The Dark Side Inside: Thoughts on Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
Anger leads to fear, fear leads to hate, hate leads to suffering … Episode III is here and it’s deep, dark and delightful. It clears up many things that were[…]
Animation · LGBT & Queer · Reviews · TV & Streaming
Bikini Bottom Babylon: The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie
He’s fun-damental, not fundamentalist! He’s a Candide for the 21st century, facing the everyday predicaments of the human condition with a sunny optimism and unreasonable zest that seem borderline manic,[…]
The Cross and the Ukelele: Seijun Suzuki’s Princess Raccoon
Suzuki blows morning glories “No man should love a raccoon.” Wise words indeed, even if they address a problem few will encounter, but that’s one lesson taught in Seijun Suzuki’s[…]
Documentaries · Music & Musicals · Reviews
Ready to Rumba? Dance Fever Doc Mad Hot Ballroom Busts a Groove
“You start having to wash two times a day and grow hair in weird places.” “I like moving my hips, a lot!” That’s one preteen girl enthusing about the pleasures[…]
Going My Way? The Hitchchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Is Finally on Film
Say “Slartibartfast” fast three times Well, Earth is destroyed, but luckily our guy-next-door, Arthur Dent (Martin Freeman), is best friends with an alien, Ford Prefect (Mos Def), who saves his[…]
Batman Begins: Now with 50% Fewer Nipples!
It’s one step forward, two steps backward as our long national aureoline nightmare refuses to end Were you, like me, drawn as a moth to a flame to attend the[…]
Essays · Experimental & Underground
Isolating Isolationism: Recent INDEX Releases from the Austrian Avant-Garde
As the covert bottom-line interests of capitalist film distribution circumscribe our viewing options as much as overt censorship ever could, we should earnestly applaud the arrival of the new “INDEX”[…]
Performance World: The Truman Show‘s Sociology
The show must go on Never has a movie better fitted a sociological theory than The Truman Show (1999) to the work of Erving Goffman. Best known for Presentation of[…]
Pulp with a Soundtrack: Getting Elmore Leonard on Film
“My sound is the absence of me.” – Elmore Leonard The curious thing about Elmore Leonard is that while his books move fast, the films that capture his tone seem[…]
Superwomen? The Bad-Ass Babes of Sin City – or Are They?
This noir-drenched comic adaptation is retro in more ways than one In the sordid, febrile netherworld of Sin City, the eponymous film re-creation of the comic by Frank Miller, the[…]
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service: Re-Viewing a Bond Masterwork
“We have all the time in the world” A cult audience was [. . .] recruited when the National Film Theatre ran a season of Bond films in 1980. Of[…]
Führerkontakt: The Emerging German Perspective on the Third Reich
“In short, completely normal.” A great deal of how the Third Reich presented itself and how we have come to know it is visual. Early on, the Nazis understood the[…]
Actors & Personalities · Comedy · Directors · Silents
Looking at Charlie – the Mutuals: An Occasional Series on the Life and Work of Charlie Chaplin
“Love backed by force, forgiveness sweet, brings hope and peace to Easy Street” “Fulfilling my contract with Mutual was, I suppose, the happiest period of my life.” Charlie Chaplin had[…]
Rousseau Redux: Regis Wargnier’s Disappointing Pygmy Tale Man to Man
These “noble savages” — and the issues they embody — deserve better
Activist & Political · Animation
Only in America: On Team America: World Police
Trey Parker and Matt Stone fight Hollywood ignorance with some ignorance of their own
Losing Liam: On Ken Loach’s Realist Masterpiece, Sweet Sixteen
The best British film of its time?
Zuckerman and Zugsmith on Sirk
GEORGE ZUCKERMAN ON SIRK Robert Wilder’s novel had been shelved and written off (because of Breen office objections and a threatened lawsuit by the Reynolds tobacco family) when I first[…]
Sarris on Sirk
The very strange, controversial career of Douglas Sirk raises perplexing questions about form and content in the cinema. For one thing, Sirk’s literary source material has ranged from Anton Chekhov[…]
The Lure of the Gilded Cage: All I Desire and There’s Always Tomorrow
“Once upon a time in sunny California” reads a title card immediately after the credits for Sirk’s There’s Always Tomorrow. “Once upon a time” triggers an expectation of a fairy[…]
Love Affairs That Always Fade: Sirk’s Doomed Romances
In Douglas Sirk’s world, romantic love doesn’t play much of a part. His characters are boxed into ruts which are ever-deepening; they cannot understand themselves or their desperate predicaments, let[…]
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