8 years ago
Essential Reading (10 posts found)
Quintessential material
Putting the Geek to the Plow
Faux film criticism, Youtube critics and where we are headed.
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“Under the Skin”: A Study of Predator as Prey
Warning: this post may contain spoilers for "Under the Skin."
After a second viewing of Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin, I'm comfortable calling it a masterpiece. Not just an other-worldly meditation on what it means to be human, like the more obvious them...
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A New Era of Hollywood Scandals?
When the allegations that director Bryan Singer drugged and raped a 17-year-old boy in 1999 recently came to light, moviegoers who were looking forward to his upcoming film, X-Men: Days of Future Past, were confronted with a series of difficult questions: Shou...
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EW, Prestige & Superblogs: Resuscitating The Dying Art Of Film Journalism
Three weeks ago, Entertainment Weekly did the unthinkable: the magazine fired veteran film critic Owen Gleiberman, one of its best-known bylines since 1990, simultaneously letting go of music critic Nick Catucci and staff writer Annie Barrett in the process. W...
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Revisiting “Godzilla”: The Japanese Original
Godzilla is something of a pop culture punchline, a quick reference to make in reference to Japan, kaiju, or mass destruction. The King of Monsters has battled other monsters, aliens, and various human armies in nearly 30 films over the course of 60 years. The...
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Vampire 3.0: How Jim Jarmusch Evolves The Bloodsuckers
Only Lovers Left Alive is Jim Jarmusch' antidote to the declining prestige of the vampire image.
In Jarmusch' latest film a whole army of stars decides to test-ride immortality. However, even though Tilda Swinton, Tom Hiddleston, Mia Wasikowska, and John Hu...
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Re-assessing William Friedkin’s “Sorcerer”
In his 1977 review, critic Andrew Sarris said of William Friedkin’s Sorcerer, “What I can swear to is the total pointlessness of the picture. What Friedkin has managed to fabricate with all his enormous resources is a visual and aural textbook on everything th...
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“Nymphomaniac” and “Grey Rape” in Entertainment
There is no rape in Nymphomaniac: Volume I. Except there is. Or at least, one could read that into it. While I don't completely subscribe to the "Death of the Author" theory, I do believe that it's possible to read an interpretation into a piece of work beside...
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A Tale of Two Cities: Rebuilding a Metropolis
"Every epoch dreams its successor"
Jules Michelet
In the grand pantheon of sci-fi cinema, no other film is as boldly revolutionary or influential as Fritz Lang's 1927 masterpiece, Metropolis. Watching it today, the silent epic has lost none of its invention,...
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