In Celebration of Silliness
“Will the Real 80s Action Movie Please Blow Up” — 80s Avarice & Film False Positives
A Labor of Love: Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein
In Celebration of Silliness
|Reid Lemker| Let’s play a game. I am thinking of a movie…It has a bit of action, some guns, a bit of drama, and a dash of comedy. This movie I am thinking of came out in the early 1970s and stars James Caan. Our hero is pitted against a gang of bad guys, one of them wears glasses and...
“Will the Real 80s Action Movie Please Blow Up” — 80s Avarice & Film False Positives
|Phil Kolas| The allure of mystery is inescapable in the upcoming quadruple lineup for the 80s ACTION EXTRAVAGANZA II: THE QUICKENING. We do not actually know what the movies in question will be. I tried to find any info about the first extravaganza, but even...
A Labor of Love: Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein
|Allison Vincent| As a kid growing up at the tail end of the 80s through the 90s with access to cable and an unrestricted library card, it was pretty easy to consume the media I wanted without too much interruption from my parents. My dad was lax, to say the least, when it came to...
The Cult and Culture of VHS and the 1980s Action Flick
|Dan McCabe| If I asked someone to name ten action movies, I wouldn’t be surprised if many of the named films were released in the 1980s. The Terminator (1984), First Blood (1982), Die Hard (1988), Top Gun (1986), Aliens (1986), Red Dawn (1984), Predator (1987), Lethal Weapon (1987)...
The Real World of Crime
|Matt Clark| The crime film and the heist picture have been integral to American cinema since its earliest days: gangster films of the 30s, noir of the 40s and 50s, even silent pictures like The Great Train Robbery (1903) still reverberate powerfully through our shared cinematic vocabulary...
A Criminal Reputation: George V. Higgins From Page to Screen
|J.R. Jones| George V. Higgins was a crime writer’s crime writer, which may be another way of saying he never enjoyed the same level of success as some of his fans. Elmore Leonard—whose fiction inspired Get Shorty (1995), Jackie Brown (1997), and Out of Sight (1998)—remembered Higgins...
Book Clubs and Pigeon Coops: A Hit-Man’s Guide to Empathy
|Noah Frazier| The beginnings and ends of movies often function as microcosms of the whole, enclosing the film’s central ideas within a few shots. Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai opens on a silhouette of a pigeon flying across a dark blue sky. After softly mumbling through the background...
How Many Dinner Plates Is an Octopus Allowed to Take at an All-You-Can-Eat Buffet?
|Phil Kolas| One of the greatest and most delicious irrefutable gifts of the internet has been the ever utterly overwhelming and bottomless wash of media that is our every waking hour. Beneath every rock there are hidden worms—snacks that will sustain our artistic intellect. Algorithmic
Paul Schrader’s Hardcore: The Film that Was and Also Wasn’t
|Penny Folger| Hardcore is an amusing fish-out-of-water story starring George C. Scott as a devout midwestern Calvinist who must plumb the depths of the California porn industry to seach for his missing teenage daughter. It’s also a film that its director, Paul Schrader, is not terribly fond of...
Hardcore: A Neo-Noir Powered by Calvinism
|Sophie Durbin| “You wanna hire a choir boy, you go back to Grand Rapids.” – Peter Boyle as Andy Mast, private detective. The opening credits of Paul Schrader’s Hardcore are set against a holiday scene in Grand Rapids, Michigan, filled with children sledding and snow-dusted corner...
They Don’t Even Have Romance in Movies Anymore!
|Caitlyn Speier| This past year, one of the most kind, smart, and justice-oriented people I’ve ever had the honor of calling a friend voluntarily left this world. Saying goodbye has been utterly… confusing. I suspect in large part because we honestly didn’t talk much anymore...
This Woman’s Work: A New Leaf, Elaine May, and Editing Versus Meddling
|Courtney Kowalke| Elaine May probably wishes I wasn’t writing this piece. While May adapted, directed, and starred in her 1971 directorial debut, A New Leaf, she was less than pleased with the finished product. Against May’s wishes, her film was edited by Academy Award-winning editors Don...
So Frond of You: The Redemption of a Latent Nerd in A New Leaf
|Terry Serres| Elaine May’s first feature film, A New Leaf, is a production rich in lore. It was based on a short story, “The Green Heart,” written by Jack Ritchie and first appearing in the March 1963 issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. The story involves the well-heeled Henry...
There’s No Lying In That Beef: Breaking Down The Singularly Unflinching Satire of The Heartbreak Kid
|Vincent Cheng| CONTEXT What creates the sensation of personal discomfort when watching comedies, and what is the value of that discomfort? To answer these questions, I’d like you to first close your eyes and imagine something funny. Undoubtedly you pictured, as I did...
The Bizarre Adventures of Joe’s Screenwriter, Norman Wexler
| Ed Dykhuizen | Joe plays on glorious 35mm at the Trylon Cinema from Sunday, May 4th, through Tuesday, May 6th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org. In 1967, American studio executives were adrift. Their main target demographic was the legion of young baby boomers who had...
Little Man With a Gun in His Hand
|J.R. Jones| When John G. Avildsen’s indie drama Joe opened in New York City in July 1970, violence had erupted across the U.S. over President Nixon’s widening of the Vietnam war to include Cambodia. National Guardsmen had killed four student protesters and wounded nine others...
The Grotesque, Memorable Brilliance of Fires on the Plain
|Ryan Sanderson| Fires on the Plain begins with a literal slap to the face. Cruel, jarring, and just a little bit funny. That’s the energy Kon Ichikawa maintains throughout his bleak and disturbing masterpiece which feels like a cross between Apocalypse Now and Bambi. If a film before 1960 captured
Chocolat is (not) an Autobiographical Movie
|Malcolm Cooke| Claire Denis moved to Cameroon, the setting of Chocolat, when she was only two months old.1 With a colonial administrator father, she had an itinerant childhood driven by her father's passion for geography,2 growing up across Burkina Faso, Somalia, and Senegal in...
Demolishing Technocratic Fascism
|Lucas Vonasek| Fascism can take many forms. Throughout books and movies, it is often portrayed as overt and obvious villainy where injustice drips from the pronounced canines of the antagonist. Other times, fascism can be seen as a devilishly debonair individual smoothly...
The Cooler Blonde: Marjorie Wood, Geek Chic, and Obsessions (with Glasses?)
|Matthew Christensen| “News Item” Men seldom make passes At girls who wear glasses. -Dorothy Parker Let me start off by saying that I never fully understood Scottie Ferguson’s obsession with Madeleine Elster in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. I mean, I get why he falls for her. Kim Novak—playing the part in perfectly coiffed white-blonde hair...
Vertigo, La Jetée, and 12 Monkeys: Three Films Where Time is Treated Like Butter in Croissant Dough *Mind Blown Gesture*
|Allison Vincent| I do not identify as a time travel girly. Movies where the laws of time and space are bent need strong foundations for me to enjoy them, otherwise I find myself inundated with intrusive thoughts about logic, the “rules of the universe” (those generated by the...
Nocturnal Animals: Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day
|Jackson Stern| Claire Denis has always made monster movies. Or, at least, movies with monsters in them or, most commonly, movies about the survivors of monsters. Most of her films revolve around (or feature in a capacity) people who have intense sense of dread permeating...
Terrorists in Tight Spots
|Hannah Baxter| In a world where every other movie ends with a blowout fight between gods, superheroes, or both, with nothing less than the fate of the universe hanging in the balance, isn’t it refreshing when you come across a film that knows how to contain itself? Passenger 57 (1992)
Snipes gets his Wings: PASSENGER 57
|Jake Rudegeair| It’s DIE HARD on a plane (or a boat, a bus, a mountain, etc.). This is the Mad-Libs elevator pitch that launched a thousand films (ooh, DIE HARD on an elevator? I guess DIE HARD had elevators, never mind). Of the “DIE HARD on a …”