Drama · Memoir · Philosophy
After Love: Alan J. Pakula’s The Sterile Cuckoo
FROM CABIN C AT OUDIN’S COURT COTTAGES I just awoke, and wondered where you were. It was the strangest feeling, like I really expected you to be there. Eventually my[…]
Author: Steve Johnson
Steve Johnson lives, works, and writes in Cleveland, where he formerly published the incomparable zine Delirious.
The Last Man on Earth: Drama of a Lifeless Ordinary
“… the living being is only a species of the dead.” – Nietzsche * * * Dead Man. Dead Man’s Curve. Dead Man on Campus. Dead Man Walking (1988). Dead[…]
Ti West Is Pregnant (On the Low-Budget Auteur of The Roost, The Innkeepers, and House of the Devil)
A reluctant genre force who admits his pictures start out as regular films but turn into horror movies much the same way he describes the process of filmmaking itself as[…]
52 Shades of Gone: Gone, Goner, Gone-est Girl
Every failure, every road not taken is a Gone Girl all its own, Regular Amy’s story a machine for the draining away of these idealizations till she and we are[…]
Directors · Exploitation & Erotica
Pure Auteurness: Bert I. Gordon in the BIG World
What better way to celebrate Halloween than with Bert I. Gordon, budget-compromised auteur of War of the Colossal Beast, Earth vs. the Spider, Picture Mommy Dead, Empire of the Ants,[…]
Directors · Exploitation & Erotica · Horror · Reviews
The Devils (the Angels): Sympathy for John Landis
“I can always make something work, if I have a camera.” – John Landis There are two John Landises. There’s the director equally at home with comedy as he is[…]
Hollywood Daedalus: The Robert Wise of Audrey Rose
Befitting a great film architect, Robert Wise gave good prologue. The beauty of a prologue well executed is in more than setting a mood or tone or offering simple backstory[…]
A Fragment of Seeking: Curtis Harrington’s Night Tide
“When Ellen Sands, the land girl who vies for his affections, sees Johnny off, the implication is that she’ll be a soft place for him to land when he comes down from his guilty obsession over Mora; her offer of coffee on his way out is as Ariadne’s gift to Theseus of the thread of consciousness that would lead him out of the minotaur maze.”
Experimental & Underground · Reviews
Getting into Curtis Harrington’s Head: Flicker Alley and Drag City Release the Avant-Mainstream Director’s Experimental Shorts
“Being fascinated with the occult, Harrington would surely have recognized that by beginning and ending his life work with the same story he was drawing a mandala around that life, making it as self-contained a thing as one of his films, all of which belong to the “trance” tradition whose introspective mien establish the work as occurring within a given consciousness walled off in some way from the natural world.”
Actors & Personalities · Directors · Essays
Love of Sophia: Lost in Translation, Transcendence, Transfiguration
“Translation is at best an echo.” – George Borrow
Directors · Exploitation & Erotica · Noir
Life of Human Loss: Hugo Haas’s Strange Fascination
“Through his ability to improvise his own scenarios and engage others in their perambulations, Haas successfully negotiates the threat of circumstance that ensnared Pavel and, most always, wills out.”
Terms of Psychic Warfare: Brian De Palma’s Divided House
“What makes The Fury work in the end is the complementary sense that this conflict is part of the film’s very construction, so you can appreciate the audacity of the auto-da-fé.”
Counterculture · Directors · Documentaries · Interviews
Drawing from Life: Talking with Director George Hickenlooper
On Art, Identity, Families, Fragmentation, Medication . . . and Fulfillment
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