Win the Lottery, Die in the Subway

May 16, 2022 By Chase Padusniak

R.W. Fassbinder’s Faustrecht der Freiheit (1975) is usually translated Fox and His Friends. That title is coy and ironic, since our man Fox is a walking “with friends like these…” bit. It does, however, capture the alliteration of the German original and something of Fassbinder’s unhinged and biting sense of humor [most prominently displayed in Satan’s Brew (1976)]. A more literal rendering might be Fistfight for Freedom or Freedom’s Law of the Jungle; these distill things down. Fox comes from... Read more

Guff from the DUFF

May 6, 2022 By Chase Padusniak

It ain’t easy to watch movies when you’ve got a new puppy and there’s something decaying in your crawlspace. It’s upsetting my asthma. We think it’s a mouse. The pest control guy is supposed to be here soon. Either way, it turns out if a teething puppy smells something that rank, he’ll spend countless hours trying to claw through your carpet, pulling up rugs and trying to tear out their innards like a buzzard getting ready for a banquet on... Read more

Disaster, I Flirt with Thee

April 29, 2022 By Chase Padusniak

David O. Russell seems like the kind of guy who sees his life and work as necromantic offerings, a series of hocuses and pocuses in the hopes of summoning Dr. Freud back from the grave. His debut, Spanking the Monkey (1994) is about the taboo (you know the one). More recently he’s admitted to (his version) inappropriately checking up on the development of his trans-niece or (her version) unwantedly fondling her in a garage. Russell seems like a man who... Read more

Messiah, Desaparecido

April 23, 2022 By Chase Padusniak

When a messiah disappears believers have a bit of a problem on their hands: this guy came to save people, establish justice, and (usually) end the world, and now he’s with us no more—what to do? What to do? He can’t have failed, after all (if he did then, like the followers of Bar Kokhba, his people probably disappeared into the morass of history). The most common answer is occultation, that is, actually he’s alive and doing fine, he’s just... Read more

Straight Eye for the Queer Gal for the Straight Guy

April 14, 2022 By Chase Padusniak

Forgive me, reader, for I have sinned—I’m reviewing another Kevin Smith movie, the one that, last week, I said a paragraph or two couldn’t explain. Turns out I still think what I thought almost seven days ago (crazy, right?) and I figure it’s about time to lay out why Chasing Amy (1997) is up there with Something Wild (1986) and Boys and Girls (2000) among my favorite of the post-Golden Age romantic comedies (that last one really, really requires some... Read more

The Politics of Kevin Smith’s Townieverse

April 10, 2022 By Chase Padusniak

I’m in a peculiar position. I left New Jersey for college (went all the way to New England, I did), studied abroad in the UK, lived in Germany on-and-off, traveled across Europe, and, even during my homecoming, came back to do my PhD at a university that—as far as most Jersey residents are concerned—isn’t really in New Jersey. And yet here I am. I live in the house where I grew up, several degrees stronger, a lot poorer, married, navigating... Read more

Old-Fashioned Ghoulish Fun

April 4, 2022 By Chase Padusniak

A few weeks ago I chanced upon a video interview with a real, live Appalachian family affected by inbreeding—right down to being sheltered and protected by the local community. My first thought was “I thought that was just a movie trope.” My next: “I think I’m going to swear off hill people incest gore porn for a while.” Way too sad and humanizing to do anything else. Tropes can take a beating; people less so. Though I put off watching... Read more

Fear of Fear, or How to Make a TV Movie

March 28, 2022 By Chase Padusniak

What makes for a good TV movie? Can such a thing exist? On Rotten Tomatoes, for example, over half of the “Top 100 Television Movies” are certified rotten. In the later-mid-twentieth century the Europeans seem to have briefly believed in such a spotted elephant, giving us gems like Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage (1973) and R.W Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980). But neither of those is really a “movie,” more like a limited series. It seems we’re doomed to smiling... Read more

When Trauma Was Goofy

March 21, 2022 By Chase Padusniak

I’m 28 and I’m already nostalgic for the earliest years of my life. On the one hand, this seems an obvious effect of our age of accelerated change—the Trump years (not all that long ago after all) feel like a blur, and the internet trudges on, introducing each micro-generation to a new bevy of cultural symbols and mediations. Facebook didn’t achieve popularity until I was nearly halfway through high school. Internet dating went from strange and pitiful to de... Read more

The Bitter Tears of the Working Class

March 13, 2022 By Chase Padusniak

Have you ever sat down to read a John Updike novel or John Cheever story and asked yourself—”I’m no upper-class WASP. No one in my family talks like this. My parents never had any affairs. And if they did, they didn’t talk about it. What’s the point of this?” Italo-Slavic-American of non-elite stock that I am, I’ve been there. We did a lot of yelling and hugging and threatening one another. I ate buttered Eggo waffles and drank Pepsi for... Read more