The Architecture of Family: An Autumn Afternoon and The Royal Tenenbaums
A Familiar and Familial Farewell: Ozu’s Final Film
He Knows When You’re Awake: (Re)Visiting the History of Santas in Horror
The Architecture of Family: An Autumn Afternoon and The Royal Tenenbaums
|Andrew Neill| Let’s get a potentially uncool but nonetheless true thing about me out of the way right now: I am a huge fan of the American film director Wesley Wales Anderson. You probably know him as Wes Anderson. He’s one of my favorite directors—gotta be in the top three...
A Familiar and Familial Farewell: Ozu’s Final Film
|Dan Howard| By the start of 1962, Yasujirō Ozu had already directed a staggering 53 feature films that spanned a 33-year journey. With classics like Tokyo Story (1953) and Floating Weeds (1959) to lesser-known gems like The Munekata Sisters (1950), the deeper you dive...
He Knows When You’re Awake: (Re)Visiting the History of Santas in Horror
|Finn Odum| Eons ago (in 2019), when I was but a spritely, youthful child (20 and in college), I wrote about the 1984 controversial Claus classic Silent Night, Deadly Night. Back in the days of zinger conclusions and quippy comments on Santa Claus’s sanctity, I had dreams...
Women in the Eyes of Men – Ozu and Kore-eda
|Nicole Rojas-Oltmanns| Japan seems to have a magnetic pull for educated Millennials. The USA, it seems, is the antithesis of the orderly, tidy, traditional, technologically advanced, and ritualistic culture of Japan in the minds of many. Whenever anyone begins recounting...
How To Properly Identify the Ending of On Dangerous Ground
|MH Rowe| On Dangerous Ground (1951) might appear at first to be one of the more unbearably melodramatic film noirs ever produced. Its ending, or really the ending of the ending—the film’s final scene—threatens especially to pull all that has preceded it down into the depths of pure...
Ozu’s Colorful Everyday: Equinox Flower (1958) and Late Autumn (1960)
|Steve Rybin| The Trylon’s “Ozu in Color” series presents four of Yasujirō Ozu’s color films made near the end of the director’s career (1958 to 1963). These films cover what is for Ozu familiar narrative ground: fathers and mothers give away daughters to marriage; generational conflicts pit...
Photographed Where It Happened
|Nate Logsdon| “This is a true story. It was photographed where it happened.” In two sentences, the onscreen statement before the opening credits of Ida Lupino’s Never Fear—the first picture produced by her production company The Filmakers—distills the ethos of independent cinema...
New Ideas in Old Hollywood: Ida Lupino’s Outrage
|Doug Carmoody| Content Warning: Discussion of sexual assault on screen. Ida Lupino’s Outrage has a concept ready-made for modern independent film glory. A famous actress writing and directing a blunt, socially aware film about sexual assault has been a recipe for several of the buzzier and better-received films of the...
TV Time
|Nate Logsdon| Wim Wenders couldn’t find reality anywhere. In the Spring of 1983, he had traveled to Tokyo to mark the 20th anniversary of Yasujirō Ozu’s death. He was seeking the Japanese world that appeared so luminously in the films of that great director, whose body of work...
TraditionVision: Ozu’s Exploration of the Multi-Generational Adjustment to TV
|Dan Howard| In this day in age, television is just as common and almost essential to our daily lives as food or nature. Sometimes, it feels like it’s just always been around, but in fact, the first concept of what would ultimately become television, Facsimile Transmissions, was introduced...
You Guys Are Soft: Male Friendship and Violence in The Hitch-Hiker
On the surface, Ida Lupino’s The Hitch-Hiker (1953) is a ripped-from-the-headlines thriller about a homicidal maniac who hitches a ride with two friends on their way to Mexicali as murder looms just around the corner. Even the onscreen title that opens the film indicates its true...
Lupino Noir: The Femme Fatale Sits in the Director’s Chair
|Patrick Clifford| THIS IS THE TRUE STORY OF A MAN AND A GUN AND A CAR. THE GUN BELONGED TO THE MAN. THE CAR MIGHT HAVE BEEN YOURS OR THAT YOUNG COUPLE’S ACROSS THE AISLE. WHAT YOU WILL SEE IN THE NEXT SEVENTY MINUTES COULD HAVE...
The Assassination of the Teen Comedy
|Brogan Earney| By the early 2000s, the teen comedy genre was at the height of its powers. Movies like She’s All That, 10 Things I Hate About You, Clueless and many more, were pumped out monthly and guaranteed to bring box office success. Eventually, they became...
Nyah! I Have to Return Some Videotapes, Doc.
|Lucas Hardwick| Spoilers ahead, Doc. Bugs Bunny may have been a master of disguise but his ability to successfully fool his adversaries with a crappy wig and a cheap dress relied on their inability to pay attention. Countless occasions of Bugs’s survival were predicated on feeble...
Guinevere Turner, American Psycho, and the Effective Distance of Lesbian Cool
|Sophie Durbin| “Gloria Steinem… as legend would have it, took [Leonardo DiCaprio] to a baseball game and
said, ‘Please don’t do this movie. You’re the biggest movie star in the world right now, and teenage girls are living for you, and I really don’t want them all to run...
A Certain Slant of Light: The Thin Line Between Fantasy and Reality in Soleil Ô
|Courtney Kowalke| The first movie I saw at Trylon in the spring of 2019 was John Sayles’ The Brother From Another Planet (1984). The film follows a protagonist known only as “The Brother” (Joe Morton), an extraterrestrial who crash-lands in Harlem, New York City...
Paying Attention to Man Ray: Some Reflections on What Experimental Cinema Can Do For Us Right Now
|Sophie Durbin| As a child, it would’ve been hard to fathom that going to the movies would one day be as esoteric as spending a night at the opera. But some time in the past five years, I realized that spending much of my free time on film had suddenly cast me as an eccentric clinger-on to...
I Don’t Belong to You: Autobiography in Anna May Wong’s Pavement Butterfly
|Ben Jarman| In 1928, Anna May Wong said “No!” to Hollywood. Before leaving Tinseltown, she made an unmistakable name for herself, taking on supporting roles that would often overshadow the lead actors and actresses. With that fame, Wong received constant attention from the...
Hertzfeldt to Miyazaki to Life: How Negative Space in Animation Gave Me the Time to Live
|Zach Staads| I first saw Don Hertzfeldt's Everything Will Be OK in my friend's living room, a cavernous Victorian echo chamber carved from oak and smothered in pink-beige plaster, where we watched on a chunky, green Dell laptop from 2006. Those 17 minutes changed my life.
Don Hertzfeldt Has Something to, um, Tell You
|J.R Jones| Don Hertzfeldt’s characters have always struggled for words. In the opening scene of his hourlong animation It’s Such a Beautiful Day (2012), the everyman protagonist, Bill, recognizes someone walking toward him on the street and prepares a greeting. But when they pass...
Burned—Anna May Wong and Shanghai Express
|Matthew Christensen| As a kid, we used to play a game called “Statue Maker.” The statue maker would swing two or three kids about; they had to hold the pose they landed in and come up with some character to portray. Other children would play customers, guided about by the statue...
Obayashi the Dramatist: Beijing Watermelon (1989)
|Natalie Marlin| In the dawning hours of the morning, a grocer (Bengal) wakes to the still-blue fading night. The framing is methodical, delicate, but not at all static. The grocer Haruzo’s body stirs from bed, but the camera lingers on his wife Michi (Masako Motai) stirring and rolling...
Everyone Knows What to do with a Watermelon
|Nicole Rojas-Oltmanns| Unlike coconuts, mangoes, apples, cherimoyas, plantains, and pineapples, everyone knows what to do with a watermelon. Cut and enjoy. They grow in the vast majority of the world from Sweden to Japan, USA to Chile, China to Israel. Perhaps, because of this, watermelons ...
HAUSU: EVILER DEADER—Why Hausu’s Creation is Cinema’s Victory
|Phil Kolas| A teenager’s disembodied floating head leaps out of a well and bites another teenager directly on her buttocks, with the camera holding for at least three full seconds on the whole framed image, like it was appreciating a work of art...