film
Always Look Directly at an Eclipse Box Set
Ongoing Reflections on Physical Media, Part 2.
Newsletter
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,
personal essay
February 2nd / November 5th
Today is February 2nd, Groundhog Day, namesake holiday of the classic film in which Bill Murray relives a single day repeatedly until he learns to be a halfway decent person. 2016 through 2020 felt a bit like Groundhog Day for myself, and I imagine many others, as days of batshit
trans
Lady Ballers: What Isn't a Woman?
Consider yourself lucky if you did not subject yourself to Lady Ballers, the recent Daily Wire film that, like seemingly all conservatives these days, has an axe to grind against transgender athletes. I watched it so you don’t have to, as the saying goes. I’ve written before about
horror
Hours of Wax
There's a great deal of twinning present in 2005's House of Wax. The film presents us with two sets of twins: Bo and Vincent, the film's antagonists, and Carly and Nick, the two protagonists. Nick sets up a classic twin dichotomy by quipping that
trans
Matt Walsh, 'What is a Woman?', and the Trans Documentary
I never wanted to watch the Matt Walsh-led documentary What is a Woman?, because, well, Matt Walsh is a hatemonger and a stochastic terrorist against transgender people. The Daily Wire host walks viewers through the insidiously sophisticated What is a Woman? not in the effort of gaining any understanding
film
Transgender Nostalgia
If you follow the logic of They'll Love Me When I'm Dead, the documentary on Orson Welles and the attempt to make his final film, then the Netflix release of The Other Side of the Wind is a vindication for the embattled auteur. And it may