film
A Quick Reflection on 'Furiosa'
George Miller's latest film is excellent, but it opened to box-office disappointment.
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film
Or, The Whale
“I’ve already started underlining meaningful passages in her copy of Moby Dick, if you know what I mean.” —Heathers In The Whale, by director Darren Aronofsky and writer Samuel D. Hunter, Brendan Fraser stars as an English teacher, Charlie, trying to reconnect with his estranged daughter. The film takes
film
The Second Civil War
Pay attention, class. What was the cause of the Second American Civil War? Subscribe now It’s clear that Alex Garland’s Civil War goes out of its way to avoid giving the audience details about what caused the eponymous conflict raging throughout the U.S. We’re given tantalizing
trans
Thoughts on 'The People's Joker'
I haven't seen The People's Joker, which recently showed at the Toronto International Film Festival, and for now, it might have to stay that way. The film has reportedly been pulled from TIFF following "rights issues", and as such, the future of The People&
Newsletter
The Transsexual Shadow: Spectacle and Absence in 'Naked Gun 33 1/3'
[Here's something I wrote in 2015; I've changed a lot as a writer and thinker, but I like this piece still. All images taken from the film in question.] Subscribe now There’s a trans character in the 1994 American comedy Naked Gun 33 1/3:
film
Always Look Directly at an Eclipse Box Set
Ongoing Reflections on Physical Media, Part 2.
film
Steel This Book: Criterion, Arrow, and the Golden Age of Home Video Packaging
Ongoing Reflections on Physical Media, Part 1.
film noir
Nothing is True: 'Naked Lunch' and Film Noir
"Exterminate all rational thought." Bill Lee in Naked Lunch Subscribe "The stuff that dreams are made of." Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon We can't exactly pin down film noir. Or perhaps it's better to say it isn't desirable to
film
Film as a Machine
The filmmaker Hollis Frampton, in his essay "For a Metahistory of Film", writes that "Cinema is the Last Machine", later suggesting that "the sum of all film, all projectors and all cameras in the world constitutes one machine, which is by far the largest and
film
The Better Angles of Our Nature: Bertolucci's 'Il Conformista'
Pasolini's Salò is a film about Fascism through sex; Bertolucci's Il Conformista (or The Conformist, in English) is a film about Fascism through architecture. All politics is distilled into the structures people live in, or more to the point the way we fit into those structures
horror
The Weekend of Psychotic Women
I think Marx put it best when he wrote that history repeats itself "the first time as tragedy, the second as a psychotic woman." I might be misremembering that, but I'm going to run with it. At the beginning of this month [note: this piece was
film
Brief Thoughts on 'Fallen Leaves'
Partway through Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves (2023), the two protagonists visit a cinema to see Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die (2019). The comparison between Kaurismäki and Jarmusch is an easy one but nonetheless bolstered by this offbeat citation: two lovers, bound yet adrift like fallen leaves,