Dads of Great Adventure: A Guide to Cinema’s Post-Apocalyptic Hyper-Parent
Those people had names! Families!
Author: Erich Kuersten
Erich Kuersten is the gonzo-theorist behind the Acidemic Journal of Film and Media as well as an award-skipping filmmaker and freelance film and music critic whose work can be found in Bright Lights, The Weeklings, Slant, Modern Drunkard, McSweeney's, Scarlet Street, VHJ, Daily Om, Muze, Divinorum Psychonauticus, and Midnight Marquee. Write him at erichk9@aol.com. He lives in Brooklyn.
The Last American Ruffalo: Lisa Cholodenko’s Lesbian “Homespun” Family Values
“In order to rectify her own misery with judgmental, shrewish wino Annette, Julianne Moore has to suffer the shame of being caught cheating, the way Dick Cheney had to suffer the blame for all the waterboarding we needed to squash terrorism.”
Erich Kuersten’s Top Ten of 2010
2010, the year movies crept off the screen and into the floorboards, the handhelds, the flats and the 3-Ds. Counting down to doomsday 2012, I hope more films like THE BLACK SWAN and ENTER THE VOID come our way.
Katherine Heigl: Infantilization’s Poster Girl
Third wave feminism was bad enough with its “I’m a princess who should be spoiled rotten and pampered AND treated with full equality to men” cake and eating it[…]
The New Lurid: Cinema’s Rape Disavowal Fantasy
“They rapin” everybody out here.” — Antoine Dodson
A Gay Pride Parade Goes Down SCARLET STREET: Remembering Richard Valley 1949-2007
But I soon thought it through and realized any initial discomfort on my part was more a realization of the shoe being on the other foot… why shouldn’t beefcake images be as important in a magazine as the cheesecake? Both were represented pretty well on Valley’s beat: Scarlet Street was/is, is beyond any agenda in itself.
Festivals & Awards · TV & Streaming
MTV 2010: You’ll Believe a Big Fat “Bleeep” Can Fly
And how can you not love that Tom Cruise has made the foul-mouthed coked-up Jewish producer-type into a stock comic expression of nothing less than the highest level of Nietzschean ubermenschood in the form of his TROPIC THUNDER role, Les Grossman?
Tivo Alert: FACE BEHIND THE MASK (1941) 8 AM Monday Morning on TCM (5/24)
The pathos is never maudlin or icky, but rather soothing (thanks to Lorre’s velvety vocal delivery), creepy and a little post-modern – with Lorre’s own weird real life looks keeping him from ever ‘getting the girl’ no matter how many movies he’s in.
Bigger Than Life: Nicholas Ray in the Life of the Gray Flannel Darkness
“Art, entertainment, and genuine fear and tragedy rarely all filter down into a deceptively ‘normal American family film’ with such quiet desperation.”
In Praise of Dangerous Men: Patton (1970)
“The very idea of losing is hateful to Americans.”
Essays · Exploitation & Erotica · Horror
Someone to Fight Over Me: Feminism, S&M, and the Daemonic in Twilight
“The pain is my only reminder that he [Edward] was real.” — Bella (Kristen Stewart)
Repo Men on DVD
Could any film hit closer to our cultural amygdalae than Repo Men? Millions of people have seen the “American Dream” crumble before them during the Great Recession and can’t help[…]
Girlies and Spider Babies living down the Lane
This spring, I’m all about homicidal nymphets, and wouldn’t you know it, so is Stacie Ponder at Final Girl, who’s hosting a big SPIDER BABY event at her Final Girl[…]
Charge of the White Elephant
What Jacksin’s doin’ with line and cullah goes beyond abstrackshin.
Book review: Femme Fatale, by Dominique Manon and James Ursini
Femme Fatale: Cinema’s Most Unforgettable Lethal Ladies, by Dominique Manon and James Ursini. New York: Viking, 2009. Paperback $24.95, 400pp. ISBN: 0-87910-369-8. Hammer Glamour, by Marcus Hearn. London: Titan Books, 2009. Hardcover, $29.95,[…]
Towards a New Cinema of Castration: I Spit on Your Grave and Only Angels Have Wings
“Peer pressure is either a boon or a bitch with the power to destroy the world, or save it.”
Who are Parents? Parents are the ones who are ALWAYS there
I’ve written a lot about the decline of the “Father” in genre film–from tough WW2 vet to tough but loving 70s hedonist to needy, emasculated single dad of the 21st[…]
Tortured Longing is the new coke
I can feel the Twilight zeitgeist in the air tonight, perhaps it’s because I live across from the cinema and the line around the block and I hear them out[…]
The Beautiful and the Darned: Avenging TWILIGHT
It’s massively popular, it’s ridiculously mopey, yet it’s also brooding, purple and relatively un-headache-inducing… in short, it’s everything you hate and love about Seattle if you ever tried to move[…]
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