Going to Extremes #2: Cymbeline (Sometimes in Britain)
Where all this takes me is to the thought that fiction frequently presents human personality as something lost or imprisoned – by self-ignorance and suspicion if by nothing worse. “We’re[…]
Category: Reviews
Going to Extremes, Part One: Pericles (Some Mouldy Tale)
Drama is about extremity. This can centre on one person, or on his/her society or both. Without it drama cannot exist. But what if the world’s greatest dramatist starts testing[…]
Ida Lupino’s American Psycho: The Hitch-Hiker (1953)
“In The Hitch-Hiker, Lupino offers an unusually sustained visual examination of the average male body that is then contrasted against the anarchic body of the Psycho. Myers is often shown[…]
Exploitation & Erotica · Reviews · SF/Fantasy
Bondage, Bestiality, and Bionics: Sexual Fetishism in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner
Blade Runner is a film seeping with representations of repressed sexuality. Every scene, sequence, and image is imbued with, commenting on, or directly a result of sexual frustration and need.[…]
DVD & Blu-ray · Reviews · Silents
Blu-ray Review: The BFI’s The Phantom of the Opera (Rupert Julian, 1925, and silent film reissue, 1929)
“Erik, like Darth Vader, is much more interesting with as little backstory as possible.” — Mike Gebert, Nitrateville, site administrator1 When fairy tales, literature, and the movies hand us a[…]
Heavy TV, Part Deux: Breaking Bad ends badly, Girls gets girly, and Mad Men explores sex, death, and ketchup
Nothing about Downton Abbey in this article By the end of season four of Breaking Bad, chem teacher gone wild Walter White (Bryan Cranston) had killed just about everyone worth[…]
Marion Davies and Bing Crosby are Going Hollywood! But only one of them makes it
“Praise the Lord and pass the absinthe!” When Marion Davies first met William Randolph Hearst, she was a Ziegfeld Follies showgirl, and a showgirl she remained. She had an uncertain[…]
Spike Jonze’s Her and the Essence of Intimacy
Samantha’s voice may have a loving tenor, but the words themselves are mournful, and it’s easy to see why. So long as the two remain together, Theodore cannot live to[…]
The You and Me Inside Llewyn Davis
“We’ve consumed the romanticism of the artist, and now we’re busily consuming the history of that consumption.” It’s an accomplishment to produce a period piece whose authenticity comes through the[…]
Activist & Political · Reviews
Doing the American Hustle
“People believe what they want to believe because the guy who made this was so good that it’s real to everybody. Now who’s the master, the painter or the forger?”[…]
Blocked or Taking Stock? A Very Brief, Not Too Bleak Mid-Winter View (Albeit with the Aid of Spectacles)
“I now present Anthony Quinn (1915-2001) – the mighty one himself – in a light few will recognize: not Quinn the rank sentimentalist ham (or Eskimo), but Quinn the deeply[…]
Blank Like a Panther: Cat People (1982) blu-ray review
“Even if Schrader would like to completely eliminate any ‘magic’ or dream-into-reality bleeding, it’s still there – the boundaries of his material threaten to swamp him at every turn, so kudos to him for at least not running in fear back behind the phallic bars of patriarchal condescension that was such an annoyance in the original. “
Activist & Political · Reviews
Consumerist Ultimate Indigestion: La Grande Bouffe’s Deadly Physiological Pleasures
“To go to the cinema is like to eat or shit, it’s a physiological act, it’s urban guerrilla” ~ Marco Ferreri Francis Bacon once said: “We’re flesh, potential carcasses. If[…]
The Wolf of Wall Street: Who Are We to Judge?
In Jarhead, his memoir of the first Iraq War, Tony Swofford calls our attention to a paradox of “antiwar” films. When he and his fellow Marines hear they’re about to[…]
Blue Is the Warmest Color 1: Unresolved Alienations of Class
“Pornographic,” “voyeuristic,” “clinical” . . . at a time when gay cinema is known for its matter-of-fact, graphic handling of sex, it’s surprising that the sex scenes in Abdellatif Kechiche’s[…]
Favorite Films of 2013
“Rather than some good safe white elephant of a film or a smutty feel-bad historical repressionist masterpiece, these are films that have escaped the maze of cliché with moxy, wit, and nutz.”
Post-Sensory Pong: A Future-Shock Analysis of Virginia Postrel’s “Who Needs Raise When you have TV?”
Now anyone who can scrape together a few hundred dollars can load up on enough movie streams and DV-R and giant LCD screens to never leave the house, so who needs a nice house?
Future-Pissed: THE VISITOR (1979), AKIRA (1988), TANK GIRL (1995)
Though last December’s lack of promised Mayan doomsday never panned out, December 2013 is laden with new DVDs and theatrical revivals that allow us to pretend the world ended as far back as 1979. Oh if only… we might all be rolling with Humongous by now, or Bane, or what’s the difference?
Actors & Personalities · Directors · Reviews
Clint, Caught in the Act: On The Beguiled, and Don Siegel’s Leading Man
“While the premise of an injured soldier recuperating in a house full of smitten women seems ripe for male-fantasy debasement, the film is deeply interested in the psyches of its[…]
Crime · Exploitation & Erotica · Reviews
The Di Blasio Grime Revival: Ms. 45 (1981), Little Nicky (2000)
This is a film from the era of Bernhard Goetz, Curtis Sliwa and the Guardian Angels, and of course, Charles Bronson finding himself facing muggers wherever he may go.
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