - director Peter O'Fallon (A Rumor of Angels) and producer and star Louise Goddard and John-Paul Macleod (Taliesin Jones)
Heavy Hitters of the New Argentine Cinema - director Juan Jose Campanello (Son of the Bride) and writer/director Fabian Bielinsky (Nine Queens)

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"We must not leave the topic of the reading of the middle class without noting the impact of its audienceship on American prose style. Its terror of ideology, opinion, and sharp meaning, which we've seen before in its visual tastes, are the main cause of the euphemism, jargon, gentility, and verbal slop that wash over us. The middle-class anxiety about the "controversial" is the reason The New Yorker rarely runs unfavorable book reviews: too upsetting to the clientele, the way piquant, pointed prose might be. Better for language first to ingratiate and finally, by waffling, vagueness, and evasion, to stay out of trouble altogether. The prose demanded by the middle class is preeminently that of institutional advertising, and it's manufactured by the most cunning corporations to imitate the faux-naif sound of The New Yorker's "Talk of the Town." . . .

Where the more fortunately educated read to be surprised, the middle class reads to have its notions confirmed, and deviations from customary verbal formulas disconcert and annoy it. . . the middle class hates and fears language." -Dr. Paul Fussell (National Book Award winner, National Book Critics Circle Award winner), p. 146-7, Class.

"Without spectators, the world would be imperfect: the participant, absorbed as he is in particular things and pressed by urgent business, cannot see how all the particular things in the world and all the particular deeds in the realm of human affairs fit together and produce a harmony, which itself is not given to sense perception; and this invisible in the visible would remain forever unknown if there were no spectator to look out for it, admire it, straighten out the stories, and put them into words." -Tom Stoppard, Travesties