An Experiment in Disrespecting the Troops: Dead of Night
2008: The year Tom Cruise played a Nazi and Hollywood changed forever
Not From Around Here: How Roger Corman Captured The Intruder
An Experiment in Disrespecting the Troops: Dead of Night
|Doug Carmoody| The patriotic imperative to “support the troops” grew, like many other national neuroses, from America’s inability to reckon with the moral failures of the Vietnam War. To counter anti-war sentiment, the U.S. political establishment boosted effusive parades to “Support...
2008: The year Tom Cruise played a Nazi and Hollywood changed forever
|Andrew Neill| 17 years ago, on a frigid night in January 2008, I was in a car packed with friends, speeding up I-29 from Fargo to Grand Forks to see a new release. We would have gone to see it locally, but the theater chain (Marcus) and the distributor (Paramount) were fighting. The film...
Not From Around Here: How Roger Corman Captured The Intruder
|J.R. Jones| If you’re sensitive to microaggressions, brace yourself for the macroaggression of The Intruder. This low-budget 1962 drama, about a small Southern town struggling to integrate its public high school, plunges viewers into the sort of casual white supremacism...
Constructing an Auxiliary Language of Horror: Esperanto
|Sophie Durbin| I have a strict “don’t talk about people from your past in your writing, they didn’t sign up for that” policy, but I am going to break it to share that I had an ex tell me (I was an admittedly overzealous linguistics minor in college at the time) that the concept of preserving...
They’re Coming to Get You (if You’re Black in PA)!
| Kit Stookey | Night of the Living Dead plays at the Trylon Cinema Wednesday, September 24th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org. It is common wisdom that any given piece of media says more about the period in which it was produced than the period it...
God Bless This Mess: Vietnam, The Monkey’s Paw, and Dead of Night
| Wil McMillen | Dead of Night aka. Deathdream plays at the Trylon Cinema Wednesday, September 24th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org. “My brother came home yesterday From somewhere far away He doesn’t look like I remember As he stares off into space He must’ve seen...
The Dirty Dozen: Your Dad’s Favorite Movie Before FOX NEWS Got To Him
|Phil Kolas| An ensemble masterpiece, where one dozen of the worst and most violent incarcerated American soldiers are offered a suicide mission in exchange for their freedom. A rotten deal from a rotten wartime government, offered to rotten men, to get them to kill the only type...
What are We, Some Kind of Dirty Dozen?
|Finn Odum| Sometime Before 1944: The US military established a covert demolition squad that later took on the moniker “The Filthy Thirteen,” after they decided to save their bathing water for cooking. Normandy, France, 1944: The Filthy Thirteen were airdropped over the Douve River...
The Last Detail, the Weight of Time
|Ryan Sanderson| The Last Detail is a film of contrasts. It’s a film about everything, in which almost nothing happens—a beautiful, very funny work of art composed of some of the ugliest, most depressing imagery you’ll ever see in a major studio film. It’s an improvisational-feeling actor’s showcase...
The Triangle of Discontent in The Last Detail
|Jackson Stern| We like to imagine that, when faced with prospects of injustice, repression, and hypocrisy from those in the highest of towers, we’d stand tall and together. We’d overthrow our oppressors by bashing them or, better yet, outsmarting them at their own cruel game...
For Fear of Retribution: All Through the Night
|John Costello| Although All Through the Night is primarily a comedy about small-time New York racketeers who become entangled in a spy ring working for the Nazi regime, the slapstick characters take moral positions for community, empathy, and democracy. The movie gives insights...
The Film’s Strength, the Show’s Weakness: Willow’s Childlike Sense of Wonder
|Dan Howard| Adventure. Excitement. A jedi may crave not these things, but a former Ewok-turned-sorcerer just might. After Return of the Jedi delivered a triumphant finale to the Star Wars trilogy in 1983, George Lucas was not only focusing on a prequel to Raiders of the Lost Ark...
They Shoot Hamsters, Don’t They
|MH Rowe| If you’re going to do something really stupid, it’s not a bad idea to be beautiful. Maybe that’s how Val Kilmer ended up in Top Secret! (1984), which is both his film debut and a spoof of spy stories, resistance thrillers, and, for some reason, Elvis Presley. Top Secret!...
Ah, Yes, Another 80s/90s “Children’s Movie” or FOR THE LOVE OF GOD WHY WOULD OUR PARENTS SHOW US THIS
|Allison Vincent| I want to start by making it clear that I love all of these movies. They are core memories for me as a kid partly because they scared the hell out of me, but mostly because, despite losing nights of sleep, they enthralled me. They are full of rich storylines, characters, themes, and...
The Great Escape as Masculine Melodrama
|Dylan Hawthorn| The concept of melodrama has a bad reputation. If I described my sister’s behavior during a conflict as melodramatic, I am suggesting that her reaction is over-the-top and should be dismissed. Furthermore, there’s a reason my brain jumped to citing a...
The Great Ecstasy of Digging a Hole
|Malcolm Cooke| For the past few months or so my father has been digging a very large hole in his backyard. It started with some error in the installation of a rain garden I always struggle to comprehend the details of. The contractor said a previous hole that was filled needed to...
Requiem for a Senior Vice President
|Nate Logsdon| Donald Trump sees himself in The Fountainhead. “It relates to business and beauty and life and inner emotions,”1 he explained in 2016, avowing an interest in the writings of Ayn Rand widely shared among conservatives though dubious in his own case considering his notorious...
What A Shame
|Patrick Clifford| Requiem for a Heavyweight is a tightly scripted, expertly acted film that centers around the career-ending knockout of a boxer. It is worth noting that a requiem is defined as a service or composition in honor of the dead. The film opens by putting us in...
Live From New York: How Rod Serling’s Patterns Elevated TV Drama
|J.R. Jones| This review contains spoilers. In our modern media landscape, where TV and the movies are slowly dissolving into a giant video stream, we might not recall that 70 years ago these two media were starkly distinguished. Movies were prestigious, a serious art form, and television was...
The Cost of Integrity: Rod Serling Vs. The Corporations
|Wil McMillen| Portrait of a nervous man in the midst of a crisis. He’s sitting with his wife, having dinner at a Howard Johnson’s. The air is heavy with what he needs to tell her. Earlier that day he quit his job at the local radio station after being tasked with writing a show based on a new...
Searching for Tucci: An Appreciation of One of Hollywood’s Most Reliable Supporting Players
|Andrew Neill| I’m in a hotel room in Appleton, Wisconsin, and turn on the TV. It’s on CNN, but instead of some talking head feeding the news cycle, there’s a man I recognize but haven’t seen in a long time. He’s sauntering down a narrow street between ancient, eroding buildings and...
Captain Kirby: Jack Kirby’s Influence on Captain America: The First Avenger and the Entire MCU
|Ben Jarman| Up until his death, Stan Lee showed up in a cameo role for every movie that’s part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Even general audiences loved finding him pop up as a postman or security guard. Appearances like this quickly made Stan Lee a household...
Self-Efface Yourself! The Fragmented Identities in Ōshima’s The Ceremony
|Alex Kies| Lots of interesting things happen at weddings and funerals. It’s a shame to miss any of it. - Ritsuko Although he is a key figure of Japanese New Wave, and his final films were consciously West-facing, Ōshima Nagisa never quite took off in the West like his friend Kurosawa Akira...
Young Boy, Old Soul
|Terry Serres| The 1969 film Boy (Shonen) by Nagisa Ōshima is something of a minor masterpiece, a work that is undeniably moving but still hard to crack, as inscrutable as its young protagonist’s impassive gaze. The boy in question is Toshio Omura, played by Tetsuo Abe...