8 years ago
Longform (10 posts found)
The Speed of Life: “Listen Up Philip” and “We Won’t Grow Old Together”
Both the overwhelming critical acceptance of Alex Ross Perry’s latest film, Listen Up Philip, and a renewed interest in Maurice Pialat’s 1972 film We Won’t Grow Old Together have accounted for one of the year’s more inspiring shared success stories. These film...
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Mama Who Bore Me: On Motherhood, Horror, and Jennifer Kent’s “The Babadook”
In some way, Sigmund Freud was right: Many of us are haunted by our mothers, and they can be scary as hell. Perceived as caring nurturers, our mothers hold a singular power over us, and when that power is used for evil, the deliciousness of the reversal is too...
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The Curious Case of Anthology Horror
Anthology horror is having a moment right now. This happens every other decade or so; like the numbnut denizens of The Purge expunging the violence from their systems by perennially slaughtering unlucky bystanders (usually of the lower-class variety), filmmake...
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Sex(ist): On Cinematic Nudity
No surprise that David Fincher’s adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s controversial best-selling novel Gone Girl became a big hit upon its release. One aspect of the film that generated unexpected chatter, however, was Ben Affleck’s penis. Days (weeks?) after critics...
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Play Dumb with Me: Looking Back at the Farrelly Brothers’ “Dumb and Dumber”
With The Lion King, The Shawshank Redemption, Forrest Gump, Pulp Fiction, and Natural Born Killers among its crop of releases, 1994 proved to be a colossal year for American cinema. It was also the year of Jim Carrey, a B-level comedian from Toronto who had b...
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District Mined: The Gerrymandering of Contemporary Cinema
While concerned citizens and political journalists agonized over the fate of the Senate in the weeks leading up to the mid-term elections, there was a good reason no one was talking about the fate of the House: Due to the gerrymandering of Congressional distri...
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“Nightcrawler” For You: How to Succeed at Capitalism Without Really Trying
Nightcrawler is supposedly about ethics in news journalism. To be more specific, the film is about the lack thereof. It’s allegedly similar to Network, Broadcast News, Ace in the Hole, and any number of films about journalists doing shady things or being force...
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The Emptiness of Days to Come: On Gender Stereotypes and Sex in “White Bird in a Blizzard”
When it comes to exploring themes on sexuality in film, few contemporary auteurs have been more radical, and more divisive, than Gregg Araki. A pivotal figure in the New Queer Cinema movement during the early 1990s, and highly considered to be the "bad boy" of...
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The Frustrated Escape from Aimlessness: “The Sheltering Sky”
Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1990 film The Sheltering Sky follows Kit Moresby (Debra Winter) traveling with her two male companions through sandy villages across North Africa in the middle of the 20th century. They claim they are not tourists, but travelers—meaning t...
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Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor”: Beneath the Gold Ornamentation
Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (1987) chronicles the story of a man unable to break out of his destiny. The Chinese Emperor Pu Yi (played as an adult by John Lone) receives the throne as a child. “The son of heaven,” he is the most powerful person in t...
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