Anthropomorphizing the Anthropoid: Peter Jackson’s King Kong
Even a big ape can enjoy a sunset, can’t he? 1st Blonde: “What is this thing, anyway?” 2nd Blonde: “Some kind of gorilla.” 1st Blonde: “Ain’t we got enough of[…]
Category: Reviews
Looking for Angst in All the Wrong Places: Sam Mendes’s Jarhead: Marines Gone Wild!
A few really cute boys take their shirts off, but that’s about it On paper, it must have sounded, well, interesting. Take the flamboyant, left-wing lyricism of Academy Award-winning director[…]
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[…]
Reviews · TV & Streaming · Writers & Critics
Nine Hamlets: Olivier, Burton, Jacobi, Kline, Gibson, Branagh, Scott, Hawke, and Lester All Take a Stab at the Original Man in Black
“Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar?” Hamlet, it must be said, is not[…]
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[…]
Grandma’s Boy: No, Not That One
Linda Cardellini dies and goes to Hell I’m no Dante, but I bet they’re busy in Hell these days. Busy putting in new and lower circles, busy putting in new[…]
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[…]
Against Pleasure, Against Identification: Feminism, Cultural Atheism, and the Tragic Subject (Part Two)
“The more a man dreams, the less he believes.” ~ H. L. Mencken Preface: Why My Dreams Smell Like Nothing (Onto the Regime of Odor) On June 18, 2005 (I[…]
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[…]
In a Galaxy Far, Far Away — But Not Far Enough: Joss Whedon’s Serenity: Like TV, but Without All the Intelligence
Sayin’ ain’t doin’, motherfucker! It’s a damn fact that starin’ into the inky, pitchy blackness of space can make you a bit addle-pated, to the point that you might start[…]
Proof or Consequences: Miscast Mathematicians in Love: Paltrow Sees Dead (Crazy) People
Let no one who is not a geometer enter here. According to legend, Plato posted this sign above the door to his Academy in Athens to show just how much[…]
Extra! Extra! Read All About It! Clooney Defeats McCarthy!
Rosemary’s nephew clocks dairy state demagogue in Good Night, And Good Luck Generals and Hollywood directors have at least one thing in common: they both enjoy fighting the last war.1[…]
Talking About the Space Between Us All: On Forty Shades of Blue
Ira Sachs’ sophomore feature is charged with emotion When we first see Laura (Dina Korzun) in Ira Sachs’ knockout naturalistic melodrama Forty Shades of Blue, she is browsing in the[…]
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[…]
Witchcraft Through the Ages: The Best of the New Bewitched
“Where do alchemy and acting meet?” Perhaps the definition of a great screwball comedy is that it is an outstandingly funny film for which no real script is conceivable. For[…]
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.[…]
Renoir on the Seine: Boudu Saved from Drowning on DVD
Criterion’s Renoir-fest continues with this classic Criterion has already remastered Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion(1938) and The Rules of the Game (1939), so the release of Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932),[…]
Links + BSA
