Murdered on the Fourth of July

Last updated on: August 17, 2022 at 6:42 pm By Chase Padusniak

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 Does T-Rex

Last updated on: August 17, 2022 at 6:43 pm By Chase Padusniak

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

Content Warning: Wild Wild West

Last updated on: August 17, 2022 at 6:43 pm By Chase Padusniak

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

Words, Words, Words

Last updated on: August 17, 2022 at 6:43 pm By Chase Padusniak

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

Who Founded the Catholic Church?

Last updated on: August 17, 2022 at 6:44 pm By Chase Padusniak

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

Is Biden Catholic?

Last updated on: August 17, 2022 at 6:44 pm By Chase Padusniak

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

Only the Bad Sleep Well

Last updated on: August 17, 2022 at 6:45 pm By Chase Padusniak

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

If Ray Liotta’s Her Ex, Get Out of Dodge

Last updated on: August 17, 2022 at 6:45 pm By Chase Padusniak

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

Slummin’ It Sitcom

Last updated on: August 17, 2022 at 6:46 pm By Chase Padusniak

No better time than another energy crisis to revisit Tamara Jenkins’ Slums of Beverly Hills (1998), the story of young teen girl and her dysfunctional-cum-loving family’s attempt to navigate life in 1976 Los Angeles. Vivian (Natasha Lyonne) and her brothers, Ben (David Krumholtz) and Ricky (Eli Marienthal) are used to getting yelled at in the middle of the night, told to move from one fleabag apartment to the next by their 65-year-old dad Murray (Alan Arkin). They are, as Vivian... Read more

When Teen Comedies Go Sad

Last updated on: August 17, 2022 at 6:47 pm By Chase Padusniak

I’m 28 years old, which means that when I think teen movies, I think sex comedies. American Pie (1999), Superbad (2007), and Project X (2012)—these carefree slices of Y2K and aughts (and honorary aughts) self-discovery are my hallmarks of teen sexual theology. Uncool boys pursue girls. Boys rag on each other. Hijinks ensue. None of that 80s heartwarming stuff. No Molly Ringwald. Bring on the Clinton-Bush-Obama degradation. Bring on the inadequacy and the failure. But make it funny. What could... Read more