Essays · Noir · Writers & Critics
Ossessione: Shabby Little Shocker?
Or Advanced Guide to Cinematic Survival?
Category: Genres
In Praise of Dangerous Men: Patton (1970)
“The very idea of losing is hateful to Americans.”
Animation · Essays · SF & Fantasy
Living Backward: The Millennials’ Alice
“We are but older children, dear, Who fret to find our bedtime near.” — Lewis Carroll, “Child of the Pure Unclouded Brow”
Crime · Drama · Exploitation & Erotica
Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom: An Introduction
Take your seats for a “dark-hearted, midnight fantasia of ecstatic sadism, voyeurism and psychosis”!
Actors & Personalities · Comedy
Forgotten Charleys I: Charley Bowers: Silent Comedy’s Wizard of the Bizarre
“He is Aladdin and the camera is his lamp.” — James R. Quirk
Activist & Political · LGBT & Queer
The Irish Queer vs. the IRA Macho in Neil Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto
“The transvestite’s camp humor is here used to stress the unsustainability of the military discourses on which the justification of IRA terrorism is based.”
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Silents
Forgotten Charleys II: Charley Chase: Mr. Normal Unleashes His Comic Demon
“He could be suave or awkward, likable or pesky, average or eccentric, a winner or a loser, a fussy nerd or the life of the party, all the while remaining Charley Chase.”
Activist & Political · Documentaries
Troubled Waters: Crashing into The Cove
“To twist Gayatri Spivak’s famous phrase, it’s a case of (mostly) ‘white men saving cute dolphins from yellow men.'”
Repo Men on DVD
Could any film hit closer to our cultural amygdalae than Repo Men? Millions of people have seen the “American Dream” crumble before them during the Great Recession and can’t help[…]
An Exit Through the Boundaries of Documentary
“Functionless art is simply tolerated vandalism.” – Peter Steele (1962-2010) From here comes a rich smell drawn from a load of bullshit. And in no way am I demeaning the practice of street art by[…]
Bigger Than Life’s Sci-Fi Twin
No one with eyes and a brain could seriously dispute Nicholas Ray’s role as the primary auteur of Bigger Than Life. All you need to do is watch Ray’s Rebel[…]
Girlies and Spider Babies living down the Lane
This spring, I’m all about homicidal nymphets, and wouldn’t you know it, so is Stacie Ponder at Final Girl, who’s hosting a big SPIDER BABY event at her Final Girl[…]
Eastern European Animation Dept. – Renaissance (Walerian Borowczyk, 1963)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAirHKywhSc”>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAirHKywhSc] I think this is one of the greatest short films ever made. Containing not a word of spoken dialogue. Not only is the stop motion animation exquisite and amusing,[…]
Music & Musicals · Reviews · Uncategorized
The Runaways Get Bio-Picked
If the brief stardom of Buddy Holly and the even briefer star of Ritchie Valens should get the Hollywood biopic treatment, then why not the first all-girl balls-out rock act?[…]
Activist & Political · Festivals & Awards
Oscars II: On The Hurt Locker
As a tonic to all the hoopla surrounding The Hurt Locker and its Oscar win as Best Picture, we’re reprinting BL writer Jay Rothermel’s provocative review of the film, originally[…]
Photo Essays · Reviews · Silents
Victory (Maurice Tourneur, 1919)
More than 20 years before Jacques Tourneur took us to an exotic tropical isle in 1943’s I Walked With a Zombie, his father, producer/director Maurice Tourneur (1876-1961), blazed a similar trail with his[…]
Not Enraptured by Performance Capture?
The Avatar hype continues. There was a front-page piece in the L.A. Times today, whining – for lack of a better word – about how “unlike the great majority of[…]
Towards a New Cinema of Castration: I Spit on Your Grave and Only Angels Have Wings
“Peer pressure is either a boon or a bitch with the power to destroy the world, or save it.”
Val Lewton’s Symbolic Statuary: A Photo Essay
“It was once the figurehead of a slave ship. That’s where our people come from. From the misery and pain of slavery.” ~ I Walked with a Zombie
Serious Joke: The Coen Brothers’ Emergence as Jewish Humorists
“The films of the Coen brothers seem to take place in a postmodern Chelm, displaced chronologically and geographically.”
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