Activist & Political · Documentaries · Essays
Corn-Fed Culture: Living Large and “Eating Shit” in King Corn and Fast Food Nation
“The films analyzed here explore the (crude) question: what are the individual and social consequences of eating shit?”
Category: Essays
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?
The Pervert’s Guide to The Birds: Of Hitchcock, Žižek, the Maternal Superego, and Critical Confusion
“It is the search for explanation itself and the experience of the alien, disturbing, and frightening that thrills audiences.” In The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, directed and produced by Sophie Fiennes,[…]
Licence to Kill (1989): The Last James Bond Movie
Don’t worry or question; just consume – oh, and kill
When Day Follows Night: How Soaps Produce the Surreal
“Nothing is more satisfying than the feeling that a show is about to perform a move in a new direction, something it has been conspiring to do all along.”
A German Tragedy, Turned Absurd: Fassbinder’s Satan’s Brew
“Allowing his acidity unfettered reign, Fassbinder concocts one of the most blistering excoriations of despotism ever committed to film.”
Jean Renoir’s Toni: Unreal and True
And staying forever young
The Homing Eye: Comparing James Wolcott and Judith Williamson
“Where Williamson is highly critical of films that encourage us to consume lifestyles, Wolcott’s writing appears to be an appreciation of surfaces — in fact, his whole style can be read as an analysis of ’50s textures and design elements.”
Books · Essays · Uncategorized · Writers & Critics
On the Escarpment, Off the Escarpment: It Helps When the Love Is Strong
Especially when the lovers aren’t
Essays · LGBT & Queer · Writers & Critics
Contagious Homosexuality: Cruising and Sodom and Gomorrah
“In both Sodom and Gomorrah and Cruising, homosexuality – and its alternate currents – is caught with a glance.”
The Dead Things We Already Are: Pod People, Body Snatching, and the Horrors of Business as Usual
“We keep returning to this story about pod people because we’re terrified of the continuing erosion of our physicality in the postmodern era.”
Can’t Repeat the Past? Of Course You Can’t – and Shouldn’t
Filming The Great Gatsby in the 21st Century
Letter from New York (c. 1980)
“The problem is other people crazy people.”
Of Perfect Plans and Acts of Creation: Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing
“His plan mirrors Johnny’s, that is, pieces of the plan are known to one person: Johnny and Stanley; and not until the end do we see most of their pieces come into place.
Essays · Film Technology & History · Music & Musicals
Art Thou Troubled? Musicals May Calm Thee
But don’t forget DVD opera
Here Come the Bromides: Living in the Era of the Bromantic Comedy
“Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity.” — Vladimir Nabokov
Ghidorah Attacks! Modern Narrative’s Three-Headed Monster
“The concept of pure art pure poetry, pure painting, and so on is not entirely without meaning; but it refers to an aesthetic reality as difficult to define as it is to combat. In any case, even if a certain mixing of the arts remains possible, like the mixing of genres, it does not necessarily follow that they are all fortunate mixtures. There are fruitful cross-breedings which add to the qualities derived from the parents; there are attractive but barren hybrids and there are likewise hideous combinations that bring forth nothing but chimeras.”
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