“There was blood upon her white dress, and the signs of her terrible efforts to escape were upon every part of her thin form.” – Poe “Victorie, my liege, and that with little losse.” – Kyd The House of Yes (1997) is hilarious. That might seem like the wrong word for a movie about a family broken apart on the day of JFK’s assassination. The father left that day. There are three Pascal children. Two are twins, Marty (Josh Hamilton)... Read more
The Net (1995) is a Cassandra of a film, if Cassandra’s curse were to be right about the future but to be so thoroughly pat and anodyne that no one would care. Coming in at almost two hours, most of this Sandra Bullock-driven thriller watches like a script pumped out by an AI trained on half-shredded copies of a Tom Clancy novel stuck in a big, beige printer. There are a couple notable, all-too-notably-human exceptions. Thank God for those. The... Read more
Voyeurism is one of those things. Most of us don’t peep through people’s windows or scan from a park bench looking for rustling in high grass. But the ubiquity of online porn, the way our heads turn at the swirling red lights at the side of the road—most of all the psychic enchantment of movies and TV—suggest an affirmative answer to the killer website’s question in FeardotCom (2002): do you like to watch? Cinema has notoriously furrowed its brow at... Read more
I Think We’re Alone Now (2008) is about two very different people who arrive at the same conclusion: late-80s two-hit wonder, Tiffany, is the missing piece in their lives. With her love, whatever emptiness they feel would be filled. Jeff Turner is a man who lives alone in a cluttered California home. He has (as it’s put in the movie) “Asperger’s” and obsessively collects clippings about Tiffany. Once he tried to give the popstar chrysanthemums and a katana. Amidst his... Read more
“Gimme your quietest indie film.” “No, that’s too quiet and indie.” – Hans Mole-chan I remember the reign not of Indie Sleaze but of Indie Twee. It’s still with us in this very room. Wes Anderson is out there making movies, and Juno (2007) is just a click away. Before Barbie (2023) there was Baghead (2008). Even Dane Cook got involved. I still remember Steve Carell’s face smashed up against a stack of pancakes at the Blockbuster. No hoard of... Read more
Most mornings my wife and I walk our dogs early in the morning. I mean, early. The goal is solitude. We hope to steal a few quiet moments with the animals before the day gets too hectic, the sun too hot. There’s also a practical matter: our neighborhood is crawling with dogs, specifically German Shepherds. And one of our boys really, really hates German Shepherds. Every now and again, the darkness throws out some sound that makes the two- or... Read more
I don’t like saying movies age poorly. It feels impolite like asking a lady her age or inquiring about that Argentinian friend with a German last name’s grandpa. You just don’t do it. But even I have to be honest with myself sometimes. It ain’t easy. I’ve spent a lifetime convincing loved ones that just because a movie is black and white or silent or slow that it’s still worth seeing. Throw in that I’m a “medievalist” and it’s built... Read more
I did not shoot the sheriff. I didn’t even shoot the deputy. And I most certainly didn’t shoot Bambi’s mom. Word on the street, in fact, is that she was never shot at all, that the chief execs over at Disney imagine a happier, less-traumatized Bambi, one whose turnaround will both reflect and produce happier, less-traumatized kid audiences. Or maybe the whole thing is a PR campaign. All press, good press—that canard. Certainly, the right-wing media sphere has its meat... Read more
Massacre at Central High (1976) has that peculiar quality by which something that anticipates a phenomenon gets to its essence better than those things that make-up the phenomenon itself. We have this idea of 70s high school exploitation films and the slashers that followed them; we know that revenge so often undergirds these kinds of movies (whether the desire of a wronged serial killer or revenge on bad guys for a group of worthy kids). But when did social salience... Read more
Orson Welles’ F for Fake (1973) is, for all its pretense of devilishness, a very Thomistic movie. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen another film so singularly invested in matching form and matter (or, if you like, content). Ostensibly, the piece investigates an art forger (Elmyr de Hory) and his duplicitous biographer (Clifford Irving), who claims to tell the truth about Elmyr’s fantastic successes, even as we know he has lied in another book (a biography of Howard Hughes). The... Read more
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