“Disease with a Purpose”: Ex-Boyfriends, Abortion and The Fly (1986)
But the choice to get this thing out of her body, to have an abortion, is made up of equal parts self-compassion and safety. It is entirely locatable. Ronnie is[…]
Category: Essays
Activist & Political · Drama · Essays
Beatriz at Dinner: Eating Up the Whole World
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a[…]
Activist & Political · African American · Essays
Between The Butler and Black Dynamite: Servility, Militancy, and the Meaning of Blaxploitation
The existence of films such as Black Samson and The Spook Who Sat by the Door reminds us that there was an era, however fleeting, in which commercial films discarded[…]
Drama · Essays · Uncategorized
Running, Reeling, Floating Free – On Hidden Figures, Humanity and Paper Balloons, City Streets
Isn’t something less reassuring and a lot more interesting going on – something more inclusive, diverse, and genuinely universal? * * * There are still too many human beings on[…]
Family Night: Attacks on the American Homestead in Night of the Hunter and Night of the Living Dead
The two films under examination here, The Night of the Hunter (1955) and Night of the Living Dead (1968), would have you believe that nothing harrows the soul like an[…]
Biopic · Drama · Essays · TV & Streaming
Video Killed the Video Star: Antonio Campos’s Christine (2016) and Film’s Continued Struggle to Expose Television
“In keeping with Channel 40’s policy of bringing you the latest in ‘blood and guts,’ and in living color, you are going to see another first – attempted suicide.” –[…]
Essays · Philosophy · SF & Fantasy
The Fall of Donnie Darko: Re-Viewing the Myth of a Generation
In honor of its 15th anniversary, Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko plays throughout the U.S. this year starting March 30 at select theaters in a 4K restoration – in some cases in the[…]
How to Kill the Queen of the Night: Tragedy Is No Joke, but It Can Be Deeply Funny
O wad some Power the giftie gie us, to see oursels as ithers see us! – Robert Burns, “To a Louse, On Seeing One on a Lady’s Bonnet At Church.” * *[…]
Counterculture · Essays · SF & Fantasy · TV & Streaming
The Machine and Beyond: Male Hysteria in The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, and Others
“I have said that the sole effect of my somewhat childish experiment – that of looking down within the tarn – had been to deepen the first singular impression. There[…]
Jerry Lewis and the Gender of Work
The gender of work in the work films is a spectrum that includes both the neutered worker of The Bellboy and The Errand Boy and the feminized worker of Cinderfella,[…]
Actors & Personalities · Essays
The Elephant in the Graveyard: The Testament of John Derek
Everywhere she was, there was Eden. – Mark Twain * * * So this is what it’s like on the other side. Not exactly how I pictured it. Nothing like[…]
Activist & Political · Biopic · Essays
The Cowboy’s Final Act: On Clint Eastwood, Trump, American Sniper, and Sully
These films aren’t merely exercises in cinematic glorification – like Clint Eastwood’s speech, they are a part of a uniquely American myth-making process, posing straw-man moral tests for their protagonists[…]
Activist & Political · Crime · Essays
Lords of Nothing: Hell or High Water (2016)
“Hey, buddy. We’re exactly the same. What’s happening to these people happened to my ancestors, and it happened to your ancestors.” – Alberto to Marcus in Hell or High Water,[…]
Essays · Horror · Religion & Spirituality
You Say You Want a Revolution? Regan’s Head and The Exorcist
If the evil spirit is “seen,” that is, reflected . . . he is overcome. – Marie-Louise von Franz Unmask Satan, and you vanquish him. – St. Augustine * *[…]
Mapping the (Cinematic) Genome: Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959); Peppermint Candy (1999); Black Coal, Thin Ice (2014)
Our cinematic genome, meanwhile, is becoming – if not always more clearly defined – certainly more rich and diverse and, at the same time, more universal than ever. * *[…]
The Propagation of Empathy, the Absence of Bathos: On Alexander Payne’s Sideways (2004)
Regret is perhaps Payne’s greatest theme. The continual human dramedy, the elegiac comedy, a country full of people with limited potential raised to think everyone is special, confined souls struggling[…]
The Trouble with Scottie (on Vertigo)
I have yet to encounter anybody who feels my fierce outrage at Scottie’s unfairness toward the necklace. That object is all-important, not because it is the vital clue to the Madeleine-is-Judy[…]
Any Husband of Yours: Spellbound and 13 Minutes
Dreams and Pistol Shots * * * From Leslie Halliwell to David Thomson, capsule reviews of Hitchcock’s Spellbound have made sure we know that the psychiatry on offer is pure[…]
Activist & Political · Essays · SF & Fantasy
Blood Will Tell: The Purge: Election Year (2016)
To be a popular film, which is the intent of the Purge series, is to play into what an audience loves; and in the case of something it is not[…]
Drama · Essays · Writers & Critics
Innocence on the Open Market: Cormac McCarthy, The Counselor, and Artistic Agency
Today (July 20) is Cormac McCarthy’s birthday. He’s 83. We send birthday wishes his way by reposting Sophia Nguyen’s persuasive discussion of McCarthy and the book/film of The Counselor, which[…]
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