Wild Imagination: Forty Years of The Thing
“You just can’t beat wild imagination.” – Bob Bottin * * * It took decades for John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) to find an audience, on home video and cable.[…]
Category: Genres
Dance · French Cinema · Interviews · Music & Musicals
GROVER DALE! An Interview with the Dance Legend
Dancing in the streets of Rochefort was the best performing experience I’ve ever known. Reacting to real sunshine, breezes, cafés, and streets was miraculous. My emotions suddenly became as accessible[…]
Animation · Franchises & Series · Myth and Archetype · SF & Fantasy
Batman, Anime, and How to Make Great Pop Art
Blockbuster films don’t have to be watered-down hero fare to succeed at the box office. The compelling design and archetypal simplicity of our comic-book heroes are gold mines for stories[…]
Drama · Mystery · Philosophy · Thrillers & Action
Are You Still Watching? Demonlover (2002) and the Spectre of Voyeurism
This is the central thesis Assayas raises here – instant gratification via the image suggests a greater degree of control over what we consume (including its ethics) when in fact[…]
Body Horror · Horror · SF & Fantasy
“A Great Future in Plastics”: Crimes of the Future and Cronenberg’s Story of Evolution
The voice-over tells us that as a result of this neo-venereal disease, his colleague’s body is creating new organs, each one complex, perfect, unique, but without function. Each time these[…]
Family · Horror · Linguistics and Language
Ghost Story: Christian Tafdrup’s Speak No Evil/Gæsterne (2022)
What kind of guests are so pathologically accommodating that their hosts can get away with murdering them? * * * What’s in a name? On one hand, Speak No Evil[…]
Celebrity Culture · Crime · Digital · Drama · Societal Trends
Bling around the Collar: How Can We Get Rid of This Dirty Ring?
The Bling Ring’s impossible challenge for us is to reject the moralizing. We feel superior to the teenagers because of the celebrity issue. The four girls and boy represent our[…]
Absurdism · African American · Horror · Surrealism · Westerns
What’s Behind That Curtain: The Wizard of Oz and Jordan Peele’s Nope
The theme of exploitation is evident in Nope’s multiple references to a classic film. Not Jaws, The Goonies, or Close Encounters, or any of the Western films nodded at in[…]
Endless Night: Luchino Visconti’s Le notti bianche
The city of Visconti’s film is a palimpsest in which postwar modernity (nightclubs, movie theatres, beatniks, and loose women) is superimposed on the ruins of the city’s gothic past. Rather[…]
Activist & Political · African American · Essays · Franchises & Series · Race · SF & Fantasy · SF/Fantasy · Societal Trends
Star Trek: Voyager – “Tuvix” and the Warped Humanities
If Deep Space 9 demonstrates how the casting of African American commanders in chief – and their election – may constitute or create a backlash disguised as “progress,” it has[…]
Franchises & Series · Horror · Men & Masculinity
Saw and the Danger of Not Talking about Masculinity
We see how Jigsaw can fail, again and again, to help anyone and still blame it on them. We see how people can live through how little his traps teach[…]
Drama · Indigenous · LGBT & Queer · Migration
Untying the Knot: Ángeles Cruz’s Nudo Mixteco (2021)
In Nudo Mixteco, characters are torn apart and brought together by the combined concerns of labor and trauma: markets are globalized, while individuals evince a panoply of erotic interests, and[…]
Comedy · Historical & Epic · Native Americans · Revisionism · Westerns
Robert Altman’s Wild West Show: On Buffalo Bill and the Indians
Buffalo Bill and the Indians joins a select group of films whose popular failure nonetheless represented an aesthetic success: Patty Hearst (1987) and The King of Comedy (1983), come to[…]
Directors · Drama · Essays · Writers & Critics
He’s Thinking of Ending Things: Charlie Kaufman’s Breakup Letter to an Entire Age
Where Reid spends pages and pages absentmindedly ruminating on the many very painful, and very human, distinctions between Self and Other before losing himself in a tonal mess of relationship[…]
Exploitation & Erotica · Impresarios & Moguls
Mom and Dad: The Most Successful Sex-Hygiene Exploitation Flick Ever
Mom and Dad is likely the most successful exploitation movie ever, and it still offers a lesson in the facts of, well, not life but canny American entrepreneurialism, that is,[…]
In Full Bloom: Days of Daisy (2022)
Plot lines about women wanting babies are as old as time, and can easily degenerate into sexist tropes. Daisy’s desire to have a kid doesn’t define her. Instead, over the[…]
Drama · Religion & Spirituality · Writers & Critics
Two Perspectives on Sainthood in 1951: Roberto Rossellini’s Europe ’51 and Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair
Graham Greene could be a very political writer (nowhere more than in The Quiet American, which was his next major work after The End of the Affair), but Christianity has[…]
Celebrity Culture · Counterculture · Music & Musicals · Production History · Societal Trends · Youth
How the Monkees Birthed New Hollywood
A rewatch benumbed to this flash and flare reveals the stark morbidity of Head. Throughout the movie the Monkees are assaulted, hunted, and caged. Words fail, fists fail. The film[…]
Animation · Experimental & Underground · Horror · Splatter & Gore
Splatter in (Stop) Motion: The Gory Animations of Michael Kahlert
There is no question of suspending our disbelief watching Kahlert’s films, but there does emerge a bizarre unease in the inescapable doom of his scenarios. Unburdened by the need to[…]
Directors · Gender · Hollywood · Horror · Men & Masculinity
The Jaws of War: How Quint Decodes Masculinity in the Films of Spielberg
If the sum of Spielberg’s work is about how men live in the world, Jaws is his most particular point on the subject, a film centered with almost fantastical totality[…]
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