Meet the Macbeths: Again and Again and Again
Almost as though we’re addicted or something
Category: Essays
New Fathers, Old Conflicts? Patriarchal Politics in 3:10 to Yuma, Don’t Come Knocking, and Atmen
“Is emotional capacity, as figured by film, an entity of fixed dimension, so that if men are represented as more caring, women must be represented as caring less?”
(Re)Staging the Story: The Pre-History of Cinema
“Though most people in earlier times could not even have imagined the present role of science and technology, nor, even more implausibly, the apparently alternate life offered by the cinema and its recent offshoots, the human imagination refused to be tied down.”
Death of a President: The Last Temptation of Anti-Bush Critics
“Where many people watch a film for a true or faithful rendition of an historical event, I needed confirmation that the thing I was viewing was . . . made up!”
“Every Man and Woman Is an Island”: Modern Discontent in the Films of Wong Kar-wai
“Wong shows that certain modernized countries have been able to flourish economically because they have embraced globalization, but with powerful emotional consequences for their people.”
Asian · Essays · Exploitation & Erotica · Genres
Random Acts of Sensible Violence: Genre, Hong Kong Censorship, and the Brief Ascent of “Category III”
A New Solution to Herbert Marcuse’s Old Riddle
Indeterminate Position: Kechiche, Tragicomedy, and La Graine et le Mulet
“If Kechiche treats political tragedy, then, it is first by creating abundantly detailed, richly convincing comédie humaine, and nowhere is this more apparent than in what is justly considered his major achievement, La Graine et le Mulet.”
Two Cinematic Visions of the Inca Conquest: The Royal Hunt of the Sun and Aguirre: Wrath of God
“Both films suggest Europe has run aground spiritually, as they both depict the Catholic Church and its representatives to be as bloodthirsty as the conquistadors.”
La Bete Humaine: Runaway Train
“The train is a symbol for whatever you want it to be,” the film’s director, Andrei Konchalovsky, explains. “It can be viewed as a prison because they can’t get out of it, or considered as freedom because they escaped from prison on it, or considered as our civilization running out of control because no-one can stop it.”
Activist & Political · Essays · SF & Fantasy
The Numinous Automaton at the Center of Scorsese’s Hugo
“With the Uncanny one has reached the fringes of the Numinous.” — C.S. Lewis”Becoming a cyborg is the ultimate goal.” — Kevin Warwick on Singularity Hub
African American · Essays · LGBT & Queer
Postlude to a Kiss: Will Smith’s Performances of Race and Sexuality in Fred Schepisi’s Six Degrees of Separation
“Beneath its self-presentation as a satiric comedy of manners lie cogent interrogations of notions about race and class, the history of blacks in America, the limits of assimilation, the representations of black gay men, the nature of African American and Hollywood homophobia, and the fluidity of racial identity. Smith performs, resists, and usurps this character in order to effect certain cultural interventions and to further the cause of his public star identity.”
Lovers and Killers? Only on This Island
Which is why you and I must escape
Composers · Essays · Uncategorized
One Resurrected Drunkard: A Dialogue on Tony Palmer’s Testimony
“Palmer’s meticulously composed images hide the fact that this film is, in a sense, underdetermined, open to endless speculation; it is uncontrolled, savage, and thus, indeed, sometimes given to uncensored crudity.”
Actors & Personalities · Essays · War
Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair: Marlene Dietrich’s Star Persona and American Interventionist Strategies in Postwar Berlin
“I read so much about immigrants, how they must adjust to customs and the words of foreign lands. Maybe because I was never treated like an immigrant! Nobody made excuses for me. Not then – not now. Nobody cares about my roots.”1 – Marlene Dietrich, April 15, 1985
Carnivals of Our Fathers:” Media Movies” Before the Television Age
“That what we now call ‘the media’ could be a threat to society was not necessarily an unknown topic before television. From the 1930s, movies had recognized the manipulative side of the press.”
Activist & Political · Crime · Essays
“What Are Kingdoms but Gangs of Criminals?” The Politics of The Departed
“I don’t want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me.” – Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) in The Departed
Grounded in the World after Eden: On Nicholas Winding Refn’s Drive
The horror lingers and seeps; the feelings are sponged away.” — Anthony Lane, “Road Kill” The New Yorker September 26, 2011
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?”
Pseudo-Innocence and Encased Fantasies: Inside the Unconscious of the National Rifle Association
“I like this exhibit . . . it’s very familiar.”
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