Happy 100th, Bobby Bumps, Surf Rider!
While it’s always difficult to make such a claim with assurance – for decades Disney’s 1937 Goofy feature Hawaiian Holiday was confidently thought to hold that honor – Bobby Bumps[…]
Category: Genres
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Directors
Jerry Lewis: b. Joseph Levitch, Newark, New Jersey, 1926-2017, res. Hollywood
“The major point of convergence between Cassavetes and the Dogme movement is an oppositional realist form that blurs the boundaries between being and performing.”
Exploitation & Erotica · Franchises & Series · Producers & Studios
Surf’s Up! Beyond the Beach: AIP’s Beach Party Movies
With summer starting to fade, what better way to while away the hours than by revisiting the beach, as imagined by exploitation studio American International Pictures in the early 1960s?[…]
Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk: Too Cute!
A particular issue is the degree to which the film departs from “fact.” Significant departures from the historical record, if they become frequent enough, are sufficient to sabotage any “historical[…]
Machines and Forms of War in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk
Though some have criticized Nolan’s rigidity and near mathematical precision in tackling a historical event (no doubt provoked by the director’s admittedly frustrating tendency to wax philosophic on his own[…]
Franchises & Series · SF & Fantasy
Silence is golden, so it would seem: On War for the Planet of the Apes (Matt Reeves)
Is it rude to point out that male chimps don’t hug their sons? That’s because they don’t know they have sons! They aren’t “faithful” to their “wives,” which they don’t[…]
Actors & Personalities · Documentaries
Ingrid Bergman In Her Own Words Gets Up Close and Personal
Ingrid Bergman In Her Own Words makes clear that her life was messy and episodic, but she earned great love from her directors, co-stars, and family. Don’t wait for Mommie[…]
Comedy · Comics · Franchises & Series · SF & Fantasy
Watch It Again! Batman: The Movie (1966)
The recent passing of Adam West – who made Batman his own despite the many higher-profile claimants to the cape – reminds us of the feature film based on the witty TV[…]
Drama · Memoir · Religion & Spirituality · Women in Film
On the Trail and Off the Grid: The Gender of Wild in Wild and Into the Wild
Both protagonists undertake a kind of “work of the self,” whereby they simultaneously come to terms with trauma – in one case, paternal betrayal, in the other, maternal abandonment by[…]
Comics · Franchises & Series · SF & Fantasy · Women in Film
Fight Makes Right: Unearned Feminism in Wonder Woman
Unshackled by the Snyder malaise – and ignoring the slow motion he made a fad with 300, which Jenkins curiously revisits with consistency verging on the fetishistic – Gadot roars.[…]
Activist & Political · African American · Historical & Epic · SF & Fantasy
The Legend of Tarzan: A Rich White Man’s Burden, or, Donald in the Jungle
Several questions suggest themselves. What ideological framework is revealed by the forwarding of a contemporary story in which the white man has lost his mojo and needs to struggle to[…]
Horror · LGBT & Queer · Writers & Critics
Have I Seen the Real World Yet? Thomas Tryon’s The Other (1972)
One of the few indelible images in director Robert Mulligan’s 1972 film of The Other is that of Niles in the freaks’ tent at the 4th of July fair, gazing[…]
Documentaries · Religion & Spirituality
The Native Eye: Re-Embracing the Serpent with “Chullachaqui”
Ciro Guerra’s Embrace of the Serpent (2016) can be read as a brilliant subversion of the colonising role that the camera plays in appropriating native cultures in favour of Western[…]
Activist & Political · Documentaries · War
Casualties of the Spirit: Liberating John Huston’s Let There Be Light (1946)
Naturally, Huston was furious about the film’s suppression and remained so all through the intervening years. In his words, “I think it boils down to the fact that they wanted[…]
Franchises & Series · Horror · SF & Fantasy
Alien: Covenant: Ridley Scott’s Myth of Creation Science
The people we care most about in Alien: Covenant are those we most delight in seeing eviscerated. David gives us his own flair for the ghoulish, cultivating with us his garden of monsters[…]
Animation · Comics · Music & Musicals · SF & Fantasy · TV & Streaming
Hooked on a Feeling: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Adventure Time, and the Bonds of Imagination
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 has infinitely more in common with the psychic quest for one’s identity, the yearning for belonging and friendship, and the no-rules imagination – sometimes[…]
Without Permission: Three Contemporary Feminist Films and One Classic (Suffragette, Mustang, Under the Shadow, Woman on the Run)
The women in these feminist films have power, but they’re more complex than fatale. * * * In the ultra-buoyant realms of badass, the femme fatale is equal to any[…]
Watch It Again! Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah, 1971)
Peckinpah’s ethics and form are evinced best in his sixth film, Straw Dogs, where we also discover the key to his aesthetic of violence. David Sumner takes a sabbatical to Yorkshire,[…]
Family Night: Attacks on the American Homestead in Night of the Hunter and Night of the Living Dead
The two films under examination here, The Night of the Hunter (1955) and Night of the Living Dead (1968), would have you believe that nothing harrows the soul like an[…]
God Is Dead but the Shadow Is Long: Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant
Like Prometheus, Alien: Covenant refuses to allow either the religious or materialist viewer to remain comfortable in their own belief or unbelief: for every Christian and Darwinian horror there is seared[…]
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