A multi-decade existence split between the coastal cities of Los Angeles and Boston, writer-teacher-designer-basketball player-film historian-cat lady Jason Carpenter has invested heavily in what a life in cinema and media affords, principally a sensibility that lies on the spectrum exactly halfway between Sherlock, Jr. and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which some have come to note as being thirteen minutes into Godzilla vs. Hedorah the Smog Monster. Need academic evidence of Carpenter’s worth to the film world? You’re that person? Behold: a master’s in film studies and contributions to Bright Lights Film Journal, ArtsEditor.com, FunnyorDie.com, and the Jason Reitman film gulp. 
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[…]
Within his mise-en-scène and competing thematic fronts, Wilder makes a case that true partnership – born of respect, admiration, and genuine affection – finds actual sex dispensable or, simply, fleeting.[…]
