Whose Noir Is It, Anyway? Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly
Mike Hammer deconstructed, or Mike Hammer disrespected? Back in the day — way, way back in the day, when life in America was not a total girlie show — Americans[…]
Category: Genres
The Poisoned Story: The Myth of Magic in Wait ‘Til You’re Older
“Even the least imaginative people are incredulous about aging: surely this isn’t the only story, the only body I get to inhabit.” To start off, Hong Kong films may not[…]
Will the Shark Bite? G. W. Pabst and The Threepenny Opera
“Macheath: I’m not asking you to put on an opera.” ~ Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera, Act 1, scene 2 Down the crooked lanes of London, gangster Mackie Messer stalks a[…]
Oh What a Lovely Jail: Crime Is Old, Crime Is New
Just Like Those Mind-Forged Manacles Blues A desire for revenge is a normal response to crime. Ask anyone who has just had his house burgled or car stolen. But there[…]
Halloween Special – 31 Essential Horror Films
This is my ranked list of 31 Essential Horror Films culled from Ed Hardy, Jr.’s 183 Official Nominees for the 31 Flicks That Give You the Willies List. In keeping[…]
Catherine Corman, Joseph Cornell, and Rose Hobart
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUpUKcCrBP8] When I first saw Rose Hobart (excerpted above) back in the 1970s, it was a revelation to me. Its maker, Joseph Cornell (1903-1972), was an American surrealist who specialized[…]
The Invasion – Metaphor for Everything or Nothing
STOP THE PRESSES! The Invasion sends out (gasp) mixed messages! Well, most Hollywood films send out mixed messages, don’t they? Mixed messages are far more the Hollywood rule than the[…]
Commies, Commies, Everywhere – Tourneur’s The Fearmakers
Commie on a plane – Oliver Blake and Dana Andrews in The Fearmakers Under the credits of Jacques Tourneur’s The Fearmakers (1958) we see a bearded Dana Andrews being tortured[…]
Historical & Epic · Movies · Reviews
300 Lies? Give Poetics a Chance
What’s Greek history without distortions, inaccuracies, and falsehoods? In the western Aegean, in a narrow pass by the Gulf of Malis, 300 Spartans and their Hellenic allies, led by King[…]
Genres · Horror · Movies · Reviews
Return of the Return of the Repressed: Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 Weeks Later
Look familiar? When considering any contemporary zombie film, it is virtually impossible to resist comparison to the work of George A. Romero. Although many directors within the genre attempt to[…]
DVD & Blu-ray · Experimental & Underground · Reviews
Close to Home: The Films of Su Friedrich on DVD
Autobiography sometimes trumps art in these uneven works Su Friedrich is a disciplined and highly skilled filmmaker who teaches school (film and video production at Princeton, to be precise) and[…]
Butterfly Dream: Tsai Ming-liang’s I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone
“There’s no overt sexuality to Rawang’s care for Hsiao Kang. It’s a tender act of love, a selfless giving of himself to another.” With I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone[…]
Glancing, Cruising, Staring: Queer Ways of Looking
Ecce homo I looked at him closely and more quickly (one can, without taking one’s eyes off an object, look very quickly. At that moment my “gaze” swooped down on[…]
Directors · Exploitation & Erotica
Before The Green Door: The Mitchell Brothers, the Counterculture, and Hard-core’s Beginnings
It came from San Francisco This is the first of a two-part article exploring how hard-core porn evolved through the efforts of Jim and Artie Mitchell and other pioneers, with[…]
DVD & Blu-ray · Music & Musicals · Reviews
Space Here We Come: P. J. Harvey’s Please Leave Quietly Redefines the Concert Film DVD
“It flashes before our eyes, and we are not even sure what we have witnessed.” There is an incongruous moment in Please Leave Quietly (2006), the long-awaited concert DVD from[…]
The Valorized Artist: Incorporation into the “Perpetual Art Machine” [PAM]
Art for [PAM]’s sake The “Perpetual Art machine” [PAM] is a new media project begun in 2005 that presents the work of a large number of video artists as pieces[…]
Stay Well, or Else . . . Michael Moore’s Sicko
“What these Americans have could happen to us. And this is frightening.” Michael Moore’s Sicko begins with clips of what happens to Americans who don’t have health insurance. A man[…]
The Simpsons Movie: from D’oh to Dough! Helping white men get richer for 18 years!
Yes, Matt Groening and James L. Brooks are rich, rich white men, and thanks to The Simpsons Movie, they’re going to be even richer. Much as I would like to[…]
Herzog’s Tricky Rescue Dawn
Most critics have approached Werner Herzog’s latest film Rescue Dawn with qualifying kid gloves, as if it would be impolite to question a late work from such a grand old[…]
Classic Hong Kong Action Cinema, you are Avenged!
Fans of Hong Kong action cinema have long had to wade through murky, treacherous terrain, even with the arrival of DVD: bad transfers, faded, junky prints, badly cropped pan&scan;[…]
Links + BSA
