The first golden period of Chinese cinema, mostly in Shanghai, [...]

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By ALI NADERZAD – May 28, 2007It’s not a mystery: [...]

By ALI NADERZAD – May 27, 2007 The Cannes festival [...]

By ALI NADERZAD – May 18, 2007 Studied boredom has [...]

After Wong Kar-Wai’s My Blueberry Nights (starring Jude Law and Norah Jones) opened the 60th festival yesterday, David Fincher’s Zodiac screened for an international delegation of journalists early this morning at the Grand Theatre Lumiere. Zodiac, which already got its release in the US, is about the namesake serial killer who terrorized San Francisco’s Bay Area in the 70s only to disappear into anonymity; as the film progresses the gruesome murders become less significant than the growing divide and ensuing skirmishes over jurisdiction between the main law enforcement players. Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey, Jr., and Chloe Sevigny as Gyllenhaal's love interest star in it.

What is it about those fabulous mid-fifties icons? The three whose names instantly come to mind—James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, and the young Elvis—are as idiosyncratic as can be, unique, sans pareil, but remain evanescent. Stars from the previous decade were glamorous, talented, and they had heft. We love Cary Grant, Gregory Peck, Bette Davis or Katherine Hepburn but we don’t feel sorry for them. But the three named above carry with them a fragility, a loneliness, an otherworldly lack of fulfillment that keeps them in our hearts and minds half a century later. Of course, around the bright lights of the three-star pantheon of the mid-fifties shone lesser individuals who, in their heyday, were as famous and as beloved, though relegated to obscurity by our short memories.