Activist & Political · Actors & Personalities · Essays
The Trouble with the Governator: Being Arnold
The ascension of Arnold salvation, apocalypse, or trigger for a resurgent left?
Category: Essays
Characters · Drama · Essays
Tunes of Mutiny, or Making the Job Bearable: On The Caine Mutiny
“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”
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”
An Unclaimed Country: The Austrian Image in American Film and the Sociopolitics of The Sound of Music
On cliche, culture, and locating national identity in Wise’s epic musical
Documentaries · Essays · LGBT & Queer · Religion & Spirituality
Trembling Before G-d: or Die Volkschmiere
Who will judge the judges trembling before sex? The atheists!
Leni’s Body Beautiful: Forty Years of Riefenstahl’s Olympic Gaze in the James Bond Title Credits
In the beginning there was Leni, and Leni begat Robert and Maurice, who begat the Bond title sequences.
How to Turn One’s Back on a Tyrant: Part Two
The opposite of realism is not fantasy, but disappointment
Together Again for the First Time: Movies Holding Mirrors Up to Movies
Imitation: great for flattery, bad for art
Daddy and Father in The Emerald Forest
On civilization and its discontents I recently saw a list of Luddite movies that listed Cameron’s The Terminator (1984), Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), and Lang’s Metropolis (1927), among others. Luddites[…]
Actors & Personalities · Essays · Reviews
Andy Kaufman, Tony Clifton, Mr. Ripley, and the Elisions of Identity
I had an opportunity to see a double feature a couple of years ago on a British Airways flight to Madrid. The size of the screen certainly reduced any desire[…]
Candy, or Libertinism
“I’ll do anything … ANYTHING” to save Daddy!” Introduction Based on the famous – or better, notorious – faux pornographic novel by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg, Candy (Christian Marquand,[…]
Essays · Reviews · SF & Fantasy
Defense of the Clones: Lucas’s Latest: Cheap Thrills or Sophisticated Filmmaking?
A close reading points to the latter. For those who see popular film as capable of providing more than cheap visceral thrills, the dismal nature of recent writing on Attack[…]
Goodbye Warren, Hello Tim: How Clinton Demobilized Liberalism and Anti-Capitalism Came into Hollywood
Hollywood shows some unsuspected radical tendencies – after eight years of Clintonian “liberalism” “Hollywood is at its best when it is relating to a progressive left political force that’s already[…]
Fritz Lang’s Assumption Factory: Social Agreements and Schisms in Fury, Modern Times, and A Clockwork Orange
Two films of 1936, Chaplin’s Modern Times and Fritz Lang’s Fury (with Spencer Tracy and Sylvia Sydney), appear to have little in common. The former sardonically depicts a man at[…]
Essays · Historical & Epic · Reviews
Black and White Breakfast: Race, Class, Sexuality, and Corn Flakes in Alan Parker’s The Road to Wellville
Parker’s “ode to bathroom humor” plumbs surprising depths Contemporary American comedy evades realistic treatment of social issues, opting instead for escape from these issues. That the bulk of racial representation[…]
Recalling the Dream of Parenthood in Raising Arizona
Of babynappings and bodily fluids, Coens and Kubricks In Raising Arizona (1987), a blatantly obscure graffiti can be seen in the lavatory wall behind escaped convicts, Hale and Evelle (John[…]
Bleeding Realism Dry, or How to Turn One’s Back on a Tyrant
The cripplingly small-minded art of verisimilitude becomes crippled by its own technology Are Human Beings Real, or Do They Only Act That Way? When we contemplate all the sinister, spirit-truncheoning[…]
Asian · Essays · Exploitation & Erotica · Reviews
The Japanese Pink Film: Tandem, The Bedroom, and The Dream of Garuda on DVD
All jargon and no authenticity? Of the vast numbers of corporate-made genre films that flooded Japanin the 1970s, Donald Richie once remarked that the “West knows nothing of these pictures,[…]
Asian · Essays · Exploitation & Erotica · Reviews
Better Beauty Through Technology: Chinese Transnational Feminism and the Cinema of Suffering
Feminism adrift in a sea of ogling orientalism, global capitalism, and fatalist aesthetics INTRODUCTION Chinese Women’s Issues Under the Polar Aesthetics of Female Suffering and Mulan-ism Since the 1919 May[…]
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