As you know if you just read my review of I Know Who Killed Me, the new Lindsay Lohan movie, I’m a big fan of the actress, “troubled” as she may be. Not everyone else is. Entertainment Weekly has finally chimed in, knocking to lesser pages obits for Bergman and Antonioni in order to cover what the “industry” “thinks” about the future of her career. It’s another obit.

The older I get the less and less I want to know about the private lives of stars, or how a movie was made (EW’s cover story is a “making of” on The Bourne Ultimatum). Personally, I don’t care about their private lives because they are probably as shabby and unkempt as mine, and to know that is to be distracted from their performance. The problem with some of her recent films is that they expect that we know something about the real LL.

And if you look solely at the performances in her last few films you get a much different picture than the floozy paraded across the various loud tabloid shows or the garish gossip sites. Georgia Rule, in which she co-starred with Jane Fonda of all people, was blandly directed by Garry Marshall but does have an interesting narrative twist that has the viewers constantly changing their minds about Lohan’s character. She is not at all bad in it, and though it may be visually distinguished, it’s something of an underrated actrial effort. Chapter 27, one of the Mark David Chapman movies coming out that will probably go straight to video, is a somber entry in the “sympathy for the devil” genre where we are invited into the mind of a killer and try to understand them (I once met a psychiatrist who worked in the same state hospital where Chapman was held and he said that Chapman was a truly weird fellow). It’s basically a one man show with Jared Leto muttering to himself as an overweight Chapman. Lohan is only in three scenes, and she is charming, while having to follow an arc that takes her from curiosity about Chapman, whom she meets as a fellow Lennon fan outside the Dakota, to repulsion at his volatility (she’s not based on a real person). Curiously, Lohan appears much “smaller” and more delicate in this movie than in any other she’s made since The Parent Trap. And my views on I Know Who Killed Me are available elsewhere. Though she’s not necessarily bad in it, the film has a terrible script that no actress could get her voice around, and also it plays on the bad girl/good girl dichotomy that is the public Lohan.

If Lohan’s career is over (as Entertainment Weekly wants to crow), that is a real loss to the cinema, for reasons I state in my Voice review. But Lindsay Lohan’s career is less the tale of a star burning out and more a media feeding the ugly public appetite for the downfall of puzzled children.

I’ve been so busy lately finishing a book, keeping up with the new DVDs, watching The Bourne Ultimatum over and over, filing a VV package of reviews, and going to birthday parties (happy 29th, Mr. Walling!) that I haven’t even had a chance to grieve over the deaths of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni.

For persons of my generation, Bergman and Antonioni, along with Fellini, Resnais, De Sica, Godard, Truffaut, Tarkovsky, and a few others, were our first experiences of “art films.” I saw his films over and over from high school on, always in a context that Bergman’s films were among the highest achievements of modern cinematic art. One could argue, as Jonathan Rosenbaum does in a New York Times op-ed piece, that ultimately Bergman was something of an overrated middlebrow trafficker in vague religious angst which comfortable Manhattanites could relate to, making him the ideal avatar for Woody Allen, who aspires to please the same constituency, but what I find disturbing is how much Bergman seems to have fallen out of favor.

Mr. Rosenbaum claims that Bergman isn’t even taught in colleges anymore (though I wonder how he compiled that fact). Bergman’s career is one more diverse than his eulogizers, even the supportive ones, give him credit for having, and it changed dramatically in the early 1960s, transitioning from rather ornate and solid theater-based dramaturgy to a modernist, if you were, neo-realism. It may be that atheistic college profs, a conformist lot at the end of the day, fear teaching a man who wrestled with religious ideas, not wanting to open that can of worms in front of a classroom of who knows how many quick-to-report-you-to-the-dean Christers. Or it may be that Bergman just doesn’t excite their critical acumen the way that, say, Hitchcock, Ford, Preminger, or Lang do, directors one is more likely to find enshrined in critical, academic papers than Bergman. The Swede’s films don’t really need interpretation. There is no subtextual film lurking below the surface like a palimpsest as there is in Ford and Lang and Hitchcock’s commercial works, meta-films that are fun to eek out. Bergman’s films are easy to understand (except for, maybe, The Silence).

What is less well known, and thus unmentioned in the obits for both Bergman and Antonioni, is how much the two directors hated each other. Bergman disparaged Antonioni in interviews, claiming that Fellini was his favorite competitor, and Antonioni returned the favor, having nothing positive to say about Bergman. That they died so close to each other suggests a competition between them to see who could hold out longer; having won, Antonioni was free to collapse the following day.

The two artists may have been mutually repulsed by their similarities to each other. Both created highly stylized, formally beautiful works, usually with a gorgeous woman at the center, that decried the moral corruption of the modern world. Though I esteem both directors, as a viewer, right now in my life, I have to come down on the side of Antonioni. If I were to choose a film from one of their catalogs to watch for pleasure, it would be one from Antonioni. Ultimately, he had the bigger influence on me. His surrealism and odd, hard-edged view of modern life always struck me as realism. Take Blowup (though my favorite of his films is L’Eclisse). It’s sexy (Vanessa Redgrave running around topless but for a scarf and a man’s sports watch), it’s funny (the odd things the main character sees on the street), it’s suspenseful (the protagonist’s various forays into the park where a murder might have happened), and it feels like observed truth (I’ve been in dance clubs like the one the hero enters, where the audience sways like zombies except for the one out of control flailer).

On the other hand, I could also easily re-watch my favorite Bergmans, such as Winter Light or Passion of Anna. You know, it is hard to choose. And in the world of cinema, one shouldn’t have to. There is room enough for both Bergman and Antonioni.