Going to Extremes, Part One: Pericles (Some Mouldy Tale)
Drama is about extremity. This can centre on one person, or on his/her society or both. Without it drama cannot exist. But what if the world’s greatest dramatist starts testing[…]
Category: Writers & Critics
Comedy · Directors · Essays · Writers & Critics
Team Apatow and the Tropes of Geek-Centered Romantic Comedy
“Nowadays, schlubs play schlubs and audiences are expected to accept that geeky males can win over classically beautiful women. What does it tell us about the state of gender relations, sexual fantasy, and desire that a physically average geek like Seth Rogen can trump an iconically attractive and glamorous star like Cary Grant?”
Actors & Personalities · Writers & Critics
“We’ll Roll in the Hey Nonny Nonny!” Antic Antiques to Keep a Drowsy Emperor Awake, if He’s Not Too Sleepy
Some of the films of Noël Coward, some of the films of Ernst Lubitsch, and one of the films of Oscar Wilde
In Illuminated Memory of Richard Matheson (February 20, 1926 – June 23, 2013)
“Matheson was able to get right to the heart of the matter, to expose the raw nerve at the base of our collective paranoia and atomic anxiety, to realize all inner demons were projections outward, and vice versa…”
Reading Movie Reviews as a Religious Experience: Roger Ebert as the Rashi of Cinema
“The wonder of life and the resources of imagination supply all the adventure you need.” — Roger Ebert (in his Great Movies review of My Neighbor Totoro)
“Drunk Literature”: On Malcolm Lowry, John Huston, and Under the Volcano
“Somebody threw a dead dog after him down the ravine.”
Bright Lights on Bright Lights!
EDITOR’S NOTE: Our innate modesty and abhorrence of insularity, self-referencing, self-reflexivity, and, well, self-everything would normally prohibit us from publishing this piece. But we were so captivated by this tribute[…]
“Gatsby? What Gatsby?” Discovering Fitzgerald’s Most Elusive Character, in the Novel and the Movies
“When I told my students I have a harder time than that shrugging off Hollywood’s misguided adaptations and revisions, one said, ‘Why? Whenever you want to, you can still go back and read the book.'”
Interviews · Writers & Critics
Political Filmmaking and America’s “Poisoned Chalice”: The Banned Gore Vidal Interview
“He fears the ‘Party of God’ because he reads their ‘cultural elite’ and ‘family values’ rhetoric as ‘code for [attacking] the media, the Jews, the homosexuals, the adulterers, people who do not believe in God, people who are better looking than you are — put it all together, you have a poisoned chalice.'”
Counterculture · Essays · Writers & Critics
On the Road to the Ninth Circle of Hell: Easy Rider Merges Lanes with Dante’s Inferno and Faust
How Easy Rider laid the groundwork for Wild Hogs
The Annihilative Evils of the Polka Tremblante: Fragments on Rhetoric, Naiveté, and Inevitable Helixes
“Leontev’s rhetoric, though overblown, might strike a chord in those who lament the replacement of honest, inspired amateurism with the interchangeable bodies of the trousered professional class. But wait . . . the polka tremblante?”
Bodies Politic/Body Politics: The Political and the Personal in Contemporary Film Essays
“Your body is a microcosm of all existence.” — Death: A Love Story
Producers & Studios · Writers & Critics
Talk Is Cheap: On Aaron Sorkin’s Moral Compass
“You want answers?” “I want the truth!” “You can’t handle the truth!” — A Few Good Men (1992), screenplay by Aaron Sorkin
Interviews · Writers & Critics
Of Time and Place: An Interview with Writer Jon Raymond on Meek’s Cutoff and HBO’s Mildred Pierce
“In Meek’s Cutoff — about a community making decisions based on limited information, confronting their own attitudes toward the unknown — it seemed appropriate that the movie would end on a moment of unknowing, incompletion.”
Essays · Horror · Writers & Critics
The Cinematic Islands of Dr. Moreau: Beasts, Monsters, and Mad Scientists
“There are monsters that are born with a form that is half-animal and half-human . . . which are produced by sodomists and atheists who join together, and break out[…]
Music & Musicals · Writers & Critics
It Would Make John Waters Proud, But Shakespeare? Musical Spectacle and the Missing Bard in Hamlet 2
“Coogan’s representation of Jesus, ascending high above the audience, is far removed from the silly, sexy Jesus who sang to us earlier wearing a wife-beater.”
Marxism Goes to the Movies: On Pioneering Activist Film Critic Harry Alan Potamkin
“He’s keenly sensitive to the immense possibilities of film as not merely an aesthetic medium, but given its mass influence, a social one as well.”
Directors · Essays · Writers & Critics
Memos from a Chinese Laundry: Reading Josef von Sternberg
“I would very much like to attract others into my world, but my world is not the world of crowds, though the crowds have often lined up before my world.”1
The Mysteries of Adaptation: Michael Chabon’s Novels Onscreen
Wonder Boys is a wonder; The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, not so much
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