Actors & Personalities · Essays
Short Takes: Acting: James Dean’s Clumsy Punch
“The time-and-place for Dean’s performances is always now, in the moment of its creation, and he resists any technique that obscures that fact.”
Category: Essays
Activist & Political · Essays · Exploitation & Erotica
Living the New High Life: A Current Note on Race and Class in America
Or Can Tea Party Porn Strike a Blow for the American Way?
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
Activist & Political · Drama · Essays
The Illusionist: Film Art and Political Power
“He tries to trick you. I try to enlighten you. Which is the more noble pursuit?” The Illusionist was released in 2006 to generally good reviews (the consensus seemed to[…]
Counterculture · Essays · SF & Fantasy
“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”: Avatar’s Psychedelic Fantasy
“What entertains us may be shaping us.”
The Mysteries of Adaptation: Michael Chabon’s Novels Onscreen
Wonder Boys is a wonder; The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, not so much
Maximum Security: Film Noir, Domesticity, and the Female Captive
“While films about men with dangerous jobs showed them returning home to supportive, contented wives, films that focused on domestic settings showed women caught in oppressive relationships or warped by the narrowness of their emotional lives.”
You Can’t Go Home Again: Mad Men and the American Memory
“In Mad Men, as in modern American politics, the past is a pre-lapsarian paradise to which it is imperative to return, and the fantasy is of those exiled from history itself.”
Black and White Orpheus: An Audio Visual Species
That still finds musicians easier to rob
Perverse Pianists: How They Do It
“Aldridge’s shoot is so striking because it purports to discover glamour in the mind of an unhinged woman: an associative path that has been cut by cinema.”
“It Seems Familiar but I Can’t Quite Remember”: Amnesia and the Dislocation of History and Gender in Random Harvest (1942)
“Whose stories do these films really tell?”
The New Lurid: Cinema’s Rape Disavowal Fantasy
“They rapin” everybody out here.” — Antoine Dodson
A Cinema of Satyagraha? A Client-Centered Approach to Film Spectatorship
“In our devotion to realism-as-catharsis, we’ve become so obsessed with psychologizing fictional characters that we forget we are the ones who need humanizing.”
Why Do We Crave Horror? Evolutionary Psychology and Viewer Response to Horror Films
“We do not realize that ‘normal’ behavior needs to be explained at all.” —Laura Cosmides “Monsters today seem to be everywhere, and they cannot be destroyed. ” —Stephen Prince
Essays · Historical & Epic · Music & Musicals · Writers & Critics
Boris Godunov in America: Notes on a Meyerhold Production Resurrected*
“My God! — cried out a querulous voice within me — is it possible that we, artists of the stage, are doomed by the materiality of our bodies to eternal servitude and the representation of crude reality?” — Stanislavsky, questioning his Realistic method after a failed 1904 production of symbolist one-act plays by Maeterlink2 “The stage is art . . . There’s a genre painting by Kramskoy in which the faces are portrayed superbly. What would happen if you cut the nose out of one of the paintings and substituted a real one? The nose would be “realistic” but the picture would be ruined.” — Chekhov, explaining to an actor why offstage sounds of croaking frogs and buzzing dragonflies would not render a 1898 production of The Seagull more “realistic”3
Documentaries · Essays · Experimental & Underground
Los Angeles in Theory and Practice: Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself
“In a powerful and precise encomium, Andersen extols the virtues of what he deems to be a kind of homegrown neo-realism.”
Essays · Noir · Writers & Critics
Ossessione: Shabby Little Shocker?
Or Advanced Guide to Cinematic Survival?
Outstanding Defense Mechanisms: The Phrenology of Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island
Shutter Island might be the only psychological thriller abetted by a lack of interest in the psyche.
Essays · SF/Fantasy · TV & Streaming
Minimalist Magic: The Star Trek Look
“By treating the style of the original series as integral to the show — and not as a kind of regrettable defect — we can get a better grasp on the Star Trek phenomenon itself.”
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