Psychoanalyze Me, Mommy: Making Sense of the Mother Role in Phantom Thread
Love and Broken Glass
Sandleriana
Psychoanalyze Me, Mommy: Making Sense of the Mother Role in Phantom Thread
|Sophie Durbin| Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread tops my shortlist of “Unexpectedly Rewatchable Movies.” On the initial viewing, the film is obviously beautiful, perfectly acted, painstakingly art directed. And yet, it’s an enigma: what is...
Love and Broken Glass
|Kit Stookey| When I first watched Punch-Drunk Love, I treated it like a horror movie, viewing parts of it between just-parted fingers. It was film as punishment. I had made my partner watch Shiva, Baby and experience all of its Gen-Z Jewish awkwardness. Now, he wanted to show...
Sandleriana
| MH Rowe | It qualifies neither as an obscure bit of Hollywood trivia nor as a famous declaration of aesthetic taste, but you may or may not happen to know that the director Paul Thomas Anderson once went on at length in an interview...
Schrödinger’s Cat Walks Into a Bar…
|Nazeeh Alghazawneh| “You know how you get rid of crabs? You got to shave one testicle. All the crabs go over to the other testicle, you got to light the hair on fire on that one. When they all go scurrying out, you take an ice pick and you fucking stab every single last one of them!”...
The Many Singular Faces of The Master
|Ryan Sanderson| When The Master came out in 2012, a lot of the conversation centered around Scientology–which made sense, at least at first. “Auteur Wunderkind Attacks World’s Most Litigious Religion!” makes for a pretty compelling headline. “Auteur Wunderkind Explores Identity...
Music as a Balm: My Appreciation for Magnolia’s Mid-Film Sing-Along
|David Potvin| Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1999 magnum opus Magnolia is sonically chaotic. There’s no two ways about it. Within the first eleven minutes we meet no less than nine members of the film's ensemble cast amidst a cacophony of these characters' morning routines...
WTF Frogs!? You know what? Sure. Why not?
|Allison Vincent| Why Magnolia So Fully Captures the Ennui of the End of the 20th Century | I need to start this post by explicitly stating that I am a millennial. Trust me, it’s important. Technically, because I was born in 1987, I’m an “elder” millennial or geriatric millennial if you’re...
Thelma and Louise and Everything Since
|Nicole Rojas-Oltmanns| Geena Davis, who plays Thelma, remarked, “After Thelma and Louise (1991, directed by Ridley Scott), people said things would improve for women in film. They didn’t.”¹ So, in 2004 she created The Geena Davis Institute to better understand disparities...
From the Valley to the Mountain: The Inevitable Success of Paul Thomas Anderson
|Brogan Earney| “I have seen the new Quentin Tarantino, and his name is Paul Thomas Anderson,” wrote Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman after watching the premiere of Boogie Nights at the 1997 Toronto International Film Festival. A line that recognizes the achievement...
Bottomless
|Patrick Clifford| This isn’t going to be easy to write. Writing about drinking is hard. And The Lost Weekend isn’t just a movie about drinking. It’s a movie about writing about drinking. Writing and drinking have always been joined at the hip. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, Stephen King—
MADD MANN: Art & Aesthetic Appreciation in the Apocalypse of Avarice
|Phil Kolas| I’ve been writing haikus, lately. There’s something so completely stupid and perfect about every single one of them. They are utterly impossible to do incorrectly, as long as you can count to 17. It is an unmissable endeavor. It is a great gift granted to every human being that...
The Lost Weekend: An Act of Understanding
|Jackson Stern| Like many self-described “film nerds”, I grew up with a great admiration for the work of Billy Wilder. Around the time I was thirteen or fourteen, I was watching Sunset Boulevard monthly, completely enraptured by the witty dialogue, the strangeness of it...
The Sound of Confrontation
|Patrick Clifford| The first frames of Steven Spielberg’s first film, Duel, are black. Total darkness. Before we see anything, we hear footsteps, a car door opening, and a car starting. I love this movie. It’s a great ride. Released in 1971, it has everything that made the 70s, Hollywood’s greatest...
A Programmer’s Note on AMERICA: EVERYTHING YOU’VE EVER DREAMED OF
|John Moret| A regular at the theater recently asked me to describe the short films of Tony Ganz and Rhody Streeter. I took a moment and realized I wasn’t quite sure how. Perhaps we could compare it to the early work of Errol Morris, but comparisons to things you like never...
Read the Book First: Adaptations, Queer Coding, and the Production Code in The Big Clock
|Reid Lemker| My dad had a rule about film adaptations. He always told my sister and me to “read the book first” when we were kids. These days, I don’t always heed this advice. However, watching John Farrow’s 1948 film The Big Clock, after reading the 1946 Kenneth Fearing novel of the same...
Firecrackers and Traditional Gender Role Reversals in Classic Hollywood: Gun Crazy
|Penny Folger| It’s difficult to measure the kind of influence a film like Gun Crazy has had. Like so many great films, it flopped upon its initial release in 1950. It was the only movie ever made by its B-movie producers, the King Brothers, that actually lost money. The industry thought of...
Steely Resolve: Firearm Fetishization in Joseph H. Lewis’s Gun Crazy
|Chris Polley| Planting a flagpole in the ground? That’s a phallus. Shredding a guitar on stage? That’s a phallus. Cocking a revolver and pointing it at a cashier with a lusty grin of power and control on your face, side by side with your gun-toting lover? You better believe that’s a phallus.
ten thousand lakes and the Maya Deren Project: Creating Music for a Surrealist Masterpiece
|Malcolm Cooke| Steven Larsen and Peter Bruhn met through their mailman. An avid sports fan, he assumed that two men hailing from Wisconsin must be Packers fans and encouraged them to meet. But when they finally got together to watch...
Oneiric Reflections and Rebirth of Femininity in Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) & At Land (1944)
|Olivia Fredrickson| The cinema of Maya Deren without a doubt captures not only the intrinsic reflections of her consistently shifting identity as a woman and artist, but also the labyrinthic inner workings of the self and psyche. Both of these crucial elements of her cinema and identity...
Detour, Low Production Values, and Me
|Sophie Durbin| Please bear with me as I begin this piece with (yes) a quick detour. I’ve always been fascinated by Low Production Values. I capitalize these words because I thought they were an official proper noun for an actual artistic style for many years. As a kid, I was fascinated by...
“For No Good Reason At All”: The Dialogue of Detour in Two Villanelles
|Nate Logsdon| Fate’s Finger Fate can put the finger on you or me. Awful chump to throw away all that dough. No. Not yet, darling. Tomorrow. Maybe. Why you dope. Where did you leave his body? Suppose he doesn’t die… He will, I know. Fate can put the finger on you or me. Another one...
Generous, Kind, Gentle, Decent People: Ministry of Fear
|John Costello| I want to tell you why almost everyone turns out to be a Nazi collaborator in Ministry of Fear (1944), a wartime thriller set during the London Blitz. I want to tell you who knows they are helping the Nazis, and who acts without understanding they're part of a larger...
The Precincts of Dream: Fritz Lang’s Ministry of Fear
|MH Rowe| The Hollywood thrillers that Fritz Lang made after leaving Nazi Germany—and after making there such classics as Metropolis (1927) and M (1931)—tend to be likable because they’re unmoved by the tyrannical demand that films ought to make complete sense.
“Long Nights, Impossible Odds, Keeping My Back To the Wall”
|Lucas Hardwick| **Mild spoilers ahead*** My career as a writer is successful only in the sense that I get to do it; my work is published here and there, and maybe a few hundred people read it, chuckle, and manage to get something out of it—some of it right here on this very blog. But...