The Bright Flame of Resistance: Star Wars
The Virgin Spring: Film as Folk Ballad
Leaves in the Storm: The Role of Nature in The Virgin Spring
The Bright Flame of Resistance: Star Wars
|John Costello| Dear H., I'm writing you about a work featuring a bold woman, a man with a fast vehicle, and an ominous edifice, Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, in the hope that I can relate your interest in that book to another work. You love the social dynamics of Regency Britain, the...
The Virgin Spring: Film as Folk Ballad
| Sophie Durbin | Folk ballads are precious, living traces of the past that explain how things came to be as they are, or how things once were. Buried within layers of variation and localization, the original singers’ voices remain a haunting echo. Documenting a ballad...
Leaves in the Storm: The Role of Nature in The Virgin Spring
| Jared Meyer | Ingmar Bergman was the first filmmaker who made me realize you can film the invisible. While first discovering my love of film and beginning my practice as a filmmaker, Bergman’s films broke open my perception of movies as entertainment, that they could be just as complex a probing...
health class lessons in cinematic heroin
| Ben Tuthill | The Physical Education department at St. Paul Central made the inspired decision in the mid-2000s to screen Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream as the capstone to the anti-drug unit of sophomore-year health class. We needed...
Natural Enemies: Man on the Moon
| Jackson Stern | Of all the corruption, illnesses, and injustices affecting the world today (you could count them on fifteen hands), few are as elusive as what many refer to as the “male loneliness epidemic.” We seem to discuss this very real sickness as if...
The American Family is Dying, Anyway
|Finn Odum| “It’s Bleak” | The 1970 Peter Boyle film Joe is not part of our Bleak Week programming—though you’d be forgiven if you thought it was. Joe, which we programmed to kick off our Cantankerous Peter Boyle series, follows a wealthy advertising executive (Dennis Patrick)
Enter Al Pacino: How the Master’s First Starring Role in The Panic in Needle Park Compares to Later Performances
| Dan McCabe | “I thought it was something I could play. A few people could have done it, but it was a relatively castable role for me. I had made my theater bones playing these types of street characters...
From Roses to Dogra: Speculating Toshio Matsumoto’s Bleak Cinematic Journey
| Dan Howard | When was the last time you had a really messed up dream? Did you want to just shake it off and forget the dream, or did it pique your curiosity? In the case of both avant-garde and bleak storytelling, it’s speculated that those who are drawn towards...
The Maddening Mystery of Dogra Magra
| Ryan Sanderson | Dogra Magra (Toshio Matsumoto, 1988) is a detective story the same way that Radiohead’s King of Limbs is a dance album. Many of the pieces are there, but they’re arranged in a way that will infuriate some and perplex many more. It left me surfing through doctoral theses on...
Reality, Television, Disaster Time
| Doug Carmody | Threads opens to a world on the brink. But despite a sky disrupted by thundering jet planes and a radio warning of escalating tensions between NATO and Iran, the opening scene shows two young lovers, Ruth and Jimmy, trying to have a nice time on a date. The next scene...
The Real Sequel to Mad Max: How to Explain the Apocalypse in The Road Warrior by Watching Threads
| Ben Jarman | Nobody is surprised when it happens; it’s been coming for a long time, before written history. One argument turns into conflict after conflict. Sometimes the conflicts bring us to the brink, but never over the edge. The scholars warn and the media antagonize...
COME AND SEE: Hell in the Eyes
| Jake Rudegeair | Prepare to have your heart curdled and pressed. Prepare to have your nervous system rattled like a corpse-black skeleton in a crossroads cage. Elem Klimov’s last masterpiece COME AND SEE is cinema in the raw. It’s caustic, an aching descent into the ugliest, most engrossing...
The Thin Line Between Chaotic and Lawful: Litigious Grief in Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter
| Chris Polley | I barely understood what a lawyer was as a teen in the 90s. I especially never thought I’d end up marrying one. The major reference points I had were all from TV and movies: I loyally watched The Practice even as ABC kept messing with its time slot...
Citizens of a Different Town: The Sweet Hereafter
| Matthew Christensen | Twelve years ago, I was living in my parents’ basement. I was 44 and living in my parents’ basement. It was not a great moment for me. I had come back to the Twin Cities after a very fulfilling four years teaching at a high school in Turkey, a place whose...
Rogue One: A Lesson in Revolutionary Hope Against Fascism
|Jillian Nelson| Rogue One follows a ragtag group of Rebels who fight to obtain Imperial Death Star plans that reveal a self-destructing weakness in its system. At its core, the film is a story about finding hope in revolution against fascism. It explores this theme through three character...
My Rotten Little Part in the Rotten Machine: Outland
|John Costello| I'm supposed to write about the problem with science fiction tropes—mainly space Westerns—but I keep thinking about Peter Boyle's portrayal of Sheppard in Outland (1981). Sheppard spends much of his time playing golf in his office, looking like he can't afford a haircut, a beard trim...
In Celebration of Silliness
|Reid Lemker| Let’s play a game. I am thinking of a movie…It has a bit of action, some guns, a bit of drama, and a dash of comedy. This movie I am thinking of came out in the early 1970s and stars James Caan. Our hero is pitted against a gang of bad guys, one of them wears glasses and...
“Will the Real 80s Action Movie Please Blow Up” — 80s Avarice & Film False Positives
|Phil Kolas| The allure of mystery is inescapable in the upcoming quadruple lineup for the 80s ACTION EXTRAVAGANZA II: THE QUICKENING. We do not actually know what the movies in question will be. I tried to find any info about the first extravaganza, but even...
A Labor of Love: Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein
|Allison Vincent| As a kid growing up at the tail end of the 80s through the 90s with access to cable and an unrestricted library card, it was pretty easy to consume the media I wanted without too much interruption from my parents. My dad was lax, to say the least, when it came to...
The Cult and Culture of VHS and the 1980s Action Flick
|Dan McCabe| If I asked someone to name ten action movies, I wouldn’t be surprised if many of the named films were released in the 1980s. The Terminator (1984), First Blood (1982), Die Hard (1988), Top Gun (1986), Aliens (1986), Red Dawn (1984), Predator (1987), Lethal Weapon (1987)...
The Real World of Crime
|Matt Clark| The crime film and the heist picture have been integral to American cinema since its earliest days: gangster films of the 30s, noir of the 40s and 50s, even silent pictures like The Great Train Robbery (1903) still reverberate powerfully through our shared cinematic vocabulary...
A Criminal Reputation: George V. Higgins From Page to Screen
|J.R. Jones| George V. Higgins was a crime writer’s crime writer, which may be another way of saying he never enjoyed the same level of success as some of his fans. Elmore Leonard—whose fiction inspired Get Shorty (1995), Jackie Brown (1997), and Out of Sight (1998)—remembered Higgins...
Book Clubs and Pigeon Coops: A Hit-Man’s Guide to Empathy
|Noah Frazier| The beginnings and ends of movies often function as microcosms of the whole, enclosing the film’s central ideas within a few shots. Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai opens on a silhouette of a pigeon flying across a dark blue sky. After softly mumbling through the background...
How Many Dinner Plates Is an Octopus Allowed to Take at an All-You-Can-Eat Buffet?
|Phil Kolas| One of the greatest and most delicious irrefutable gifts of the internet has been the ever utterly overwhelming and bottomless wash of media that is our every waking hour. Beneath every rock there are hidden worms—snacks that will sustain our artistic intellect. Algorithmic