Terrorists in Tight Spots
Snipes gets his Wings: PASSENGER 57
On-Screen Mystery in Claire Denis Films
Terrorists in Tight Spots
|Hannah Baxter| In a world where every other movie ends with a blowout fight between gods, superheroes, or both, with nothing less than the fate of the universe hanging in the balance, isn’t it refreshing when you come across a film that knows how to contain itself? Passenger 57 (1992)
Snipes gets his Wings: PASSENGER 57
|Jake Rudegeair| It’s DIE HARD on a plane (or a boat, a bus, a mountain, etc.). This is the Mad-Libs elevator pitch that launched a thousand films (ooh, DIE HARD on an elevator? I guess DIE HARD had elevators, never mind). Of the “DIE HARD on a …”
On-Screen Mystery in Claire Denis Films
|Azra Thakur| Claire Denis sets the tone of her second feature film, No Fear, No Die (1990) from the start: in the middle of night a young Isaach de Bankolé and Alex Descas are at the forefront of establishing their lives in Paris. De Bankolé is reflecting on a passage from a book, whispering...
Shake a Tailfeather: Abdullah Ibrahim and the Music of No Fear, No Die
|Courtney Kowalke| Recently, I've been getting into jazz. This exploration is born of necessity: I work third shifts. I want to listen to music on the job, so I need workplace-appropriate tunes. I also get annoyed by incessant ad breaks, overly chatty DJs, and radio stations...
Birds of a Feather Hate Surprises and Don’t Cope with Change Very Well Together
|Lucas Hardwick| ***No surprises here: spoilers ahead.*** In the broad scope of the human struggle, few things are as relentless as the churning juggernaut of unwashed laundry. Every day, we peel off layers of clothes only to put on more layers of clothes that we eventually peel off...
The Nightmare of the Unreal
|Joseph Tin| In the October 1966 issue of American Cinematographer, Alfred Hitchcock relates an evening at the matinee to the awful experience of having a nightmare: “When you have a nightmare, it’s awfully vivid if you’re dreaming that you’re being led to the electric chair.
The Shift from Straight to Queer – To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar
|Nicole Rojas-Oltmanns| Even though Wesley Snipes, John Leguizamo, and Patrick Swayze are all cishet men playing gay drag queens, I actually love To Wong Foo (1995, directed by Beeban Kidron). The drag is really fantastically done. Also, there is small-town drama, RuPaul...
All Our Trashcans Within: Tears and Other Feelings in Claire Denis’s Beau Travail
|Ben Tuthill| The first time I watched Beau Travail, I cried for ten minutes straight. I watched it alone. I didn't understand the plot very well. I knew that the final scene was famous, but when it happened I didn't really get it. I started crying right about the moment the first credits hit...
Hitchcock Astrology: Under Capricorn Inspires a Misguided Trip Through the Zodiac
|Andrew Neill| I have never seen the 1949 film Under Capricorn, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. I freely (and quite bravely) admitted this in my pitch to the benevolent editors of this blog. On April 10th, when the film screens at the historic Heights Theater, I will be sitting...
Horoscope for Those Born Under the Sign of Capricorn: December 3, 1831
|Bill Nelson| HOROSCOPE FOR THOSE BORN UNDER THE SIGN OF CAPRICORN:(1) DECEMBER 3, 1831(2). As the Book says, we may be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with us.(3) Your own past will visit you this month in unpleasant ways,(4) causing you to doubt your choices
Solar Citalopram: Beau Travail, Ken, and Burning Isolation
|Finn Odum| Author’s note: This essay contains discussions of fictional suicide and real-life suicidal ideation. I. Citalopram On a relatively warm Monday evening last September, while on a short walk to see Kenji Misumi’s Ken at the Trylon, I found myself struggling to cross the street...
Blade: Supes Are the New Cowboys
|Dan Howard| Every generation has its defining film genre. For the 40s, it was Noir. The 70s were ruled by the auteurs, the 80s were all about sci-fi and fantasy and for the 50s and 60s, we had Westerns at the Hollywood throne. However, for the last 25 years or so, Superhero film...
How the Orientalist Vices of Licorice Pizza Overpower its Virtues
|Anjali Moore| Since I have always held a compulsive devotion to 1970s media and coming-of-age films, I ventured to the cinema to see Licorice Pizza with relatively high hopes when it was first released in 2021. I felt like Licorice Pizza might pierce my general disaffection for PTA...
“I Think It’s Weird”: Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza
|Steven Rybin| 15-year-old Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman), a teenage actor and budding entrepreneur, lives with his mom Anita (Mary Elizabeth Ellis) and younger brother Greg (Milo Herschlag) in the San Fernando Valley during the long summer of 1973. Whether it’s waterbeds or...
Caught in the Moment
|Doug Carmoody| Alfred Hitchcock’s British films trade heavily in spycraft and international intrigue, but lightly in specificity. Each of The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, and Sabotage feature spy rings embedded in Britain, dedicated to extracting British secrets or...
A New Vision of the Western: Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood
|Dan McCabe| For better or worse, the Western is the quintessential American myth from its beginnings with The Great Train Robbery (1903) through the films of John Ford, Sergio Leone, and Clint Eastwood. During the Western’s heyday in the first half of the 1900s, the nineteenth...
The Political, Personal Prophecies of There Will Be Blood
|Ryan Sanderson| “Shuffle the cards, and deal a new round of poker hands: they differ in every way from the previous round, and yet it is the same pack of cards, and the same game, with the same spirit, the players grim-faced and silent, surrounded by a haze of tobacco-..."
Don’t Ever Trust a Man that Calls You Monkeyface: Masculinity then and now
|Reid Lemker| If you learn one thing after watching Alfred Hitchcock’s 1941 film Suspicion, it should be this: don’t ever go out with a guy that refers to you as “Monkeyface.” I don’t care where they are from, how much money they claim they have, or even if they look like a young...
To Love or Leave: The Paradoxical Feminism of Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion
|Chris Polley| “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you,” Joseph Heller famously wrote in his 1961 wartime satire Catch-22. Taking place during World War II and reveling in the titular paradoxes inherent in the very concepts of warfare and military service...
Psychoanalyze Me, Mommy: Making Sense of the Mother Role in Phantom Thread
|Sophie Durbin| Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread tops my shortlist of “Unexpectedly Rewatchable Movies.” On the initial viewing, the film is obviously beautiful, perfectly acted, painstakingly art directed. And yet, it’s an enigma: what is...
Love and Broken Glass
|Kit Stookey| When I first watched Punch-Drunk Love, I treated it like a horror movie, viewing parts of it between just-parted fingers. It was film as punishment. I had made my partner watch Shiva, Baby and experience all of its Gen-Z Jewish awkwardness. Now, he wanted to show...
Sandleriana
| MH Rowe | It qualifies neither as an obscure bit of Hollywood trivia nor as a famous declaration of aesthetic taste, but you may or may not happen to know that the director Paul Thomas Anderson once went on at length in an interview...
Schrödinger’s Cat Walks Into a Bar…
|Nazeeh Alghazawneh| “You know how you get rid of crabs? You got to shave one testicle. All the crabs go over to the other testicle, you got to light the hair on fire on that one. When they all go scurrying out, you take an ice pick and you fucking stab every single last one of them!”...
The Many Singular Faces of The Master
|Ryan Sanderson| When The Master came out in 2012, a lot of the conversation centered around Scientology–which made sense, at least at first. “Auteur Wunderkind Attacks World’s Most Litigious Religion!” makes for a pretty compelling headline. “Auteur Wunderkind Explores Identity...