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
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
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
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
A glance at the Rotten Tomatoes reviews of Robert Zemeckis’ Used Cars (1980) about sums up this Milius-and-Spielberg-produced cavalcade of gags. “One of the most underrated comedies of all time. Made in an era when political correctness was challenged and Kurt Russell was at his BEST,” gushes Ian D—5 stars! “There are two women in this movie. They both get molested on screen and the audience is supposed to laugh. I’m sure there are some jokes about molestation that are... Read more
When Bo Burnham’s Netflix special, Inside (2021), lamented a year at home and a society gone awry, I lamented my decision to watch. Funny in parts, Inside felt perfect, not because it was just what we needed, but because it was just what we deserved. Funny in parts, Burnham’s feature-length musical dramedy crystallized the limp inadequacy of any resistance to prevailing norms. Every joke boiled down to little more than a pale bony index finger locked onto one target at... Read more
2020’s I Blame Society leans heavily on the “I,” with producer-writer-director-lead actor, Gillian Wallace Horvat in just about every shot. Its basic steps tread those of other found-footage comedy-murder mockumentaries—deep breath—like Man Bites Dog (1992) and Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006). We meet a psychopathic film director who’s making a movie about the perfect murder—which is, of course, the movie we’re watching—and follow her down a trail of blood. In this case, actually not that much... Read more
On September 12, 2016, I published a piece about Catholic Twitter’s most notorious catfish. I explored the way in which that little ecosystem’s then most popular account took us all (and most of all me) for a ride. Those days seem halcyon now—half the people I see posting these days probably don’t even know what I’m talking about. But back then it was a big deal. We’ve moved on. Some recent goings-on led me to read the comments on... Read more
When George H.W. Bush died, he was publicly lamented as “the last WASP president,” a Republican committed to decency, in a party (and a world) gone mad. John McCain got much the same treatment when he passed away. The implication, of course, is that the modern Republican Party, especially since the rise of Donald Trump, has become an anti-liberal institution opposed to norms, normalcy, and the politic of civility and respect required a functioning political party. Joe Biden ran against... Read more
I find myself in an uneasy situation. I don’t love either Donald Trump or Joe Biden. With asthma and Crohn’s Disease, I see no reason to risk my health by going out more than occasionally, and even then only briefly; at the same time, I feel little anger at those chafing under whatever patchwork of lockdowns and restrictions we have had and will have again soon enough. This seems a deeply human response to me. Still, my family is small... Read more
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