8 years ago
Longform (10 posts found)
Two Writers Get Into A Car. Ouch.
David Foster Wallace is the epitome of the Writer's Writer. His labyrinthine prose and slang-laced erudition appeal to the myriad would-be scribes struggling to find meaning in their debt-inducing liberal arts educations that never really pay off—the "obscenel...
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Here’s To Never Growing Up: Paul Mazursky’s 1960s Sex Comedies
Borrowing a line from his 1978 movie An Unmarried Woman, Paul Mazursky once described midlife crisis as a cross between Mary Hartman and Ingmar Bergman. “It’s on the edge of soap opera and the edge of real,” pondered the director, a sentiment that’s rarely ech...
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I Love You, Man: A Discussion on LGBT Films
Kyle: Noah, I unfortunately neglected to read your piece, “Three’s Company: A Trio of Modern LGBT-Themed Comedies”, when it was initially posted, but I was immediately intrigued when I skimmed it that day. Your choices -- I Love You, Man, Talladega Nights: The...
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SNL In Review: “Caddyshack”
By 1979, Saturday Night Live was a house divided. Popular cast members John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd were preparing to send their Blues Brothers characters to the big screen, bolstered from the success of Belushi’s National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978). The sh...
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The Act of Silence: LBJ and the Indonesian Genocide of 1965
Between The Act of Killing and now The Look of Silence, filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer has now given audiences a well-rounded look at a tragic event that had somehow been lost to history’s abyss: the killing of up to a million innocent civilians by the Indonesia...
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The Unbearable Sameness of “Ant-Man” and Marvel Movies
Hollywood churns out a lot of superhero movies, but then, they also churn out a lot of movies about, say, cops. Multiple times each year, multiplexes will run new releases about the boys in blue, and yet the public isn’t subjected to a deluge of thinkpieces ab...
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From The Ashes: The Collaboration of Director and Actress in “Phoenix”
Phoenix, Christian Petzold’s latest film, finds the German filmmaker working with many of his usual cast and crew, including cinematographer Hans Fromm and editor Bettina Böhler. The most significant of his recurring collaborations, however, is with star Nina ...
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The Politically Misunderstood Films of Sean Baker
Regardless of his eventual standing next year, one man has handily filled 2015’s entertainment quota: Donald Trump. In announcing his candidacy for President of the United States (again), he gave the following thoughts on illegal immigration: “When Mexico send...
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The Bright But Uncertain Future of Film Criticism
Film reviews are tricky things. As a critic, you have to explain enough of what happens in a movie to give readers an idea of what to expect, but that plot description has to be balanced with analysis unless you want to wind up with a flat recap. You have to r...
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Musical Martyrdom and Asif Kapadia’s “Amy”
It’s not easy for a filmmaker to take on a documentary subject as delicate and complex as a dead musical icon, particularly when they’ve reached mythic proportions in the popular imagination. With tragic figures as well-loved as Kurt Cobain or Amy Winehouse, t...
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