A respectful goon. The kind of henchman who pulls out your chair at dinner. A bald man, sheepish and charmingly incompetent. He’s the kid on the team who pinch hits in the bottom of the ninth of the big game because everyone else has broken all their bones sliding into various bases. He hits a single, and, even though your team loses 7-2, you hoist him up on your shoulders. Next week he’ll be back in the dugout picking his... Read more
Ever been in front of a fan on hot summer day, no AC in sight? How would you describe the experience? For my part, I’d report a mixture of gratitude and disappointment—gratitude because it’s better than nothing, disappointment because a solitary fan before a humid New Jersey summer day is like the backwash drop at the bottom of a Windex bottle squaring off against a mirror from Grey Gardens (1975). Black Bag (2025), Steven Soderbergh’s newest spy film, left me... Read more
The Substance: Substance Wanted If someone whose brain were turned on eight hours a day from January 1, 2017 to January 1 2024—it doesn’t matter nights, days, mornings, evenings, or whatever else—if the physical organ of their thinking were jacked directly into Twitter (now X, the Everything App) and nothing else, if they received every datum of information about the universe, from cinema to current events, from that website, that brain would produce The Substance (2024). Ostensibly, Coralie Fargeat has... Read more
I have seen three Bong Joon-ho films (Snowpiercer, Parasite, and Mickey 17). In each case, the man’s work reflects a deep investment in allegory. What I mean is a marked literalness. The world is ending due to climate change; everyone is on a train, and the train’s layout reflects a broader truth about contemporary class society. It relies on abject working conditions, child labor, and inflexible hierarchies to sustain our current world. In the train too, we see little hands... Read more
Salò, or the Circles of Hell During a break from a graduate seminar, I once expressed an interest in watching Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975). My professor snickered nervously. It’s not that I wasn’t aware of its reputation. I knew to expect graphic violence, constant nudity, and general perversion. But I have never been one for moralism in filmmaking. As long the film wasn’t merely exploitative, what was there to laugh at or avoid?... Read more
What kind of person do you imagine became a Nazi? The manly, the droves of stomping Freikorps-Mitglieder staining the cobblestones with blood? The neopagan convert fired up at a chance for a revitalized Reich? A conscript in the Wehrmacht just following orders? Yes, yes, and, of course yes. But these are the easy questions. The harder version, at once banal and resistant to easy resolution, is one of calculation and differentiation. Are their types of insurance salesman who acquiesced? Did... Read more
Some movies seek to entertain. Others have the gall to make one think. The truly perverse, like those by, say, the Coen Brothers, attempt both at the same time. After watching the Belgian black comedy-mockumentary Man Bites Dog (1992), I cannot shake this (masterfully crafted, in my opinion) three-branch classification system. I can’t tell what the film is up to. I’d heard of the movie before seeing it, almost always summarized in the same way: a documentary film crew follows... Read more
Way back in the early 2010s, when the world was coming to terms with the epidemic of sexual assault on college campuses, Slavoj Žižek told a joke. I wish I could share the clip, but among countless YouTube videos from channels called “I WOULD PREFER NOT TO” and “The Based Bureaucrat,” I have been unable to locate one. Let me relay it from memory in my own voice. “As our understanding of what constitutes assault changes, so will our ways... Read more
Hairspray: Simply Divine What do Ric Ocasek, Debbie Harry, Sonny Bono, and Ricki Lake have in common? Why, they’re all in John Waters’ Hairspray (1987), of course (I tried looking for something a bit cleverer—scavenging through astrological signs and looking over how death and birth months might be loosely tied together—but to no avail). Music, music, music, and talk TV—that about sums up this Baltimore-centered take on early-60s racial integration. Like me, many people might have seen the aughts-era remake... Read more
John Waters’ Cecil B. Demented (2000) asks the tough questions like “what kind of shlock is Hollywood turning out these days” and “can you scorch the roots of starlet to the point that she goes full Batty Hearst” (Patty the batty even appears in the film). As usual, Waters follows a gang of punks and outcasts in Baltimore, though with a(nother) twist. This group wants to make the great American outlaw film—Easy Rider (1969) in the style of G.G. Allin.... Read more
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