Talk to the Hand (Sorry)

Last updated on: August 8, 2023 at 6:20 pm By Chase Padusniak

There’s an episode from one of my favorite childhood cartoons, Recess (1997-2001), called “The Game.” The game is a puzzle-based quasi-Pokémon rip-off called “Ajimbo” that leaves its players decrepit husks, determined to collect more and more little silver owls and yellow chickens. Their dead eyes, however, did not deter me. I remember wishing we had that game in real life. “Ajimbo” represented a global (or schoolwide) social cohesion that began to disappear by late middle school. The episode closes and... Read more

Barbie: Pretty in Pink, Didactic in Plastic

Last updated on: July 22, 2023 at 11:51 am By Chase Padusniak

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Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (2023) is what the ads led you to believe. Barbieland is stunning in both accuracy (or so I’m told) and aesthetic quality. Margot Robbie (as Stereotypical Barbie) moves as if made of plastic, gliding down a pristine slide from her dream house, straight out of a yassified The Ladies Man (1961). There is no liquid. Ken’s job is “beach,” and he does it well. In an age of rampant CGI, the sets are a pristine reminder, ironically... Read more

When Landscape Looms

Last updated on: July 21, 2023 at 4:22 pm By Chase Padusniak

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There’s a reason no one’s ever found Jimmy Hoffa’s body. Ask anyone lucky enough to inhabit the north-central part of the Garden State and you’ll learn the truth: this is a densely populated, paved-over swamp. It’s such a bog that we have a whole national wildlife refuge named the “Great Swamp.” Mosquitos multiply like plague-ridden fleas; summers are humid enough to make the sweat stick to your skin day-in and day-out. But it has its benefits, and we get an... Read more

Complicities in Damnation

Last updated on: February 19, 2025 at 5:36 pm By Chase Padusniak

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While watching Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (1969), my wife blurted out: “The Nazi budget for banners and armbands must’ve been enormous!” As the movie progresses, more and more swastikas show up, multiplying from a single lapel pin at a family dinner to crowding, eye-thieving backdrops, competing with acts of unimaginable cruelty. My wife’s comment is right on the mark, sums Visconti’s masterpiece up better than I could have: this work proposes a unity of opposites, at once loud, campy, and... Read more

Clown Car Gladio

Last updated on: July 11, 2023 at 4:41 pm By Chase Padusniak

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A recent book review asks: “There are Herzog memes, but no Fassbinder memes. Why is that?” The answer, I think, lies in the scowling, gleeful sardonicism of his movies. His work is always prophetic, topical, and utterly alien. Form and content coil around each other, comingling even as they snap at each other’s underbellies. Inevitably, they turn on themselves too. All is soon strangled. Even more-straightforward works like Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) and Eight Hours Don’t Make a... Read more

Foolish Brutes and Brutish Fools

Last updated on: July 5, 2023 at 4:26 pm By Chase Padusniak

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After absorbing Federico Fellini’s La Strada (1954) I didn’t say much for a few hours. I was tired and sweaty and had to run to catch a train; my wife was also tired, sweaty, and had to catch a train. But the exhausting rush home provided a fitting backdrop for the dark-matter pit brewing in my gut. Fellini’s film left me with what might otherwise seem opposite feelings: sympathy for the world and everyone in it and a sense of... Read more

The Conman and the Preacher

Last updated on: June 23, 2023 at 5:16 pm By Chase Padusniak

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Elmer Gantry (1960) is an easy movie to reduce to one of its elements. You could fairly easily see it as a straightforward critique of organized religion, some avant-garde assault not just on today’s blatant televangelists and cult leaders but on the whole of faith as such. You could just as simply call it a saccharine bit of old-fashioned wisdom literature, a film only a step or two removed from shlock like Reefer Madness (1936). It is indeed moralistic and... Read more

Teach It Phenomenology!

Last updated on: June 21, 2023 at 5:52 pm By Chase Padusniak

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It may come as a surprise to some Halloween (1978) fans that John Carpenter’s debut feature is a sci-fi farce co-written by and co-starring Dan O’Bannon of Alien (1979) fame. It surprised me, anyway. Not that Carpenter hasn’t made forays into comedy (e.g., 1986’s Big Trouble in Little China), but I wouldn’t have bet on “goofy existential comedy” as his student film-turned-first-shot-at-the-silver-screen. Dark Star (1974) follows a crew of four extremely bored astronauts as they fulfill their noble mission of... Read more

The Found Footage Curse

Last updated on: June 16, 2023 at 4:05 pm By Chase Padusniak

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Found footage movies face a fundamental problem: editing. For a film to be “found” its makers must have disappeared. Their vanishing is the movie’s raison d’être. Why else would the actors from The Blair Witch Project (1999) sit out Cannes and watch their parents receive condolence letters? A steward might step in and contextualize the movie, but the footage itself belongs to the bygone. Any number of cinematic problems arise. You need to find a reason why the camera cuts... Read more

Confessional Everything

Last updated on: June 16, 2023 at 8:37 am By Chase Padusniak

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With the Confessional Poets, there’s candor, yes. But more than that there’s shame. There may indeed be pleasure in that shame, the smile that comes with admitting one is broken. That pleasure, however, is by necessity ambiguous. You can see it, for example, in the title of Anne Sexton’s “The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator.” It’s even more apparent in the poetry itself: The boys and girls are one tonight. They unbutton blouses. They unzip flies. They take off shoes.... Read more