All Your Teachers Are Belong to Us

Last updated on: August 17, 2022 at 6:48 pm By Chase Padusniak

1998’s The Faculty (dir. Robert Rodriguez) breaks the golden rule: never mention a better work of art in yours. The diagnosis is typically fatal. The viewer’s mind trails off, thinking about what could’ve been, the more entertaining time they could be having. This is always a risk when watching writer Kevin Williamson’s films [other credits include Scream (1996), I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), Teaching Mrs. Tingle (1999) and Dawson’s Creek (1998-2003)], since his brand of satire doesn’t... Read more

Temporary Insanity

Last updated on: August 17, 2022 at 6:48 pm By Chase Padusniak

I grew up with Office Space (1999). It’s with us even now, the giggles to “yeah…I’m gonna have to ask you to…” and the famous printer scene (one version of which stands at over 4 million views on YouTube). Even in the book I’m reading right now about workplace massacres, Going Postal by Mark Ames, the movie is a constant refrain, serving to punctuate not just chapters, but even sections of chapters, as if Mike Judge had captured it. You... Read more

Win the Lottery, Die in the Subway

Last updated on: August 17, 2022 at 6:48 pm 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

Last updated on: August 17, 2022 at 6:49 pm 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

Last updated on: August 17, 2022 at 6:49 pm 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

Last updated on: August 17, 2022 at 6:49 pm 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

Last updated on: August 17, 2022 at 6:49 pm 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

Last updated on: August 17, 2022 at 6:50 pm 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

Last updated on: August 17, 2022 at 6:50 pm 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

Last updated on: August 17, 2022 at 6:50 pm 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