Bottomless
MADD MANN: Art & Aesthetic Appreciation in the Apocalypse of Avarice
The Lost Weekend: An Act of Understanding
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...
Blue Collar: A Rare, Authentic Working-Class Drama
|Ed Dykhuizen| Traditionally, if you’re a character in a Hollywood movie, you have to be rich. You don’t always have to be obscenely wealthy, but you must have enough money to never worry about how you’re going to pay for whatever the plot demands you have. Even if you’re in Los...
“Mixed Up”: Sylvia Sidney’s Bad Desire
|Doug Carmoody| In the years prior to her leading role in Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Once, Sylvia Sidney had endured a barrage of difficult on-screen romantic partners. She was impregnated and drowned by her boyfriend in An American Tragedy, bullied into a life of alcoholism and infidelity...
Crawling Up the Walls: Set Design and the Use of Space in Dial M for Murder
|Courtney Kowalke| I lived in my last apartment for five years and ten months. When I was allowed to work from home at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, my apartment was the center of my universe. I got out plenty, taking long walks and bike rides and drives around the city. Still...
Proscenium Arch Thriller
|Matthew Christensen| I teach film and theatre at an international high school in Japan, and have spent the last few days in tech rehearsals for our theater club’s production of Our Town. I have pulled out what little hair I have in my head handling last-minute crises—a locked door...
Making an End of Anger: Valor, Heroism, and Warriors
|Veda Lawerence| The Warriors is based on a book (The Warriors, by Sol Yurick) which is based on a work by Xenophon (Anabasis) that details the journey of an army of ancient Greek mercenaries. Xenophon recorded the tales of his battles as a soldier in the Greek army around four...
The Tortured Muse Department: Xanadu
|John Costello| There's something wonderful about watching a chaotic roller disco fantasia with multiple, costume-intense musical numbers in the middle of winter. As a kid watching Xanadu (1980) with my oldest sister, I loved the upbeat music and the flurry of joyous visual...
From Truce to Tyranny: Pulp Historicism in Walter Hill’s The Warriors
|Chris Polley| “The neighborhood hasn't really changed that much,” NYPD Detective William McQueen said to The New York Times in 1979 for a story about record-breaking violent crime in the Big Apple. He added, “Homicides seem to be the thing we have the least control over. Burglaries...
Give ‘Em the Old Razzle Dazzle: All That Jazz and the Strength of Self-Reflection
|Courtney Kowalke| The day after Perisphere assigned me All That Jazz (1979) for my next film essay, the web browser on my phone recommended I read the IndieWire article “‘All That Jazz’ Is a Favorite of Fincher, Kubrick, and Scorsese—Here’s Why.” I’m not a fan of whatever...
Fosse’s Reckoning: Wrestling With Demons, Death, Cinema, and Broadway
|Dan Howard| Bob Fosse. His name alone is engraved into the history of dance, Broadway, and cinema in works from Chicago to Cabaret. Even Michael Jackson saw him as one of his heroes. The reputation that bestowed Fosse as one of the greats was as well-known as how...