8 years ago
Longform (10 posts found)
“We Are Not Things”: Women as Depicted in “Mad Max: Fury Road” & “Transformers”
There is a scene early in George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road in which a woman is shown scaling Imperator Furiosa’s war-rig tanker to enter the cab. The audience is bound to assume this woman is part of the precious cargo stolen from the tyrannical self-proclai...
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SNL In Review: Will Forte and “MacGruber”
In SNL IN REVIEW, we look back at some of the notable cinematic efforts from Saturday Night Live alum, and place them in context of the actor-comedian’s career.
For years, Will Forte quietly developed one of pop culture’s most slept on comic personas. It’s u...
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Going Back: On Taking Nostalgia Seriously
Over 30 years, it can either seem like not much time has passed, or the opposite. On July 10, 1985, the number one Billboard single was “Sussudio” by Phil Collins, one of the most ’80s songs ever recorded. Though music has moved far beyond where it was back th...
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The Exceptional Characters in Brad Bird’s Films
Brad Bird is, to date, among a handful of mainstream filmmakers with a Midas touch. Though his new film Tomorrowland represents the closest thing to an exception to the rule--it's big, bold, messy, and never quite able to deliver any kind of satisfying payoff ...
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How Documentaries and Fiction Films Can’t Handle The Truth
There are many, many hoary quotes one could pull out in regards to the malleability of history, most obviously the one about how it’s written by the winners. But we must acknowledge that the past isn’t an actual, tangible narrative—it’s only what we remember. ...
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The Twisted, Outrageous, and Empathetic Mind of George Miller
I. In a profile published by the L.A. Weekly around the release of the 2006 animated musical Happy Feet, Australian director George Miller—creator of the Mad Max franchise, co-founder of Kennedy Miller Mitchell productions, and former medical student—said that...
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Homesick for the Past: On the Modern Film Critic
The unrepentant dandy of a critic Addison DeWitt (George Sanders) in All About Eve (1950) wields his influence like the magic of a Faustian Satan, manipulating stars and playwrights with nothing but the threat of a review. Yet he stands from society, distanced...
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Prancing Through Spaces in Destiny’s Cracks: “The Apu Trilogy”
Criterion Collection’s new 4K remaster of Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy is a wondrous accomplishment. The Ravi Shankar scores captivate. The depth of the black-and-white shading is enough to leave you gasping. The textures on title cards. The shine on a girl’s ha...
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“Do The Right Thing” and the Moderate Disavowal of Rioting
Even if one might have wished for a more diverse talking head roster from Baltimore’s cultural scene in the wake of Freddie Gray’s violent death in police custody on April 12, it was no surprise when David Simon’s media dance card found itself full, given his ...
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The Marvel-Industrial Complex
"Pity the land without heroes!"
"No, pity the land that needs them." —Bertolt Brecht, Galileo
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As inconceivable as it seems, 2008's Iron Man was, at the time, a mortgage-the-farm gamble for Marvel Comics, who was tired of watching film studios like Fox (Th...
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