War is one of our favorite abstractions. I grew up playing map-based strategy games, the kind in which you pick seneschals, set tax policy, and send figurine-stand-ins off to their deaths. How many divisions does the pope have? How long are my supply lines? Yes, I’d like to enslave the population after we take the city. We need the labor. No one likes to think about the families annihilated or the sex crimes, the long nights spent in fear and... Read more
All but the most conceptually adventurous movie-watchers experience meta-cinematic devices as an imposition. I don’t mean the vivid colors of a Sirk melodrama or the dramatic lighting of Argento’s most daring gialli. What I have in mind are halting breaks in the story, actors spliced into the flow of the narrative discussing their own characters, those qualities that not only ask the audience to keep in mind that it is watching a movie but also to reflect on what it... Read more
We all like to, as they say, be seen, no? None of us enjoys what that old Slovenian Diogenes, Slavoj Žižek, follows his master Lacan in calling “symbolic castration.” Misrecognition according to our own notion of ourselves is bad enough. Imagine the horror if other people were indeed thinking about you all the time. But it’s just plain rude when there are indisputable external features at play and others just can’t get them right. Why else does the bully accuse... Read more
Based on a novel of the same name by the director, Takeshi Kitano’s latest film Kubi (2023) assumes substantial historical foreknowledge. The events it depicts are, I assume, famous enough in Japan to merit little exposition. Covering the Honnō-ji Incident is a bit like staging Benedict Arnold’s betrayal or depicting the Battle of Gettysburg—most people interested enough to see the film will have a basic grasp of the context. Given my longtime fascination with this period in Japanese history, I... Read more
When I was TA’ing a course on American Television, several students told me their favorite show was Friends (1994-2004). I found this fact perplexing both because many of them were just born as the series went off the air and because, if they insisted on a 90s sitcom, Seinfeld (1989-1998) is the clearly superior choice. Matters made more sense when they clarified that “favorite” really meant “comfort.” It soothed them. Falling asleep? Put on Friends. Hanging out with, uh, friends? Put... Read more
Like most kids of a certain age, I went to Blockbuster often. I’d beg my dad to drive me over there after a long day at work and rent games I shouldn’t have been playing. Same goes for movies. As much as I enjoyed taking over Vice City and learning about serial killers reanimated as gingerbread men, few of these early incursions touched my regular life. One did. Sitting in my grandmother’s apartment with a close friend, we played our... Read more
I will fight a pitiful rearguard action. Usually, nothing could be braver than skirmishing with a more powerful foe, shielding what remains of your comrades from certain death, accepting your own end in the process. That takes courage. But announcing that you plan to fight a rearguard action is less glamorous business. I’m admitting it’s over before I even start. Instead of waving a white flag, I’m taking off all my gear and shrieking “come and get some!” That... Read more
The first time I watched William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973) I became sluggish. Who’s to say if I fidgeted too? It’s been too long. I’m far removed from the days when I consumed every classic movie with reckless abandon, total disregard for when it came out, who directed it, what it was trying to do. None of that mattered to me. To this day, I can’t tell you a single fact about High Noon (1952), barring two things: 1) I’ve... Read more
There is no getting around it: Megalopolis (2024) is an elderly man’s fever dream. Its psychedelic transitions, flat dialogue, bizarre acting, and milquetoast politics polymerize into a whole both mysteriously personal and entirely legible. It is a fable set in faux-contemporary New York with “Make New Rome Great Again” signs and superficial invocations of the Catilinarian Conspiracy. Characters have names like “Cicero” and “Crassus.” Signs for the New York Stock Exchange are still visible. Yet, none of these allusions go... Read more
Empire Records (1995) is a cult hit. Having been born in 1993, I missed out on the phenomenon. In preparation for seeing the stage-musical adaptation of the Allan Moyle film, I decided to check it out. It’s fun in its way. Teen comedies are, well, for teens. And I can imagine enjoying this movie in a right-place-right-time sort of way. I’d wager the musical would be better (the movie never leans into its song choices). But I had to miss... Read more
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