A Progress Boccaccio’s Decameron, written immediately after the Black Death, hints at the arrival of a more egalitarian post-pandemic world. This was especially evident in the new approach to gender[…]
Indigenous film, global dreams1 For most of the film critics who have given it any thought, the term “Canadian Popular Cinema” is a vexing oxymoron. In a paradox that goes[…]
What’s in a name 1. The Rumpelstiltskin-God No matter how mightily I strive to intellectualize my living (not my life, my living, you understand), to sieve from it every iota[…]
Please dispose of all reality at the back of the theatre An emancipated society . . . should rather point to the bad equality of today, the identity of film[…]
Society overboard! Upon the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 commentators have argued that American popular cultural has not changed significantly. Any minor changes have been[…]
“It is a face that has ‘glimpsed into the abyss’ and never recovered from it.” Note: This essay examines the notion of “serenity” as it appears in section 9 of[…]
Lost in translation In the past three years, the cineplexes have been saturated with movies based on videogames, including big-screen adaptations of the Super Mario Brothers, Tomb Raider, Alone in[…]
Wings not desired Simply assuming that human goodness will triumph over its opposite is — as everybody knows — an immature stance. It makes us easy targets for scoundrels of[…]
African American · Essays · Genres · Lists · Movies
“It’s independent thinking without the protection of an ‘indie’ label.” While hosting the Academy Awards in 2005, Chris Rock made the following claim: black films don’t have real names. “Barbershop?[…]
Subtitles for the hard-of-believing One of the strangest facts about film on DVD is that it is not — in the original sense of the word — cinema at all.[…]
“The more a man dreams, the less he believes.” ~ H. L. Mencken Preface: Why My Dreams Smell Like Nothing (Onto the Regime of Odor) On June 18, 2005 (I[…]
Activist & Political · Essays · Reviews
Watkins’ savaging of commodified culture remains disturbingly relevant After retailing Scotland’s Jacobite rebellion of 1746 to almost universal acclaim in Culloden (1964) and, in less than a year, establishing an[…]
Essays · Experimental & Underground
As the covert bottom-line interests of capitalist film distribution circumscribe our viewing options as much as overt censorship ever could, we should earnestly applaud the arrival of the new “INDEX”[…]
The show must go on Never has a movie better fitted a sociological theory than The Truman Show (1999) to the work of Erving Goffman. Best known for Presentation of[…]
Human, mecha, supermecha and David
Jon Halliday’s indispensable Sirk on Sirk has confirmed what Sirk’s admirers and students had long suspected: that his films are not all equally “personal,” and that he had a much[…]
In Douglas Sirk’s world, romantic love doesn’t play much of a part. His characters are boxed into ruts which are ever-deepening; they cannot understand themselves or their desperate predicaments, let[…]
“Once upon a time in sunny California” reads a title card immediately after the credits for Sirk’s There’s Always Tomorrow. “Once upon a time” triggers an expectation of a fairy[…]
