The Foul Sty Underneath: The 5 Greatest Small Town Noirs
If film noir is defined by any single image, it is the dark city. Yet a film doesn’t have to take place in the dark city to be noir. Any fallen world[…]
Category: Genres
The 10 Most Devastating Film Noir Endings: Pre-Code to the Present
A film noir doesn’t have to have an unhappy ending … but it helps. Here are 10 film noir endings that pack an emotional wallop. I Am a Fugitive from[…]
Cinema du WTF – UPSTREAM COLOR (Shane Carruth 2013)
A singular and highly accomplished independent film, Upstream Color is philosophical science fiction in the tradition of the French nouvelle vague, seasoned with a dash of Cronenbergian body horror. Like[…]
Activist & Political · Documentaries
From Climate Hacker to Hero: An Interview With Tim DeChristopher
Originally published in An environmental idealist stops an illegal oil and gas auction by bidding for parcels he can’t possibly afford. Savaged by an exponentially accelerating climate crisis, a once-proud[…]
Experimental & Underground · Reviews
A Boy and His Atom: The Smallest Movie Ever Made
IBM releases a movie starring actual atoms, on a screen you can’t even see with an ordinary microscope.
Directors · Reviews · SF & Fantasy
The Man Who Shot John Ford — in 3D: Spielberg Retrofits Jurassic Park with Mixed Results
“As cold and insincere as it may be for Spielberg to flush an ‘updated’ version back into theaters as a marketing blitz for the forthcoming 3D sequel, Jurassic Park still[…]
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.
Activist & Political · Directors · Documentaries · Interviews
“It Could Cause a Popular Uproar”: Interview with Amir Ramses on his controversial documentary Jews of Egypt
“They were educated in security, and these guys are raised with the concept that the word ‘Jew’ means ‘enemy.’ They all look at themselves in the mirror, and they imagine themselves to be superheroes, spy killers . . . I doubt they even saw the film before banning it.”
Actors & Personalities · Directors · Producers & Studios · Silents
Who Was the Real James Young Deer? The Mysterious Identity of the Pathè Producer Finally Comes to Light
“With his acting experience and technical know-how, Young Deer soon advanced to one of Pathé’s leading filmmakers. His Indian identity served him well: no one in the cast or crew at that time would have taken orders from a black man.”
The Man Who Shot John Ford — in 3D: Spielberg Retrofits Jurassic Park with Mixed Results
“As cold and insincere as it may be for Spielberg to flush an ‘updated’ version back into theaters as a marketing blitz for the forthcoming 3D sequel, Jurassic Park still exemplifies, for better and worse, the staying power and effectiveness of Spielbergian theme park ride filmmaking, independent of the fact that it is actually about a theme park, and its success is a testament to how skilled he can be at showing an audience what it wants to see.”
The Lost Films of the 1840s: The Mississippi River and the Tradition of Proto-Cinema
“The unrolling of the canvas was timed to take around two hours, with the speed of movement simulating the experience of drifting on a steamboat down the river itself. Lit by gaslight, the presentation was accompanied by the delivery of a lecture by a narrator, an episodic commentary that ranged from the didactic to the purely entertaining. The exhibition was often joined by piano accompaniment, the score composed specifically for the painting and even made available for purchase after viewing. In some cases, as the scene moved, stage crews would manipulate lighting to simulate sunrises and sunsets, daylight and darkness.”
Satirical Excess and Empty Vessels: Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy
“Rupert Pupkin is uniquely a product of late capitalism near the close of the twentieth century; his fantasies reflect mass media’s ability to twist the real world into an insubstantial collection of images that mimic reality — the representation of self becomes more than the actual self, and it becomes impossible to tell the difference.”
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.”
Activist & Political · Uncategorized · War
Zero Dark Thirty: Simple-Mindedness Dressed Up as Moral Complexity or Artistic Vagueness
“Does it all come down to the injustice of 3,000 people dying on 9/11? But at some level everybody went through that. Yet few of us thereafter felt the need to cast off every other human part of ourselves in order to find ‘justice,’ whatever that means in such contexts.”
Unreliable Narrative: Zero Dark Thirty, Torture, and Truth
“If Bigelow is not assembling the story, who is? The darkest implication of this is that Zero Dark Thirty takes no stand on the events of the last decade because the sources on which it relies believe that there is no stand to take. Her sources believe that the existence of war is a value-free fact; so this is what Bigelow believes.”
Essays · Historical & Epic · Music & Musicals
The Music of Words: Storytelling in Two Powell & Pressburger Films
“While Powell and Pressburger were masters of the classic show-don’t-tell method, they also daringly broke the rule by telling, not showing. Both techniques ultimately serve the same purpose. Despite the aesthetic of excess often attributed to the Archers’ films, they gain power by withholding certain elements, requiring the audience to supply what’s not there.”
More Than Just Another Day Underground: Anthony Asquith’s First Feature Gets the Deluxe Treatment
“It is a much starker contrast than, say, in Hitchcock’s London films of the same period, where the humorous grace notes of the urban everyday and a happy ending are balanced throughout by a recognition of the inherent instability and all-out terror of the same modernity that produces those grace notes.”
The Women in Prison Film: From Reform to Revolution 1922-1974
“The cheap production values of most WIP films required them to rely on the promise of forbidden spectacles such as sex (‘Love Starved Women!’), violence (‘Rape, riot, and revenge’), and often the pretense of an exposé (“The story of a woman’s prison today’) to attract moviegoers.”
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