How to Hate Titles Correctly: A Pillow Book of Misguided Assertions
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[…]
Category: Essays
Suspicious White Powder: Bad Actors in an Age of Bad Equality
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[…]
Capsized: A Tale of Two Poseidons
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[…]
Selma: Or the Absence of God
“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[…]
Game Over, Curtains Close: The Creative Failure of Videogame Movies
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[…]
Falling Angels, Rising People: A Brief Look at Sex-and-Spirituality in Cinema
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
Routes to the City: The Ways of the New Black Films
“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?[…]
Floating Bridges: Caution: Children Crossing
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.[…]
Against Pleasure, Against Identification: Feminism, Cultural Atheism, and the Tragic Subject (Part Two)
“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
Distribute This! Privilege (Peter Watkins, 1967, Great Britain)
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
Isolating Isolationism: Recent INDEX Releases from the Austrian Avant-Garde
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”[…]
Performance World: The Truman Show‘s Sociology
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[…]
God Is Dead, or Through a Glass Darkly: On Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession
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[…]
Love Affairs That Always Fade: Sirk’s Doomed Romances
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[…]
The Lure of the Gilded Cage: All I Desire and There’s Always Tomorrow
“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[…]
Saving AI: Artificial Intelligence: Philosophical Aspects of Spielberg’s Neglected Robo-Epic
Human, mecha, supermecha and David
Asian · Essays · Exploitation & Erotica · Thrillers & Action
Against Pleasure, Against Identification: Feminism, Cultural Atheism, and the Tragic Subject (Part One)
Rescuing feminism from rape and queer theory
The Interpretative Odyssey of 2001: Of Humanity and Hyperspace
More fun in the new (old) world
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