8 years ago
Longform (10 posts found)
The Gleeful Free-For-All of “Gremlins 2: The New Batch”
Joe Dante’s The Movie Orgy (1968) was, contra its title, less a film than a 7-hour marathon audiovisual DJ set. Conceived and collated by Dante, with the help of his future producing partner Jon Davidson, it was an epic, unwieldy expression of movie love, asse...
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Mezzanine Essentials: “The Trial”
“It has been said that the logic of this story is the logic of a dream, or a nightmare,” says Orson Welles in the opening narration of his 1962 adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial. He seems to be talking specifically about a brief parable he’s just related f...
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Montgomery Clift: The Original Method Actor
The names and faces of Marlon Brando and James Dean are instantly recognizable in contemporary popular culture, while Montgomery Clift remains a name and face relatively few today recognize. Oh, maybe they’ve heard of him, perhaps as the subject of a particula...
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The Movie-Star Fantasy of Chris Pratt
In Jurassic World, Chris Pratt does battle with the Indominus Rex, a fictional dinosaur bred by way of focus groups. But the Chris Pratt we see onscreen, that digital ghost of old photographs, is himself a creation of aggregate determinism. There is, somewhere...
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“Total Recall” at 25
Paul Verhoeven proved his sci-fi chops with the 1987 cyberpunk masterpiece RoboCop, but that film’s grimy location shoots and dilapidated effects scarcely offered evidence that he could mount a film on the level of Total Recall. Based on Philip K. Dick’s story...
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“Roar” and the Limits of Ironic Appropriation
“No animals were harmed in the making of this film. 70 members of the cast and crew were.” So beams the promotional copy for Drafthouse Films’ recent dustbin rescue of Noel Marshall’s 1981 expensive boondoggle Roar, an animals-run-amok disaster picture with ac...
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On The Formal and Narrative Style of Nathan Silver
Across Nathan Silver’s three latest features—Exit Elena, Soft in the Head, and Uncertain Terms, exempting the just-premiered Stinking Heaven—one can immediately see a handful of formal and narrative similarities. Each opens with an ambiguous pre-title sequence...
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Junkies on Film: A 1990s Revival
Last year, the New York Times reported that a new heroin epidemic was raging in New York City. Evidence indicated a dramatic surge in sales and seizures around the five boroughs, and the numbers were higher than they had been in over 20 years. As the Big Apple...
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Birth of the Uncool: The Mind and Movies of Cameron Crowe
Cameron Crowe is a romantic. Since 1989, he’s made eight features as writer and director, and they’re all broadly similar, featuring sensitive white men in search for identity in a world that, to them, has temporarily lost meaning. But there’s more to Crowe’s ...
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Round 2: The Marvel-Industrial Complex
When I wrote "The Marvel-Industrial Complex" at the invitation of Movie Mezzanine a few weeks ago, it was just supposed to be a thinkpiece with some actual thought behind it, as well as a way of talking about some of the more disquieting corporate and cultural...
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