All Our Trashcans Within: Tears and Other Feelings in Claire Denis’s Beau Travail
Hitchcock Astrology: Under Capricorn Inspires a Misguided Trip Through the Zodiac
Horoscope for Those Born Under the Sign of Capricorn: December 3, 1831
All Our Trashcans Within: Tears and Other Feelings in Claire Denis’s Beau Travail
|Ben Tuthill| The first time I watched Beau Travail, I cried for ten minutes straight. I watched it alone. I didn't understand the plot very well. I knew that the final scene was famous, but when it happened I didn't really get it. I started crying right about the moment the first credits hit...
Hitchcock Astrology: Under Capricorn Inspires a Misguided Trip Through the Zodiac
|Andrew Neill| I have never seen the 1949 film Under Capricorn, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. I freely (and quite bravely) admitted this in my pitch to the benevolent editors of this blog. On April 10th, when the film screens at the historic Heights Theater, I will be sitting...
Horoscope for Those Born Under the Sign of Capricorn: December 3, 1831
|Bill Nelson| HOROSCOPE FOR THOSE BORN UNDER THE SIGN OF CAPRICORN:(1) DECEMBER 3, 1831(2). As the Book says, we may be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with us.(3) Your own past will visit you this month in unpleasant ways,(4) causing you to doubt your choices
Solar Citalopram: Beau Travail, Ken, and Burning Isolation
|Finn Odum| Author’s note: This essay contains discussions of fictional suicide and real-life suicidal ideation. I. Citalopram On a relatively warm Monday evening last September, while on a short walk to see Kenji Misumi’s Ken at the Trylon, I found myself struggling to cross the street...
Blade: Supes Are the New Cowboys
|Dan Howard| Every generation has its defining film genre. For the 40s, it was Noir. The 70s were ruled by the auteurs, the 80s were all about sci-fi and fantasy and for the 50s and 60s, we had Westerns at the Hollywood throne. However, for the last 25 years or so, Superhero film...
How the Orientalist Vices of Licorice Pizza Overpower its Virtues
|Anjali Moore| Since I have always held a compulsive devotion to 1970s media and coming-of-age films, I ventured to the cinema to see Licorice Pizza with relatively high hopes when it was first released in 2021. I felt like Licorice Pizza might pierce my general disaffection for PTA...
“I Think It’s Weird”: Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza
|Steven Rybin| 15-year-old Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman), a teenage actor and budding entrepreneur, lives with his mom Anita (Mary Elizabeth Ellis) and younger brother Greg (Milo Herschlag) in the San Fernando Valley during the long summer of 1973. Whether it’s waterbeds or...
Caught in the Moment
|Doug Carmoody| Alfred Hitchcock’s British films trade heavily in spycraft and international intrigue, but lightly in specificity. Each of The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, and Sabotage feature spy rings embedded in Britain, dedicated to extracting British secrets or...
A New Vision of the Western: Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood
|Dan McCabe| For better or worse, the Western is the quintessential American myth from its beginnings with The Great Train Robbery (1903) through the films of John Ford, Sergio Leone, and Clint Eastwood. During the Western’s heyday in the first half of the 1900s, the nineteenth...
The Political, Personal Prophecies of There Will Be Blood
|Ryan Sanderson| “Shuffle the cards, and deal a new round of poker hands: they differ in every way from the previous round, and yet it is the same pack of cards, and the same game, with the same spirit, the players grim-faced and silent, surrounded by a haze of tobacco-..."
Don’t Ever Trust a Man that Calls You Monkeyface: Masculinity then and now
|Reid Lemker| If you learn one thing after watching Alfred Hitchcock’s 1941 film Suspicion, it should be this: don’t ever go out with a guy that refers to you as “Monkeyface.” I don’t care where they are from, how much money they claim they have, or even if they look like a young...
To Love or Leave: The Paradoxical Feminism of Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion
|Chris Polley| “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you,” Joseph Heller famously wrote in his 1961 wartime satire Catch-22. Taking place during World War II and reveling in the titular paradoxes inherent in the very concepts of warfare and military service...
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...