The Unbearable Lightness of Being Cool: Appropriation and Prospects of Subversion in the Works of Quentin Tarantino
Overthrowing the patriarchy, one flush at a time
Category: Essays
The Altered State of War: Heaven, Hell, and the Structure of the Combat Film
“The duality of man. The Jungian thing, sir.”
Millions Like Us: Bereavement in British Cinema
“All the lonely people, where do they all come from?”
Activist & Political · Drama · Essays
Above the Revolution: The Dreamers and Alienation
“With my memories I have lit a fire.”
F for Fake: The Ultimate Mirror of Orson Welles
In which Welles deflates expectations of greatness and transcends them
Don’t Follow Leaders: Animal Mother in Full Metal Jacket
Kubrick’s shaman/artist takes on “the leaders”
Activist & Political · Essays · Historical & Epic
Want Fact with That? Disney’s Hidalgo and the Commodification of Myth
Enjoy your myths that’s what they’re there for
All the Citizen’s Men: Kane as Welles; also America
Kane as Welles, also America
Disturbing Movies: or the Flip Side of the Real
Disturbing movies shouldn’t equivocate
Blood Feast Revisited, or, H. G. Lewis, Keeper of the Key to All Erotic Mystery
After forty years, now serving porn as intentional camp for erotic consideration
Activist & Political · African American · Essays
Dancing Across Borders: Blackness That Isn’t (African) American
Can there be co-cultures instead of subcultures?
Trainspotting‘s Playlist: A Compilation of Subcultural Struggles
… how independent do I want to be if the cost of being pure independent is marginalized … And if the only way to intervene is to be assimilated, perhaps I should allow myself to be assimilated, if that’s the only way to work. Because you’ve got to deal with them, and that’s the line that the Underground has to take that you stake your claim, artistically, which you try to do with as great a degree of independence as possible. But once you move out of the office, then you have got to deal with Thatcher’s real world, because otherwise no one’s going to hear your records, no one’s going to buy your fanzine, and your dream is to be like a little blip and you don’t want that to happen.
Essays · Exploitation & Erotica · LGBT & Queer
Twelve-Tone Cinema: A Scattershot Notebook on Sexual Atonality
Is queerness an angry chord or a beautiful harmony?
Characters · Essays · Genres · Thrillers & Action
The Revolutionary James Bond Movie: On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
In which Lazenby, like Lazarus, is resurrected, along with the movie
Bonnie and Clyde: Together Again
Warren Beatty’s seminal sixties shoot-’em-up revisited
What We Talk About When We Talk About Ho Meng-Hua
How to strike at the heart of a beast with the heart of a beast
Essays · SF & Fantasy · Writers & Critics
Patriotism, Politics, and Propaganda: The Naturalization of Friday’s Man, Robinson, in Robinson Crusoe on Mars
Defoe’s classic translates surprisingly well to outer space in this 1960s gem
Kubrick and the Coen Brothers Again: The Shining and Fargo
The Shining and Fargo share a view of a society “stupefied by its hypothetical aspirations”
Activist & Political · Actors & Personalities · Essays
The Trouble with the Governator: Being Arnold
The ascension of Arnold salvation, apocalypse, or trigger for a resurgent left?
Characters · Drama · Essays
Tunes of Mutiny, or Making the Job Bearable: On The Caine Mutiny
“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”
Links + BSA
