Now I finally know why all the videos I had to watch in class in the early 2000s looked so bad. On TV, they’d show old-fashioned PSAs about slinging horse and the wonders of man’s newest, greatest mass market innovation—barbiturates—and I’d be amazed at the quality of the image. Sure, they were corny, and everyone looked like the Platonic Form of Kelso from That ’70s Show. But they looked like La Dolce Vita compared to the rad “say no to... Read more
For all its motivating potential, or perhaps because of it, “freedom” is one of those slippery words. In Ninja Thyberg’s Pleasure (2022), there’s no doubt that Bella Cherry (Sofia Kappel) decides to move from Scandinavia to the US to act in porn of her own volition. She, like many a young person, may be deluded about the future, about what awaits her. But it’s her choice. No question there. But every experience from then on muddies the water. Bella will... Read more
A disfigured corpse sits in a burnt-out helicopter somewhere in the Kuwaiti desert. The officer responsible for investigating the incident tells his lackey that he better identify the bodies, and, more importantly, better not say this was done by US troops. As the grunt approaches, the corpse reanimates, snaps the guy’s neck, steals his gun, and mows down the officer. Pleased with himself, the soldier-turned-revenant muses: “Don’t be afraid; it’s only friendly fire.” Uncle Sam (1996) is exactly what you’d... Read more
Tammy and the T-Rex (1994) is a B-movie done well and under immense pressure. Maybe necessity is the mother of innovation. I don’t know. Ask Roger Corman. What I do know is that ingenuity deserves praise, as does a willingness to (and this seems impossible now, doesn’t it?) have a little fun. My day job is as a medievalist. And for all the supposed religious dourness of the so-called “Dark Ages,” they loved a good laugh (and a good fart... Read more
As a five-year-old in 1999, I remember gawking at the Burger King tie-in toys for Will Smith’s newest movie: Wild Wild West. I didn’t see it then. Ever since (and for anyone not alive or otherwise unconscious in that year) it feels like a fever dream. A big budget action comedy in which steampunk Will Smith runs around the frontier trying to wrangle a legless Neo-Confederate Cajun who rides around in a gigantic mecha-spider? How could could such a thing... Read more
At the beginning of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944) Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), a successful insurance salesman turned fraudster, narrates his undoing into a Dictaphone: “I killed him for money—and for a woman. I didn’t get the money. And I didn’t get the woman.” Wilder loved to bookend films with laconic summaries [who could forget Joe E. Brown’s final line in Some Like It Hot (1959): “nobody’s perfect!”]. Double Indemnity is a film noir, based on a James M. Cain... Read more
Essentially every self-described Christian group sees Jesus as its founder, either literally and historically or spiritually. So, while George Fox would acknowledge that Quakerism was an innovation of the 17th century, undoubtedly he saw Jesus as the departure point for his discovery of the Inner Light. No Bible, no George Fox. No Jesus, no Bible. Even Mormons, whose sacred texts radically rewrite salvation history, call themselves “the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” Sure, they may be “latter-day,” but... Read more
Outside of the modern United States this would seem a relatively open-and-shut question. Anyone baptized and confirmed Catholic who identifies with the Church and has not been excommunicated is rightly entitled to that label. But, of course, in our deeply polarized society that’s insufficient. When people raise such an issue, they’re generally asking a political question. They aren’t asking if a public figure like Joe Biden believes in the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist or if he... Read more
In 1921 at eleven years old, Yoshio Kodama was unhappily living with his sister and her husband in Korea, beating steel into sheets at a nearby mill. By 1929, he had attempted to hand the emperor a direct appeal for greater patriotism. Kodama was stopped by security forces, though that didn’t stop him from spending the better part of the next decade plotting (and occasionally succeeding in) assassinations against major political figures. By the early 50s, only 20 or so... Read more
It’s a little late to eulogize Ray Liotta. He died three weeks ago. And yet I couldn’t help myself but to turn on Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild (1986), not the film in which I first encountered Liotta, but the one in which he first really struck me. I caught the movie for the first time in a college cinema class, where I recall feeling blindsided by the work’s subtle transition from screwball comedy to thriller. Somehow it was both. It... Read more
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