David, David, David

Your favorite glitzy journal of delicious East Coast snobbery, New York Magazine, has a slick new website, but the best new feature isn’t the design. No, it’s the not one, not two, but three dazzling new stories by the magazine’s newly anointed film critic (and Slate defector), David Edelstein.

His short entry on the Film Forum’s Boris Karloff retrospective is, in classic Edelstein fashion, wickedly (heh) adverb heavy:

The retrospective includes two early rarities, Graft and The Guilty Generation, as well as Karloff’s gleefully macabre Fu Manchu in the floridly racist The Mask of Fu Manchu. Only in John Ford’s The Lost Patrol do you catch him madly overacting as a religious zealot, although this bleak portrait of British soldiers picked off one by one in the desert is remarkably prescient and ripe for rediscovery

Sometimes, while composing my own articles, I wonder if it’s possible to love those busy little modifiers a little too much (though, admittedly, that rarely stops me), but then Edelstein shows up on the doorstep with another flighty rhetorical bouquet, and I’m reminded of how it’s really done.

And of course, there are two spirited new reviews, one of Tristram Shandy, the other of Manderlay. Both bubble over with the delightful little verbal flourishes and handy allusions that make his work so much fun. Really, what other big name movie critic could (or would) get away with writing the line “dig that freaky symbolism”? Other highlights include:

Tristram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story is a hall of mirrors that doesn’t tease the brain (it’s easier to watch than to read about) so much as goose it into submission. There is room in this conceit for almost any in-joke imaginable: barbed banter between “Coogan” and “Brydon” (“This is a co-lead.” “We’ll see after the edit”); psychosexual anxiety dreams; and impish parodies of Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, its Baroque symmetries diminished in these threadbare surroundings. Winterbottom goes in for Altman-esque hubbub and keeps the visual textures slapdash.

And less kind words for Manderlay…

Although it’s a listless affair, Manderlay is less noxiously reductionist than Dogville, if only because Von Trier regards African- Americans as both pathetically weak, conniving nonentities and victims. But no matter where he begins, his dramatic compass drifts toward the same pole: the sexual humiliation of his heroine (How could Daddy let you do this, Bryce?), Fascistic mob rule, and David Bowie warbling “Young Americans”—this time over photos of blacks being lynched. But it’s hard to get too worked up over racial injustice when a director has the temperament of a Klansman.

But the real treat (probably not the best word, but...) is his article on what he calls “torture porn.” Edelstein, one of the great defenders of stylized celluloid bloodshed, takes on our nation’s cinematic sadistic streak, applying his giddy jokester’s prose to a topic of real seriousness. As a critic, Edelstein has always understood the fine distinctions in cinematic violence—the careful lines that separate raw barbarity, caricatured bloodshed and graphic images with real moral weight. Here, that nuanced understanding continues: The notable thing about the article is that it neither attempts to excuse big-screen bloodletting nor simply dismiss it as some great, pure evil, another banal symptom of societal vulgarity and decay. And in the end, it even goes on to indict itself—there’s a self-reflexive understanding of the power and complexity of violent imagery that’s truly rare in cultural commentary.