Category: Film
Dangerous Minds: The Rare Conundrum of A Movie Being Offensively Condescending & Also Good
From the moment LouAnne Johnson (Michelle Pfeiffer) walks into the classroom of Parkmont High, she is branded as “white bread” by the students she’s been [Read More…]
Love Won’t Save You: An American Werewolf in London
There is a common trope in every love story that begins with a seemingly insurmountable obstacle that actually is, in the end, insurmountable (though many [Read More…]
Madness Grows in Isolation–And Also In Company: Grey Gardens Through the Quarantine Lens
Little Edie, of course, was slightly more averse to staying confined, noting from the vantage point of her “youth,” “I suppose I won’t get out [Read More…]
Outbreak & “The President,” Or: Bill Clinton Was Way Too Peacenik to Blow Up A Town
As American governors already look to reopening states despite a paltry amount of time spent in confinement compared to Europe and China, one can, of [Read More…]
The Theory That We Are All In Some Version of David Fincher’s The Game Right Now
Of course, like any closed off, impossibly callous person, Nicholas van Orton (Michael Douglas) suffered an unforgettable trauma in his childhood: bearing witness to the [Read More…]
“You Want a Dorito?” How The Doom Generation Captured the American Ability to File Away Trauma
If anyone has ever mastered the art of disaffection and its immortalization in the pop culture oeuvre, it’s Generation X. Or what Gregg Araki billed [Read More…]
Chaos Is the New Cocaine & Other Revelations Seeking A Friend For the End of the World Taught Us
In a year that has rendered many apocalypse movies (in addition to zombie ones) freshly relevant, Lorene Scafaria’s directorial debut (after writing the script for [Read More…]
28 Days Later Proves Humans Keep Going Even When They Should Very Clearly Commit Suicide
Among the greats in the pandemic movie pantheon is a film from the not so distant past: Danny Boyle’s 2002 post-apocalyptic classic, 28 Days Later. [Read More…]
Shaun of the Dead: That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore, It’s Too Close to Home & It’s Too Near the Bone
Remember what a levity-laden time 2004 really was? Sure, there was the usual contempt for Republicans and their latest “faux cause” (paying Afghanistan back for [Read More…]
Presently Living in the Plotline of Color Out of Space
The most recent film adaptation of one of H. P. Lovecraft’s most lauded and sinister tales, “The Colour Out of Space,” seems to have been [Read More…]
