Boyhood: When Art Is Just Winging It
When the technology of transmitting typed words or smartphone photos and GoPro filming accompanies our every movement and all this runs far ahead of thought, a culture leaves behind both[…]
Category: Essays
DVD & Blu-ray · Essays · Historical & Epic · Writers & Critics
Sexual Confusion, the Attractions of Moral Chaos, and the Contrarieties of Personality: Navigating the Vagaries of Fellini Satyricon (1969)
He was the spectator at his own drama, like a person at a play he doesn’t understand. – Victor Hugo1 “On the other hand, I don’t want to do Petronius[…]
Approaching and Transcending the Limit: The Experience of Death and Possibilities of Renewal in Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light and Dreyer’s Ordet
Consume my heart away; sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is; and gather me Into the artifice of eternity. Once out of[…]
Essays · New Media · SF & Fantasy · Writers & Critics
Spike Jonze vs. the Conspiring Escapist: On Her, Robert Coover’s Universal Baseball Association, and Jan Švankmajer’s Conspirators of Pleasure
“What Jonze, Coover, and Švankmajer are all playing with in their distinctive, varying shades of dark humor are the dual perspectives of the Spielbergian audience, absorbed in the protagonists’ fantasies,[…]
Home Is Not Just for Christmas … or Thanksgiving … or Middle-Class Chaps, However Decent
To be clear, The Holly and the Ivy is not mistakable for a lost gem from Renoir or Mizoguchi. Yet it does make the most of a story told “in[…]
The Melancholy of Alex Proyas: Seeking Transcendence in an Epicurean Age
Introduction This essay uses The Crow, Dark City, and Knowing to trace director Alex Proyas’ repeated thinking through of a philosophical problem using a stock of images that derives from[…]
Essays · Experimental & Underground · Silents · Sound & Language
Tomatoes Another Day: The Improbable Ideological Subversion of James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber
“Though standard critical appraisals would deem Tomatoes a deliberately crude affront to modern technical sophistication, it is itself the sophisticated artifact, its small rebellion resonating more strongly in a media[…]
A Pessimist’s Puzzle, or The Ambiguity of Ida
A respectable and due measure of column inches has been devoted to Pawel Pawlikowski’s latest film, Ida, but as the director himself has intimated, much of it has concentrated on[…]
American Dreamers: Badlands’ Kit Carruthers and Holly Sargis
“Certainly Kit’s story, like that of Charles Starkweather and indeed, that of Warshow’s gangsters, will end in his solitary demise, precisely because his actions have set him apart from others.[…]
Everything Is Marvellous, but without Superbeings, what does that even mean?
When space seems polluted with far too many Superbeings, maybe cinema is not the first place to go for relief. Yet for those who have not given up looking for[…]
Activist & Political · Essays · Horror · Reviews · SF & Fantasy
We Are Not Who We Are: Human Sacrifice, Philosophical Horror, and (Maybe) the End of the World
There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part,[…]
Actors & Personalities · Essays · LGBT & Queer
Fifty Shades of Ick: Gay Panic and Star Discourse/Star Panic and Gay Discourse
“The privileging of star persona over actor’s craft insists that sex within a narrative cannot, in fact, be a purely storytelling tool: it is required to be both a character[…]
The Graveyard of Your Fucking Species: Wolfen: The End of the World by Wolves
“The most powerful aspect of Wolfen is not, then, its status as an exemplary and indeed essential period piece, but its unusual situation of contemporary New York City within the[…]
Hope and History: Beyond Violence
By means of horror?
Between Artless Passions and Anal Hells: On the Edinburgh Festival’s Production of Marlowe’s Edward II
“Why should you love him who the world hates so?”
Comedy · Directors · Essays · Writers & Critics
Team Apatow and the Tropes of Geek-Centered Romantic Comedy
“Nowadays, schlubs play schlubs and audiences are expected to accept that geeky males can win over classically beautiful women. What does it tell us about the state of gender relations, sexual fantasy, and desire that a physically average geek like Seth Rogen can trump an iconically attractive and glamorous star like Cary Grant?”
The Wanking Widow and Other Indecorous Dames: Three Films about Maternal Transgression and the “Fortunate Fall”
“Popular culture feels compelled to interrogate the ‘barren’ years, in some cases expressed as a contradiction between competing life goals: the other-oriented value of maternal self-sacrifice and the inner-oriented value of following one’s bliss. The aging mother should, in theory, be free to indulge her desires. When desire runs afoul of ‘age appropriate’ codes of conduct, however, the positive goal of self-actualization can take a nasty detour.”
Structural/Sexual Transgression: Todd Haynes’ Poison as a Critique of Homonormativity
“In the Washington Times I was called ‘the Fellini of Fellatio’ — a proud moment!” —Todd Haynes, “From Underground to Multiplex”
No Gloomy Ones: Double Suicide?
Or transcendent love?
Essays · Reviews · Uncategorized
The Life of Pi: A Politics of the Imagination
“The Life of Pi is a paean or homage to the imagination and its salvaging power (we were shipwrecked in the Great Recession and in need of salvaging) not in cyberspace but in the real conditions of a troubling offline world inhabited by our own troubled human nature.”
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