Synthetic Mythology: George Lucas, Disney, and Star Wars: The Force Awakens
The marriage of Disney and Lucasfilm is a match made in heaven. Disney – the man and the company – spent the better part of a century trying to homogenize[…]
Category: Essays
Activist & Political · Counterculture · Essays
All the World’s a Stage and Every Revolutionary a Commodity: Network and Its Progeny
The challenge is to convince the suits who kept recycling dramas about state-legitimized violence to get on board with the notion that counterculture or revolutionary violence can also sell. When[…]
A Regular Film: Deluded or Clear-sighted? (When artist and critic are one)
Regular or otherwise, interesting films famously have the power to take us inside other people’s heads. * * * In the 2014 film Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter, director/co-writer David Zellner[…]
Film: An Adaptive Species. Part 2 of 2: Brainy, Sexy, and Not Totally Doomed
It’s more than magic * * * With Rachel Weisz as a fourth-century intellectual surrounded by far from intellectually questing males, Agora was Spain’s most commercially successful film of 2009.[…]
Activist & Political · Essays · War
Innocents Abroad: Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper (2014)
American Sniper becomes neither a post-ideological assertion of the nobility of the soldier forced to reflect on his own beliefs, nor a latter-day western investigating the presence of violence at[…]
Lone Rangers: Using Terror to Publicize “Revolution”
From the margins, both a “crazy man” and visionary artists can ask: How can leaders govern when language has been debased and words no longer have true meaning? * *[…]
Notes on a Stupid Dinosaur Movie: Jurassic World and the Hollywood Blockbuster
Once a film gives up on originality, it immediately descends into nihilism. Whatever sensory pleasures such a film may offer, the underlying assumption is that the entire experience is empty[…]
Drama · Essays · Writers & Critics
Film: An Adaptive Species. Part 1 of 2: Between a Book and a Hard Place
Lincoln (2012) & Wolf Hall (2015)/Les Miserables (1933) & Great Expectations (1946/2012) * * * So, notwithstanding humanist art or realistic biography, we go on hurting each other. “Everybody hurts,” as[…]
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[…]
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[…]
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