Daddy Issues: Anxiety and the Muted Triumphs of Goro Miyazaki’s Tales from Earthsea
“Hayao Miyazaki gets zero marks as a father but full marks as a director of animated films.” – Goro Miyazaki1 * * * Most artists exist under what the literary[…]
Category: Genres
Franchises & Series · SF & Fantasy
Watch It Again! The Avengers (2012) and the Intertextuality Problem
A Transformers film has to face incessant criticism about the amount of action, the blurry continuity of its symphonies of shrapnel, the overuse of MacGuffins, and the lack of good[…]
Meta-Anti-Musical: Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark
Dancer in the Dark is largely about movies, in particular, about those movies in which people sing and dance their troubles away. Even this self-reflexivity situates the film in the[…]
Asian · Interviews · Producers & Studios · Production History
Moving from Japanese Film Distribution to Production: An Interview with Third Window Films’ Adam Torel
What Third Window’s practices and Adam Torel’s insights provide is a view of the industry that contrasts significantly from current Japanese film research, especially in light of other exhibitors and[…]
When Heaven Came to Earth: Letter to My Millennial Friend on Alan Rudolph’s Made in Heaven, Shot the Year You Were Born
MY CHUM, JANE LILEE, Being as it’s coming up on the anniversary of our meeting, I thought I’d check in with you, and maybe get points for remembering the occasion.[…]
Happy Birthday, Baby! Irving Berlin (b. May 11, 1888) on Film
This article first appeared in Bright Lights in October 2000. We reprint it as a tribute to the seminal composer on what would have been his 130th birthday. (And frankly, we’re surprised[…]
Fashion · LGBT & Queer · TV & Streaming
What Exactly Do We Spy with Our Queer Eye? Neoliberalism and Homonormativity in the Revival of a Noughties Classic
Queer Eye strips queerness of radical intention and repackages it as the non-threatening support system of heteronormative practice, with the Fab Five offered up as the ultimate Gay Best Friend[…]
Watch It Again: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
The high-tech and the primitive coexist in The Life Aquatic, much as they do in Keaton’s The Navigator, and as in all of Anderson’s films they combine with the deeply[…]
Comedy · Drama · Festivals & Awards
Dispatch from Tribeca #5: Short Takes on To Dust, Song of Back and Neck, Diane
To Dust (dir. Shawn Snyder) “Isn’t that sweet,” I thought when I picked up my mother’s dropped pocket calendar. So many dates had names on them. Mom doesn’t want to[…]
Documentaries · Festivals & Awards
Dispatch from Tribeca #4: Tiny Shoulders: Rethinking Barbie
“I’m grateful I didn’t grow up with Barbie.” – Gloria Steinem * * * Gloria Steinem isn’t alone. Lisa Simpson hates Barbie. Feminist writer Roxanne Gay wishes Barbie had never[…]
Dispatch from Tribeca #2: Ghostbox Cowboy: Capitalists in the Coffee Shop
I don’t like these three guys in this coffee shop either. I can’t help but compare them to the Ghostbox opportunists who were written to be disliked. That much –[…]
Comedy · Documentaries · Festivals & Awards
Dispatch from Tribeca #1: If you loved Gilda, you’ll Love, Gilda
The effect is intimate, but not particularly enlightening. Love, Gilda offers a lot of reminiscing, some sweet (and a few heavy) insights, but very little new information about Radner’s life.[…]
Focus on Robert Altman: Three Takes on Popeye
Unassimilated weirdness is typical of Popeye – even in its soundtrack, where goofy “boing” effects are used to accompany ordinary, unheroic movement. Sweethaven’s anthem, the Harry Nilsson song “Everything Is[…]
Meat for the Machine: On the Hidden Horrors of Alain Resnais’ Documentary Shorts
Covering topics as banal as the production of plastics and as profound as cultural appropriation, these films aren’t workaday projects so much as serious visual essays that extend Resnais’ preoccupation[…]
Drama · SF & Fantasy · Women in Film
The End of Cinema: Female Agency and the Influence of Stalker in Annihilation
Even as it has sunk like a stone commercially, Annihilation has drawn a flurry of passionate responses, mainly, it seems, from women writers. Many single out its admixture of beauty[…]
Designers · Drama · Women in Film
Food, Fashion, and (Fe)male Identity in The Phantom Thread
This is the second of two pieces on Phantom Thread. See Sam Ankenbauer’s different take in the previous post. * * * The articulation of female pleasure in The Phantom[…]
Secret Lives: On Phantom Thread
Note: This is the first of two reviews of Phantom Thread. Watch for Raymond De Luca’s take later this week. Each viewing paints old interactions in new colors, and the film thrives[…]
Dark Undercurrents: Claude Chabrol’s Second Wave from Les Biches (1968) to Innocents with Dirty Hands (1975)
“There are no waves, there is only the ocean.” – Claude Chabrol * * * From 1968 to 1975 Claude Chabrol directed a dozen films – one of the most[…]
Directors · Horror · SF & Fantasy
Weird and Pissed Off: Field Notes on John Carpenter’s First Fifteen Years
“It’s better to be a human being than an imitation.”- John Carpenter, on The Thing * * * 1. Begin with sound. Begin with Assault on Precinct 13 (1976). A[…]
Lady Bird, Lady Bird, What the Heck Are You?
The internal structure of Lady Bird is, I think, unconsciously designed to evoke the monster mother and then deflect the daughterly hostility she provokes by turning things around to insist,[…]
Links + BSA
