Generals and Majors Everywhere
Seconds: Be Careful What You Wish For
Rock Hudson Deserved Better from Hollywood
Generals and Majors Everywhere
|J.R. Jones| Last spring the New Republic published a theme issue titled “American Fascism: What It Would Look Like,” with a cover image of Der Donald staring bullets at the reader in closely-cropped hair and a Fuhrer mustache. Eight different stories examine how a second Trump presidency...
Seconds: Be Careful What You Wish For
|Bob Aulert| In 1966, Rock Hudson had been a movie star since the early 1950s—by his mere presence, he could generate the financial support to get a movie made AND then get people to buy tickets to see it. John Frankenheimer had parlayed solid network TV jobs like Playhouse 90...
Rock Hudson Deserved Better from Hollywood
|Matt Lambert| In 2013, I was taking my first-ever film studies course. It was a course on Melodramas and our introductory film was the Douglas Sirk, 1956 classic (and a mainstay on my Letterbox Top Four) Written on the Wind. Rock Hudson plays a working-class, intellectual who works for...
Kenji Misumi: Both Lone Wolf and the Cub
|John Moret| The samurai film is, in essence, a very conservative genre in the same realm as the western or horror film. Before you freak out, I don’t mean conservative in terms of politics (though, really…) but in form. The conventional film would witness a ronin finding his honor after losing his way...
A Mother Scorned
|Matthew Christensen| If you are a Gen-Xer like me, your first introduction to Dame Angela Lansbury was probably not through her phenomenal stage career, nor her remarkable film appearances. No, your first introduction to Lansbury was through her work as the pragmatic, somewhere...
Isolation and Family, Arthouse and Hollywood, The Mafia and Jesus: The Impossible Marriages in Martin Scorsese’s Filmography
|Ryan Sanderson| I didn’t fall for Scorsese initially, the same way I did for his contemporaries. Raging Bull left me cold. I hated the characters in Goodfellas too much to really latch on. Make no mistake—I encountered plenty of toxic masculinity in adolescence, just a brand that disguised...
Killer Smile
|MH Rowe| Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust (1939), which like Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays (1970) is a classically bleak “Hollywood novel,” ends as Didion’s later story never could: with a riot. No one could riot in Play It as It Lays. Although it is set in the unruly 1960s the violence of...
The Chic Nothingness of Play it As It Lays
|Sophie Durbin| The unexpected thread that I chased for Play It As It Lays was a comment a family friend made when she saw me doing my due diligence by reading Joan Didion’s novel of the same name. “Oh, that’s a good book,” she said...
Pretty Poison: An Anti-Lolita for the Post-Code Era
|Sophie Durbin| Let me set a scene for you. In a quaint little town in mid-century America, an emotionally stunted man with a suspicious past becomes fixated on a lovely young girl. In an attempt to incorporate her into an insidious plot, he whisks her away, lying about his identity and his intentions...
Sam Mendes at War
|Hannah Baxter| 1917 (2019) was not the first project on which director Sam Mendes collaborated with cinematographer Roger Deakins.1 It’s not even the first war story they made together: that would be Jarhead (2005), a film that makes an interesting counterpoint to 1917. The latter film...
1917 and the Pitfalls of One-Shot and Long-Shot Filmmaking
|Nicole Rojas-Oltmann| You may have noticed the influx of one-shot and long-shot films in the past two decades. We have camera technology to thank for this. Now film can be made in one go. You know, like theatre has always been done. One-shot and long-shot cinematography pose...
This Just In: Audience Manipulation in Johnnie To’s Breaking News
|Benjamin Jarman| “Image matters most. We have to put on a great show. An eye for an eye. This is the age of the media. The media got us. Now we get back at them.” These are the first lines of dialogue recited by actress Kelly Chen in Johnnie To’s 2004 crime film, Breaking News. Chen
Slacker Noir
|Hannah Baxter| The Watermelon Woman (1996) is a movie about making a movie about movies—the very definition of meta. The main character, Cheryl, played by writer-director Cheryl Dunye, is steeped in moving pictures. She supports herself videotaping weddings and working...
Humanity and Stolen Choice in Children of Men
|Matt Lambert| By the time Children of Men plays at the Trylon, my son might be born. It will be my wife and I's first child. It's something we've waffled on in our marriage for many years. The decision to bring life into the world has changed drastically as I've grown older. When I was younger, I thought the idea of...
A Youthquake for Yakuza: Coming of Age in Sailor Suit and Machine Gun
|Jake Rudegeair| “Coming of age” always struck me as a flat phrase for something so bumpy, so relentless. It doesn’t really illustrate that slow erosion of our bodies and souls as we’re worn down by the slings and arrows of experience, cruelly and carelessly reformed over and over...
Mind Your Manners: I Am Cuba
|Nazeeh Alghazawneh| Propaganda is a funny thing to be afraid of because it’s uniquely man-made, and therefore not real. It only exists along the periphery of chasing omniscience—an impossibility that grants salvation, the liberation that keeps us from killing each other.
Dialectical Materialism and Proletarian Internationalism: ‘I Am Cuba’
|Jasper Nordin| On July 26, 1953, the Cuban Revolution began. Fidel Castro, leading a force of 136 men, attacked the Moncada military barracks in the capital city of Havana. The goal of this attack was to instigate a wider revolt against the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, and to...
Race-Revenge Films: the Psychodrama of Clearcut
|Chelli Riddough| I first saw it embroidered on my coworker’s hat: “You are on Native land.” Then I noticed it emblazoned in neon signage at Owamni, the indigenous restaurant. Those five words: are they a fact? A reminder? Are they meant to spark remorse?
Pacifism Ain’t No Panacea: Vengeance and Desperation in Ryszard Bugajski’s Clearcut
|Chris Polley| Ugly injustice and righteous anger fill the frames of nearly every fantasy revenge flick, but the best of the genre go beyond the emotion. They consider their targets and punishments carefully as well as provide a convincing argument as to why pacifism...
A Beginner’s Guide to Edgelord Cinema
|Andrwe Neill| With the Trylon screening Oldboy this week, I got to thinking about a new subgenre with a unique shade of ugly that’s been taking shape. Only in recent years has it emerged fully formed, given dimension in light of a heinous online subculture. Members of this...
Beyond the Video Store Shelves: How Oldboy Introduced me to a New World of Subtitled Film
|Rowan Smith| When I first started getting more seriously interested in movies, around age thirteen, it was when video stores were on the precipice of catastrophe, though we didn’t know it yet. The business had already largely homogenized, people mostly rented from large chains...
Unfortunate Passions: David Lean’s Brief Encounter
|Penny Folger| A central moment in David Lean’s Brief Encounter that jumps out are these words by its protagonist. “I’ve fallen in love. I’m an ordinary woman. I didn’t think such violent things could happen to ordinary people.” This little bit of narration is at once melodramatic...
The Thin Veil Between Comedy and Horror in Coward’s Blithe Spirit (1945)
|Allison Vincent| A foundational memory of mine is sitting in Dr. Doug Julien’s “Comedy Text and Theory” course at the University of Minnesota and realizing the slender thin line that separates a scream from a laugh. Dr. Doug, as he liked to be addressed, told the class he was...
Brief Encounter: Music as Memory
|Nate Logsdon| A man and a woman, dressed formally and speaking properly, sit in a crowded restaurant and mock the efforts of a string trio supplying background music to the chattering lunch crowd. The camera zeroes in on an earnest, bespectacled cellist, whom...