Charlie Chaplin’s Renegade Anti-Fascism in The Great Dictator
The Great Dictator: What Else is There to Say?
Godzilla vs. Gigan: Kaiju, Technology, and a Turkish Take on Gentle Emotions
Charlie Chaplin’s Renegade Anti-Fascism in The Great Dictator
|Ed Dykhuizen| During the first half of the twentieth century, there was no bigger star than Charlie Chaplin. At a very young age he rose from English music halls to American comedy shorts. His defining character The Little Tramp debuted in only his second film, the 1914 Keystone...
The Great Dictator: What Else is There to Say?
|Brad Bellatti| For the better part of 15 years, the above image of Chaplin has bothered me. No matter how many times I watch this sequence, the finale of Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940) shakes me up. I’ve tried many times to find the right words to express this sentiment...
Godzilla vs. Gigan: Kaiju, Technology, and a Turkish Take on Gentle Emotions
|Matthew Christensen| My husband Luka and I have divergent tastes in movies. If I am sitting in the living room watching an old Hollywood musical or a period piece, he takes one look at the television, announces in a mix of Turkish and English, “Tamam. I will be in bed reading a book. Hadi...
Interview: A Grandmother on Godzilla vs. Gigan
|Ben Jarman| My mom is back with her take on another film that would normally disinterest her: Godzilla vs. Gigan. My mom never watched Godzilla films with me when I was a kid, but she never stopped me from watching or pretending I was a giant creature in my backyard. A giant to her is...
“Cha too ma laya conky, ya neema loka nyan:” Return of the Jedi Appreciation
|Ben Jarman| Before prequels and sequels, kids used to tell me Return of the Jedi is the best Star Wars movie. I used to tell the same thing to adults just after the movie came out. Then I grew and my body cracked, forming a chip on my shoulder. Return of the Jedi was suddenly just a...
Star Wars Film Love: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Theater
|Devin Warner| Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back is unquestionably my favorite film of all time, although I have never seen it in a movie theatre, only on VHS, DVD, Blu Ray, and 4K but by god with this Trylon series that will finally change. My love of Star Wars started when I was...
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...