Dads of Great Adventure: A Guide to Cinema’s Post-Apocalyptic Hyper-Parent
Those people had names! Families!
Category: Essays
Something That Festers: The Silence of the Lambs, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and the Visual Pleasures of Horror
“We’re drawn to and fascinated by horror because the genre reminds us that we have both outsides and insides, skin and guts, eyes and gray matter, ideas and appetites.”
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[…]
Comedy · Essays · LGBT & Queer
Between a Rock and a Soft Place: Queering/Queered Heterosexuality in “Career Girl” Films of the 1950s and ’60s
“Perhaps Hollywood, in trying to engage in queer possibilities for its narratives and with its audiences, could only put up a resistance to the binaries in the dominant culture through[…]
Essays · Exploitation & Erotica · Film Technology & History · Movie Theatres
Haunted Cinema: Movie Theatres of the Dead
“There are no start times, there are no intermissions . . . there is no beginning, there is no end.” The movie exhibition business has always been extremely volatile. The[…]
“Unique (and Just a Little Queer)”: Camping with James Bond
“We want to be Bond; we want to fuck Bond; we want to be Bond fucking.”
Freedom from the Pedomorphic Ideal: A Speculation on the Tragically Cute
“Beyond religion, we have resorted to a more modern neurosis to calm our terrors and complement our pretended ennui: cuteness.”
A Dog Day’s Night in Brooklyn: Revisiting Lumet, Pacino, and the ’70s in 2010
“My first exposure to the transcendent grit of Dog Day Afternooon, at the age of 13, may have aroused an inchoate urban longing.”
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.”
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[…]
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.”
Links + BSA
