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?”
Category: Essays
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”
Essays · Horror · SF & Fantasy
The Lore of the Running Undead (How World War Z Was Lost and Won)
“The choppy narrative arc of the film ends up matching the new hybrid of fast-running, fast-changing zombie: like its undead, the film moves too fast. The bitten person turns in twelve seconds in World War Z, which feels like about the same amount of time given to a story line before turning to another.”
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.”
Those Thrilling Days of Yesteryear: The Lone Ranger Rides Again . . . or Not At All
“Westerns are difficult to sell to modern audiences. ‘The Long Ranger,’ directed by Gore Verbinski, follows ‘Cowboys & Aliens’ and ‘Jonah Hex’ as recent Old West flops.” — Brooks Barnes, “Masked Lawman Stumbles at the Gate,” New York Times, July 8, 2013
Essays · LGBT & Queer · Reviews
Making Love While the Bullets Fly: Plata Quemada (Burnt Money), Representation, and Queer Masculinity
“The queer theorist Leo Bersani has argued for the “self-shattering” qualities of gay sex, but Plata Quemada foregrounds gay desire as a mutually shattering event. The film’s romantic nihilism is at the heart of both its appeal and its essentially troubling nature.”
Pulping American Moral Exceptionalism: Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained
“Django Unchained was the subject of controversy due to its use of racial epithets and depiction of slavery; many reviewers have defended the usage of the language by pointing out the historic context of race and slavery in America. Spike Lee, in an interview with Vibe magazine, said he would not see the film, explaining, ‘All I’m going to say is that it’s disrespectful to my ancestors. That’s just me . . . I’m not speaking on behalf of anybody else.’ Lee later tweeted, ‘American Slavery Was Not a Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. It Was A Holocaust. My Ancestors Are Slaves. Stolen From Africa. I Will Honor Them.’ Writing in the Los Angeles Times, journalist Erin Aubry Kaplan noted the difference between Tarantino’s Jackie Brown and Django Unchained: ‘It is an institution whose horrors need no exaggerating, yet Django does exactly that, either to enlighten or entertain. A white director slinging around the n-word in a homage to ’70s blaxploitation à la Jackie Brown is one thing, but the same director turning the savageness of slavery into pulp fiction is quite another.'” — Wikipedia
Essays · Exploitation & Erotica
Ten Shades of Girl: One Guy’s Response to Fifty Shades of Grey
The causation of this book’s variable inattentiveness to any coloring detail is the same source of the book’s greater fundamental and overarching flaw. Fifty Shades of Grey just has too much sex in it.
Depth Takes a Holiday: Good Bad Movies
“Good bad movies have been around since the dawn of cinema. Logically, they cannot be more common to one era than another. If you’re looking for empty-headed entertainment on a Saturday night, you could pop in an early Chaplin short just as easily as The Cannonball Run (1981), especially once you realize how much they have in common.”
Don’t Swoon: Howl when you’re far from home. Weep at Nature’s wonders.
But, dearest sister, never ever swoon.
The Phantom Archivist and The Phantom Archives: The Amateur Online Archive of Brian De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise (1974)
“Kahan’s site encroaches on the nascent landscape of a new mode of archival behavior, increasingly obligatory in and enabled by the digital age, in which archival collections move out of the physical tyranny of closed vaults, reconceived as virtual and dynamic, to empower a wider audience of users through hypermodern modes of informed and active engagement.”
Remote Viewing: Observations Inspired or Furthered by And They Were Two in One and One in Two
“If, as [Nicola] Masciandaro claims, ‘cinema’s witness’ is ‘somewhere between the pure loss of head (negatively being no one) and the playful transcendence of the capital (positively being neither oneself nor someone else),’ then this witness’s penumbral status becomes not only ontologically problematic, but morally problematic into the bargain.”
What Exactly Is the “Road” in the Road Movie? (Fragments on Narrative Endings)
“We’ve long since lost faith in endings; the postmodern project of ‘decentering’ everything has made it irrelevant whether our endings end with conjugal bliss, a predicted death, nothingness, a tree, an empty gaze, or any assorted marginalia.”
Activist & Political · Essays · Historical & Epic
A Journey into Political Consciousness: Africa as “Setting and Backdrop” in Shekhar Kapur’s The Four Feathers (2002)
“In reflecting the postcolonial sensibilities, rather than the imperialist enthusiasms, of the early twenty-first century, the film is very much a creature of its time.”
August and Everything After: A Half-Century of Surfing in Cinema
Long have you timidly waded holding a plank by the shore, Now I will you to be a bold swimmer, To jump off in the midst of the sea, rise again, nod to me, shout, and laughingly dash with your hair. — Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
The Strangeness of Realism vs. the Realism of the Strange: Themes in Synecdoche, New York
“Charlie Kaufman’s film(script) can be understood as a commentary on a line from E. M. Cioran: ‘He who does not believe in the impossibility of truth, or does not rejoice in it, has only one road to salvation, which he will, however, never find.'”
“Drunk Literature”: On Malcolm Lowry, John Huston, and Under the Volcano
“Somebody threw a dead dog after him down the ravine.”
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