Emotionally forged by a life lived in both Los Angeles and Boston, the author cites the strange alchemy of Billy Wilder, Ray Bradbury, Richard Pryor, the Marx Brothers, Adventure Time, Ishirô Honda, Ruth Gordon, Terrence Malick, Dorothea Lange, Chuck Jones, John Steinbeck, and MF Doom as an eternal creative wellspring from which to "borrow" stuff. Jason is working on being passionately grateful for things and people, and also contributes to ArtsEditor.com. 
Billy Wilder (1906-2002) died on March 27, age 95. We honor him by reposting Jason Carpenter’s fine analysis of the master’s work, first published in Bright Lights in 2016. *[…]
As some of those character names echo, James portrayed a lot of villainy and savage desperation over the course of his career, inaugurated by his performance as burning racist Ralph[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Drama · Essays · Romance
QT’s films are commonly hurtling toward darkness, yet Once Upon feels like a repudiation, as much as a culmination, of his oeuvre. There’s a point in the experience where the[…]
What sneaker cinema is amounts to the sport shoe’s role in adding narrative or stylistic significance to a film’s mise-en-scene, themes, characters, or plot lines. And to be clear: ruby[…]
Considering Mitchum’s background, it’s forgivable to conflate his cinematic existentialist tough guys with his mythic, often dubious, real-life history. Some things are certain, though: Mitchum lost his father early, crushed[…]
The demon-summoning, LED laser-lens flares, medieval weaponry-fetishizing, churning synth and axe rhythms, and the overall simmer of curdling darkness are collective flickers of a recurrent, suffocatingly inescapable nightmare, one fueled[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy
The Brothers don’t enter into sanctimonious class systems, organizational institutions, or drawing rooms to assimilate and enjoy the fruits of its privileges either; they gain access, enact a savage modus[…]
Animation · Comics · Music & Musicals · SF & Fantasy · TV & Streaming
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 has infinitely more in common with the psychic quest for one’s identity, the yearning for belonging and friendship, and the no-rules imagination – sometimes[…]
The two films under examination here, The Night of the Hunter (1955) and Night of the Living Dead (1968), would have you believe that nothing harrows the soul like an[…]
