Men in Love: On Brokeback Mountain
” … I wanted eternal union with a man too: another kind of love,” he said. “I don’t believe it,” she said. “It’s an obscenity, a theory, a perversity.” “Well[…]
Category: Genres
A History of Violence: A Minimum of Thought
“A whole load of ‘Aw’ with not a lot of ‘shucks,’ updated only by a little cunnilingus.” If David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence were an actor, it would be[…]
What the Sound Is Saying: How Music Moves in Bertolucci
“Who doesn’t want to be rescued by their narrator?” Sometimes a film’s camera takes you on one track, while its music sends you on another, wider one: it offers you[…]
Everyone Has Something to Hide: On Cronenberg’s A History of Violence
Unmasking (the) America(n) Two of the largest influences on postwar American life were the virtual invention of the teenager and self-help. Something for nothing underlies the idea behind each development.[…]
Ann-Margret in Wonderland: But Bates and the Brits Are at Home in The Return of the Soldier
“Her English accent wanders around her mouth like a playful ice cube.” Have pity on The Return of the Soldier. Shot in England in 1982, the film did not get[…]
Actors & Personalities · Directors · Silents
Blossom in the Dust: Lillian Gish, The Wind, and Mr. Griffith
“I was never young, and if you were never young, how can you ever feel old?” Towards the end of Follow Me, Boys! (1966), a particularly obnoxious piece of Walt[…]
SF & Fantasy · Visual Artists · Writers & Critics
Expanding the Possibilities: Peter Chung Talks About Aeon Flux, Matriculated, Dark Fury, and More
“The more you’re able to project your own world upon the work, the more power it has.” Peter Chung is not your average sci-fi figure. First, he cuts a studied[…]
Buried Alive: On Frederick Wiseman’s Juvenile Court
“The great legal scholar Lenny Bruce once observed that in the halls of justice the only justice is in the halls . . .” The long, astonishing final sequence of[…]
Actors & Personalities · Reviews · Silents
Step Right Up and Call Me Speedy! Harold Lloyd — Almost All Isn’t Enough
The last of the great silent clowns now on DVD “Step Right Up and Call Me Speedy!” Harold Lloyd has often — too often, really — been called the Anthony[…]
Exploitation & Erotica · Reviews
Quickies: Random Short Reviews from 119 Bullets + 3 to Transgeneration
“Dafydd Thomas (Lucas), a delusional queen in PVC fetish drag, jealously guards his status as ‘the only gay in the village’ even when competing queens arrive to challenge him.” 119[…]
Toto, I Don’t Think We’re in the Grand Tetons Anymore: Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain
Queens in jeans? Bareback Mountain? Buttfuck Mountain? Steers n’ Queers? Homos on the Range? Has there ever been a movie that invited more witticisms?1 In fact, Brokeback should be called[…]
Far from the Madding Multiplex: The Subtle Horror of The Innocents
This ghost story’s charms are far from ephemeral At a point in cinema’s long history when multiplex horror films either have the staying power of 20-year-old aspirin (The Ring) or[…]
How Sweet to Be a Cloud? Fancy and Fucking Collide in Tsai-Ming Liang’s Latest
Tsai pushes the art/porn envelope — or does he? With The Wayward Cloud (Tian Bian Yi Duo Yun — literally “A Cloud at the Edge of the Sky,” 2004), Tsai[…]
Les Fleurs du Mal: The Leopard Man and Le Corbeau: Tourneur and Clouzot Deliver Homefront Perversity, Paranoia, and Subversion
“Nothing is so transient as sanity and safety . . .” Free from his past and sufficiently angry to wage war, Germain enlists Vorzet’s talents as psychiatrist — he believes[…]
Asian · Directors · Interviews
The Immortality Blues: Talking with Fruit Chan About Dumplings
And other tasty subjects Fruit Chan’s Dumplings provoked unprecedented attention at the 2005 Melbourne International Film Festival, first and foremost because of its controversial and idiosyncratic narrative, but also because[…]
Actors & Personalities · Westerns
Golden Boy: The Sexy Ways of Joel McCrea
“Easy to overlook but endlessly rewarding to look over” Joel McCrea, an amiable, modest actor who turned down parts because he felt he wasn’t good enough for them, began his[…]
An Unsawed Woman: Re-exhuming the Texas Chainsaw Massacre Remake on DVD
How Jessica Biel’s Moral Hotness Tamed the West While Tobe Hooper’s original 1973 Texas Chainsaw Massacre stands tall in the orchards of horror academia as a symbol of the dismemberment[…]
There’s Nothing You Can Do: Notes on William Friedkin’s The Guardian
We have met the enemy and he is us The Guardian (1990) concerns itself with the guardian spirits of trees. We’re told some guardian spirits are evil. In this very[…]
Bennett Miller’s Capote: Flatter Than Kansas, and Almost as Boring
Life is earnest, sure, but why does art have to be? “No one got further in history with less intellectual baggage than Cicero,”1 as Freddie Binkard Artz2 liked to say.[…]
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