Lady Bird, Lady Bird, What the Heck Are You?
The internal structure of Lady Bird is, I think, unconsciously designed to evoke the monster mother and then deflect the daughterly hostility she provokes by turning things around to insist,[…]
Author: Joseph Aisenberg
Drama · Philosophy · SF & Fantasy
I am Blade Runner 2049, Blade Runner 2049 is I
“I was the shadow of the waxwing slain By the false azure in the window pane. I was the smudge of ashen fluff – and I Lived on, flew on,[…]
More
Activist & Political · Uncategorized · War
Zero Dark Thirty: Simple-Mindedness Dressed Up as Moral Complexity or Artistic Vagueness
“Does it all come down to the injustice of 3,000 people dying on 9/11? But at some level everybody went through that. Yet few of us thereafter felt the need to cast off every other human part of ourselves in order to find ‘justice,’ whatever that means in such contexts.”
Podcast Pleasures
There are all kinds, types, brands, bits and pieces of chit-chatter to plug one’s ear into should one wish to plumb the misty myths and mysteries of movies and all[…]
Bridesmaids Revisited
Last summer, in the midst of the The Hangover 2‘s disappointingly massive success, another comedy came along, which went on to become something of a triumph of box office girlpower,[…]
Mind over Mother: Ecstasy and Cruelty in Brian De Palma’s Carrie
“One reason for [Carrie’s] success in both print and film, I think, lies in this: Carrie’s revenge is something that any student who ever had his gym shorts pulled down in Phys Ed or his glasses thumb-rubbed in study hall could approve of. In Carrie’s destruction of the gym . . . we see a dream revolution of the socially downtrodden.”2
Books: Nightmare Movies, by Kim Newman
Nightmare Movies: Horror on Screen Since the 1960s, by Kim Newman. Bloomsbury Publishing, 1988, 2011. Trade paperback, 633pp. $45.00. The first film writing I ever came in contact with was one[…]
More Damned and More Heroic: The Enigma of Michael Corleone in Coppola’s The Godfather
“There’s something curiously remote and cool at the center of it, something slightly out of focus that makes this melodrama rather ambiguous and hard to assemble.”
Book review: Star, by Peter Biskind
Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America, by Peter Biskind. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010. Hardcover, $30.00. Peter Biskind’s plump new book about the life, loves and career of Warren Beatty, Star:[…]
Actors & Personalities · Books
Book Review: Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America
Peter Biskind’s plump new book about the life, loves and career of Warren Beatty, Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America (Simon & Schuster, 2010, 627 pgs., $30.00) has come up[…]
Here Come the Bromides: Living in the Era of the Bromantic Comedy
“Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.” — Vladimir Nabokov
My Dinner with Andre again…Again!
The post before last made me unearth these notes I once wrote after first seeing the film. Maybe they’ll add a little something here. Although from a stylistic perspective[…]
Actors & Personalities · Directors · Uncategorized
Falling in love again
Recently I re-watched Josef Von Sternberg’s The Scarlet Empress (1934) and found myself again surprised by the sickly gushy tasteless humor of the piece; had forgotten most of the film’s[…]
Actors & Personalities · Reviews
Come Back To The Five And Dime Sandra Bernhard, Sandra Bernhard
Once upon a time a strange sassy redhead with a big nose and giant lips cropped up as a pathetic obsessed fan in Martin Scorcese’s heavy-handed satire The King of[…]
OMF Godard There’s a Hitch in my stitch
Over time it becomes more and more obvious that as a species humans really aren’t much more than a bunch of monkeys. And our monkey brains, motivated with banana dreams[…]
Directors · Essays · Writers & Critics
Counter Clockwise: Or Lay Quiet Awhile with Ed and Id Molotov
Re-examining the Crossed Wires in Kubrick’s and Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange
Wes’s World: Riding Wes Anderson’s Vision Limited
Paging crackle, energy, and wit. Come in, please.
Links + BSA
