A Human Noise: On Rebirth and Birdman (2014), Five Years After
“They had no song. Their calls were harsh and ugly. But their soaring was like an endless silent singing. What else had they to do? They were sea falcons now;[…]
Category: Essays
Activist & Political · Essays · SF & Fantasy
Klaatu’s Police Action: The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) Remembered
Suddenly, Gort doesn’t seem so powerful. We’re told of his strength and given a few meager examples. We have to take Klaatu’s word for it. The universe/world policeman is a[…]
Essays · Mystery · SF & Fantasy
Talkin’ ’bout My Gentrification: The Secret Life of The Kirlian Witness (1979)
“The city was dirty. And dirt is fertile.” – Jeremiah Moss * * * New York City ca. 1976 was dying on the vine. With over a million citizens on[…]
Activist & Political · Essays · Philosophy
Once Upon a Time – Shots in the Hyperreal (on Tarantino’s New Film)
“Hey, you’re Rick fucking Dalton. Don’t you forget it.” – Once Upon a Time – in Hollywood “And so art is everywhere, since artifice is at the very heart of reality.”[…]
Essays · Historical & Epic · Memoir · SF & Fantasy
The Wizard of Oz at 80: Archive of a Rust Belt Girl
The Wizard of Oz, the film, turns 80 this year, 2019. To celebrate, we present Amy Kenyon’s striking analysis/memoir, which explores growing up a “rust belt girl” in postwar Detroit[…]
Time and Friendship in Old Joy (Kelly Reichardt, 2006), or How We Age with Film
The film withholds memory and history from us, always knowing more than us, plot-wise, but inviting and compelling our projection of how we fill the space of our own friendships.[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Drama · Essays · Romance
Adios, Compañeros: Living the Dream of Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood
QT’s films are commonly hurtling toward darkness, yet Once Upon feels like a repudiation, as much as a culmination, of his oeuvre. There’s a point in the experience where the[…]
Donald Trump: Lynchian Monster
“We’ve met before, haven’t we?” – The Mystery Man in Lost Highway * * * David Lynch is not a horror director. With the possible exception of Eraserhead, his films[…]
A Fine Romance: When Love Neither Leaves nor Stays
But goes on being itself * * * True Love in cinema is more than fine acting, well-written scripts, or even directorial tone. Not that IMDb cast and crew should[…]
Two Truths: Inside No Way Out (A Gift to a True Friend)
That’s why I sing for an America that will never be back but that left us with such vivifying memories. You’re not lost, not past, not buried. You’re active, vital,[…]
Before Hollywood: Max Ophüls, Curtis Bernhardt, and Robert Siodmak in Exile in Paris
Hollywood was just beyond the horizon for the émigrés. There is no doubt that Curtis Bernhardt, Robert Siodmak, and Max Ophüls thought they would settle down in Paris and become[…]
You Say You Want an Evolution: Sneaker Cinema’s Narrative and Aesthetic Ground Zero
What sneaker cinema is amounts to the sport shoe’s role in adding narrative or stylistic significance to a film’s mise-en-scene, themes, characters, or plot lines. And to be clear: ruby[…]
Between Diegesis and Mimesis: Voice-Over Narration in Fiction Film
This brief essay will seek to answer the distinctions between mimetic and diegetic elements in a filmic text, isolate the voice-over as a unique event located between the strict division[…]
Post-Horror Kinships: From Goodnight Mommy to Get Out
“The aesthetic features of post-horror replicate the mixture of shame, confusion, shock, and anxiety about the future experienced by liberal Americans in the midst of the Tea Party and Trump’s[…]
Directors · Documentaries · Essays
But It Did Happen! Werner Herzog and the Ecstatic Truth
I think that this delicate line between reality, and fact, and truth needs to be more clearly defined. We have to redefine reality.1 – Werner Herzog There are dignified stupidities.[…]
John Wayne Burns His Hand: Gestures in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1962)
Some actors’ gestures are the equivalent of a great singer, dancer, or athlete achieving the heights of their profession. And the reason so many people respond to Ford’s films by[…]
“The Joke’s on History”: Retro-Reality, Twee, and Mediated Nostalgia in La La Land (2016)
Mia: It feels really nostalgic to me. Sebastian: That’s the point. Mia: Are people going to like it? Sebastian: Fuck ’em. – La La Land * * * The popular[…]
We Need to Talk: Language and Communication in The Martian and Arrival
Uncharacteristically, The Martian and Arrival do not present us with a problematic dystopian future with which to grapple; a future in which everything has always already gone wrong. Instead, they[…]
Design for Killing: Function Follows Form into the Megalomania of Giallo
Filmmakers like Argento have no interest in sex per se. Suffering seems inessential, but terror and death are key, photographed with the same clinical absorption and aesthetic gloss as giallo-maestros[…]
Out of the Shadows: A Hollywood Theater Impresario Emerges from LA’s Notorious Black Dahlia Murder Case
The middle-aged theater owner who preferred a discreet lifestyle suddenly found himself in the media spotlight only ten days after the Black Dahlia’s murder. Someone had gathered Elizabeth Short’s personal[…]
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