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
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
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
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
Influencer (2022) is the sort of movie in which a ruddy, sopping-wet Englishman sidles up to a young woman at a bar and offers to show her around because he’s “just being friendly.” It is the type of film in which another young Western woman mockingly laughs and tells him to get lost, intimating that “such men are dangerous.” It is the kind of cinematic experience in which Western Girl #2 lures Western Girl #1 to a remote island off... Read more
Low-hanging fruit but fruit nonetheless—I stand by (or slink past) my title. I’ve been down on story/plot lately. My reviews have highlighted style and bemoaned our dot-connecting obsession. Fair enough, but narrative has its uses, chief among them parody. The adage is that you have to know the rules to break them—Picasso and all that. Just so, subversion of expectation only works if you have expectations. If McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) is your first Western, John Wayne’ll be quite... Read more
Someone remarked to me recently that Mick Foley, the ex-professional wrestler, may be among the greatest two or three living Americans. The question came up because I mentioned his debut novel, Tietam Brown (2003), which I began reading not long after finishing the first volume of his memoirs, Have a Nice Day: A Tale of Blood and Sweatsocks (1999). The autobiography alone gives you the sense that he belongs in our annals (slim as contemporary pickings may be). The large... Read more
Help me find the golden mean. One end, draped in the ole stars and stripes and buttressed by the Hollywood money machine, resounds with a chittering, echoing ad infinitum: “superhero movies are our modern-day myths!” On the other side, a portly gourmand and his rail-thin, mustachioed compatriot, clap their hands together gently but with feeling: “an exercise in style!” I’m with Scorsese more than not on this one, I think. But it’s worth investigating that commonplace, the idea that we... Read more
My distaste for director Ari Aster’s movies is, if not well known (because who would care?), at least unhidden. I thought Hereditary (2018) was sub-par but inoffensive. Midsommar (2019) made me apoplectic, most likely because I have poor self-control and because it’s a bad movie. I haven’t seen Beau is Afraid (2023), but both the title and Eileen Jones’ review make it unlikely I’ll spend 3.5 hours of my life on Joaquin Phoenix screaming at his dad’s penis or whatever... Read more
Dungeon and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023) crystallizes just about everything about moviemaking in our time. We’ve got a well-worn piece of intellectual property that’s already got a (failed) cinematic trilogy under its belt. The IP itself once represented all things grim and unsightly (I, for example, recall a woman at a block party telling me that her young adult boyfriend had been driven to suicide by the game’s demonic magic). Now, like nearly all “nerd culture” it’s been commodified... Read more
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