Books: Nightmare Movies, by Kim Newman
Nightmare Movies: Horror on Screen Since the 1960s, by Kim Newman. Bloomsbury Publishing, 1988, 2011. Trade paperback, 633pp. $45.00. The first film writing I ever came in contact with was one[…]
Book review: Shock Value, by Jason Zinoman
Shock Value: How A Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, And Invented Modern Horror, by Jason Zinoman. New York: Penguin, 2011. Hardcover. $25.95. 274 pp. ISBN 978-1-59420-302-2 By[…]
Book review: They Live by Jonathan Lethem
They Live by Jonathan Lethem. New York: Soft Skull Press, 2010. Paperback. $13.95. 163 pp. Any author who devotes an essay to Donald Sutherland’s buttocks has already won me over, so[…]
Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life: An Outsider’s View
The Tree of Life seems to excite fanatical devotion. The reactions to the film heard, for example, on Filmspotting, from both the podcast’s commentators and its listeners, have an uncritical[…]
Karloff/Tourneur x 2
Do you recognize this dastardly villain? It’s Boris Karloff, playing a hostile Native American in The Last of the Mohicans (1920) directed by Maurice Tourneur. The hero of the film[…]
Forgotten Fathers – Maurice Tourneur, Richard Oswald
The Frenchman, Maurice Tourneur, and the Austrian, Richard Oswald, were major producer/directors during cinema’s Silent Era, but are hardly remembered today. These days, movie lovers are more likely to know the films and[…]
Space Dust: On Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life
“Malick invites us to marvel at a universe created for our benefit and an afterlife in which all our cares will be resolved. The best part of the movie — Brad Pitt taunting his sons, willing them to rebel against an authority he doesn’t believe he deserves — vanishes behind a scrim of inane space flotsam, while the combination of the two endows Jack’s childhood with a world-historical weight it can’t possibly bear.”
Genres · SF & Fantasy · TV & Streaming
Concocting Character in Television: The Case of Star Trek’s Annoying Old Men — and the Beautiful Young Women Who Love Them
“The arrival of Kirk on the scene precipitates a kind of crisis in the equilibrium of this pair of older, controlling-male and young subordinate-woman. What happens is that the woman is somehow awakened by the arrival of the Enterprise crew — awakened sexually, but also in a much broader sense.”
Producers & Studios · Writers & Critics
Talk Is Cheap: On Aaron Sorkin’s Moral Compass
“You want answers?” “I want the truth!” “You can’t handle the truth!” — A Few Good Men (1992), screenplay by Aaron Sorkin
Festivals & Awards · LGBT & Queer
Crafting Community: The 2011 QDoc International Film Festival
“It’s encouraging to see how articulate and unafraid many of the kids in Put This on the Map are in deciding who they want to be, how they want to live, and even what they want to be called: ‘Very gay,’ ‘an ally,’ ‘dating an FTM,’ ‘not straight, gay, bi, anything.'”
Carnivorous Lunar Activities: The Origins of 1980s Metamorphosis Cinema
“I didn’t mean to call you a meatloaf, Jack!” — David (David Naughton), An American Werewolf in London
Desert Solitaire: On Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff (2010)
“The sheer physical immensity of this space threatens to hijack everything else in the film, and it’s a testament to Reichardt’s directorial intelligence that she lets it, and that she makes it work as part of a larger project.”
Short Takes: Cinematography: “But It Did Happen” — Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia
“Magnolia’s most instructive revelation occurs obliquely and, quite literally, microscopically. The shot occurs during the climactic rain of frogs, as Claudia and her mother, panicked, cling to each other in Claudia’s apartment. The camera bends away from their embrace toward one of Claudia’s paintings, zooming in so that we can read the words “but it did happen” in the bottom right corner . . .”
You Say Goodbye, and I Say Hello: The Long Goodbye and the End of the Crime (and Competition) in American Detective Films
“While Altman’s description of the detective and his generic milieu as it evolved by the early 1970s works up to a point, the idea that his film closes a genre fails under examination. Such a position misjudges the primary pleasure derived from the American detective film, and misinterprets the satisfaction The Long Goodbye’s ending provides when set within this pleasure and these films.”
Darkening the Image of American Wealth and Power: Unstoppable and The Lincoln Lawyer
“How do you get a “Headstart” program going that isn’t about implanting early entrepreneurial ambitions in toddlers but one that gets a head start on that sort of brain ownership? More difficult: How do you develop a resistance to such ownership by the surround we are born into without falling into the illusions of an individual will-to-power?”
Misery Loves Fantasy: Kim Ki-duk’s Arirang (2011)
“Kim decided to retreat into an interior world where he does not need to confront or take but where his time can be sucked up by shitting in fields, smoking fish, getting drunk, and singing.”
Eating Cinema: The Frozen Dessert as Audiovisual Synaesthesia
“But we can imagine infinite other, less stodgy flavors: a Saragossa Manuscript of Neapolitan layers within layers within layers; a Cannibal Holocaust of pure cherry surrounding a chunky mystery surprise; a Seventh Seal of precious white vanilla lost in an ominous ocean of midnight chocolate.”
Still Hungover: Todd Phillips and Rape Culture
“There is no excuse for what others have called the “bro-magnon” film The Hangover, which unapologetically and even aggressively defends the model of masculinity that poo-poos date rape as some feminazi invention to further harass those poor, horny, entitled men.”
Greer Garson and the Good War: How We All Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Great Lady
“Almost everything about Greer, her graceful figure, little mannerisms, the way she walks, talks, and smiles, reminds us of the Nineties, when Papa sat at the head of the table, airing his arrogant opinions, and never dreaming that his demure little wife, resourceful as a dozen U.S. Army engineers, was twisting him around her little finger, really running him and everything else in the house.” — Charles Samuels in Motion Picture magazine (1945)
Activist & Political · Essays · SF & Fantasy
Green Lantern: The Allegory of Fear & Will Unfolded
“Facing fear and not concoctions of fear serving the needs of our own resident guardians of wealth and power is a far different enterprise than joining the enthusiasts of self-empowerments’ call “to just wish it.”
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