|Sophie Durbin| In the typical haunted house movie, the protagonist and their loved ones move into a house and stay put despite the fact that it has a million red flags (creepy caretaker, suspicious sounds at night, blood oozing from the elevators…). By the time the entire social order of the film collapses… Continue reading
|Michael Wellvang| By the mid-1980s, public perception of films “rated X” had shifted radically. First introduced in 1968 by the Motion Picture Association of America, the rating simply stated a patron should be at least sixteen to watch a particular movie. Now it just meant smut. So the MPAA… Continue reading
|Finn Odum| Last November, I learned that the guy who made the completely mid Body Snatchers and King of New York is the same guy who made Bad Lieutenant. This knowledge came to me against my will, as I was quite content not knowing anything else about… Continue reading
|Lucas Hardwick| Star Trek: The Next Generation ended its seventh and final season in May of 1994. The Emmy Award-winning series ran for 178 episodes and was one of, if not the most successful first-run syndication television show of all time. Thanks to its nightly 9 p.m. time slot… Continue reading
|Veda Lawrence| “Whatever souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” For all my adoration for Austen, I must admit that she never wrote a single confession of love that comes close to rivaling even a throwaway sentence in Wuthering Heights in terms of romanticism and ferocity. That said, … Continue reading
|Nazeeh Alghazawneh| As a pimp, the optics of being an absent, deadbeat parent are bad, but the optics of being a bad dancer are far worse—to abandon your child is your choice, but to falter in the corporeal shimmy-shimmy of a hot-blooded mambo dance… Continue reading
|Sophie Durbin| While procrastinating on my research for this piece on The Piano, I decided to learn everything I could about Michael Nyman’s lush original score. The track titles are as romantic and sensual as you’d expect: “The Heart Asks Pleasure First,” “The Scent of Love,” … Continue reading
|Jake Rudegeair| Ever seen First Knight (1995)? I didn’t think so. It was my first tangle with Gere as the famous Sir Lancelot of legend. I was ten and even then I wasn’t buying it. He’s an invincible swordsman and a treasonous Don Juan? I was put off by the cool-guy affect, anachronistic… Continue reading
|Finn Odum| Several weeks ago, in the monotonous gray cubes of the Mall of America® office tower, I dared to make a joke about my gender identity. This is how it went:
Finn, 24, strikingly gorgeous and wickedly funny email specialist: Now, I’m not like most women—in that I’m not one… Continue reading
|Natalie Marlin| When we dream, unconscious shapes fill in the blanks. Vague visages that recall someone we know, or perhaps the half-formed images of blurry memories—those specters of past days, buried, submerged, just waiting for free association to emerge—fill what is otherwise vacant. In my dreams… Continue reading
