Dreams and the Human Material in Night of the Living Dead
Dawn brings the forces of reason and order (ironic, in that the posse clearing away the few remaining dead are little more than trigger-happy, thrill-seeking rednecks, not the wise and[…]
Tagged: cinema
Activist & Political · African American · Societal Trends
A Star Is Shorn: Thanks to Woefully Underinformed Campus Activists, Acting Legend, Badger Alum, and Civil Rights Champion Fredric March Is Suddenly “Off Wisconsin”
Fredric March stands alongside four other mid-century drum majors for civil rights during the 1943 national radio broadcast of “Race-Relations Sunday.” Left to right: concert soprano Dorothy Maynor, actor Canada[…]
Drama · Theory · Writers & Critics
André Bazin and Graham Greene (and Alfred Hitchcock): Some Points of Contact
Bazin would always harbor reservations about The Third Man, but, due to that film, Greene’s presence would continue to loom large in discussions of Orson Welles, who was, of course,[…]
I’m Thinking of Ending Things and Men Writing Women
I’m Thinking of Ending Things is, like so many stories, a story about a man masquerading as a story about a woman. Which ultimately makes me wonder why we need[…]
Experimental & Underground · Horror · Memoir
Strangest Damn Things: Eraserhead in My Head
Our Eraserhead screening was naïve and unexpected and for me had lasting impact, because when art enters our heads uninvited, leaves traces after it’s flashed through our consciousness, jars the[…]
Troubling Mastery: Scorsese’s and Kubrick’s Psychosexual New York Odysseys
About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position. – W. H. Auden, “Musée des Beaux-Arts” (1940) “It’s also a film I cherish[…]
Born on a Meat Hook: On André Øvredal’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019)
“We grow up, but do we ever forget how afraid of ourselves we are?” * * * The books parents protest about are the best at converting children into bookworms.[…]
Doing Favors: The Insular Moral and Political World of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman
The restrained tone, middle American location, and half-century historical sweep of The Irishman depart from Scorsese’s gangland epics Goodfellas and Casino. It isn’t a political treatise, but it does tie[…]
“Who is the third who walks always beside you?” Carol Reed, Graham Greene, and The Third Man
If Harry, viewed through the lens of Greene’s perverse Catholicism, is some kind of dark Jesus, then Holly is his betraying Judas, and Anna is his Magdalene. Both Harry and[…]
Activist & Political · African American · Drama
“Don’t talk to us about being killed”: Uptight and the Problem of Black Cinema in Hollywood
Like Dassin’s 1950 noir classic Night and the City, Uptight is shot predominantly at night, with oddly titled camera angles and bright, glaring colours, ironically organised around the shades of[…]
SF & Fantasy · Women in Film · Writers & Critics
A World Like This Deserves Contempt: Adapting Harlan Ellison’s A Boy and His Dog
A Boy and His Dog’s promotional advertisements also reveal how the novella was adapted and modified to suit the tastes of the American popular film-going public. The movie’s promo posters[…]
Drama · Horror · Women in Film
The Birds Is Us: Where Did We Come From?
The movie is, literally, a projection of our mental landscape. We passively sit back (like Jeffries in Rear Window) and the world appears as we live and make it. We[…]
Documentaries · Historical & Epic · War
Sacrifice in the Name of Documentary: Apollo 11 and For Sama
The pair have little in common, but each goes against the grain of how this form is typically used, sacrificing everything else in the pursuit of an important story that[…]
Positive Freedoms in a Negative Space: Revisiting Mädchen in Uniform
From these socio-erotic negotiations sprung cinema’s first expressly lesbian-themed feature, Mädchen in Uniform (1931), not simply a tale of forbidden love but a historically particular challenge to Weimar Germany’s separation[…]
Directors · Indigenous · Interviews · Women in Film
On Canción sin nombre (Song Without a Name): Talking with Director Melina León
It’s the kind of film I wanted to make where you see social implications growing from a personal story. What made it very hard was the sadness of it and[…]
#MeToo · Activist & Political · Drama · Women in Film · Workplace
#MeToo in Three Recent Films: The Assistant, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, and On the Record
#MeToo has been an unequivocal success in terms of calling out the rampant sexual abuse that exists in the veins of Hollywood, but has been less successful in allowing room[…]
Directors · Drama · Interviews
On Driveways and Spa Night: Talking with Director Andrew Ahn
“I try very hard to give the characters in my films a sense of humanity. I want this feeling for the audience that these characters exist outside of the frame.[…]
Drama · Interior Monologue · Letters
Just a Violet: On Gillian Armstrong’s Mrs. Soffel
(interpolating material by Paul Simon, John Sebastian, Johnny Jewel, Johnny Mercer, Emily Jane Meluch, Conor Oberst, Jaret Ray Reddick, and Eddie Argos) * * * The weight of the world[…]
African American · Horror · Race
Color-Blind in Black and White: How Suture Wants Us to Ignore Race
As it stands, Suture’s bold attempt at cultural effacement never drives home any type of allegory, just as Clay is only a passenger in a narrative with barely any causal[…]
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