Based on a True Story: Hitchcock Between Reality and Subjectivity
|Malcolm Cooke| At the start of The Wrong Man, a darkly silhouetted Alfred Hitchcock declares this film is different from all the ones he has made before: this story is true, and he intends to tell it with clinical accuracy. Hitchcock takes this task seriously, so seriously in fact that critic...
Scoring the Past, Playing in the Present: A Tradition Continues with The Poor Nobodys & Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger at The Heights Theater
|Chris Polley| This was how it all began, really—music that’s performed, visuals that are projected, and never a word is uttered. Dating back to the first public presentation of the works of the Lumière brothers in Paris back in 1895, musical accompaniment to a film exhibition was performed...
The Rip Van Winkle-Level Sleeper
|Hannah Baxter| How does a movie end up in front of theater audiences? Best case scenario: it’s the product of a major studio, with big stars, a respected director, and/or superheroes. The studio will likely handle distribution and marketing; if not, distributors will pay handsomely
Back to the Future: Michael Roemer’s Nothing but a Man
|Nazeeh Alghazawneh| The idea of someone “being ahead of their time,” whether it be an artist, an author, an activist etc., is kind of paradoxical. The phrase implies that broad social, philosophical or political landscapes will change inevitably, develop autonomously, independently of...
I Feel You, Man: Ridley Scott’s The Duellists
|MH Rowe| Of course we’re supposed to condescend to the idea of a duel. To imagine two people—two men—agreeing to mortal combat with guns or swords over a breach of honor strikes the contemporary and perhaps cynical observer as so fussily absurd, so absurdly dramatic, and so male, that we...
Harvey, the Haughty Hussar
|Alex Kies| In 1977, two years after Stanley Kubrick released Barry Lyndon, Ridley Scott made his filmmaking debut with The Duelists, his own artfully shot Napoleonic epic about the inner lives of petty European men played by incongruously cast Americans. Last year, Scott made...
A Whine and a Whimper: The Death of Law Enforcement’s Lionization in James Mangold’s Cop Land
|Chris Polley| There’s a certain built-in legacy in the alliterative phrase “corrupt cop” that belies its own linguistic paradox (or, perhaps, even its redundancy). The rogue detective, the rule-breaking sheriff, and the trigger-happy officer: even before modern American history...
The Museum of Home Video’s Ring, Ring: a Doorbell Cam Fantasia is Coming to Town! Some Context on Bret Berg’s MOHV from a Fellow Los Angeleno Who Witnessed its Inception
|Penny Folger| The Museum of Home Video is an online streaming show that took flight during the pandemic and seems to have created an empire. Started by Los Angeleno film programmer/distributor Brett Berg, it takes place at museumofhomevideo.com at 7:30 pm PST most Tuesday evenings. Since its inception in July...
Why Black Narcissus is a Haunted House Movie
|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...
Bad Lieutenant: Make Perfect My Imperfections
|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...
Your Forgiveness Will Leave Blood in its Wake
|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...
Make It So: A Journey in Overthinking ‘A Matter of Life and Death’
|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...
This is What Happens When We Give Women Wuthering Heights
|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, ...
Devil in a New Dress
|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...
The Attraction of the Pedaling Ankle: The Body as the Voice in The Piano
|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,” ...
Remaking Breathless: A Bizarre Choice, Starring Richard Gere
|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...
I Want All the Bisexuals To Know: If I Can Edit a Film Blog, You Can Too
|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...
Lost in the Dream
|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...
Mockumentaries peaked with “Real Life”
|Matt Lambert| I used to think the death of culture was Aretha Franklin songs played in Applebee's' commercials to sell cheap chicken wings and obscenely sauced slabs of ribs. I now know that the death of culture was when Albert Brooks stopped making movies...
What Is Beach Blanket Bingo?
|Courtney Kowalke| Beach Blanket Bingo (1965) is on my list of movies I want to watch before I die. It’s on page two, between Splendor in the Grass (1961) and Avanti (1972). I do not remember why I put Beach Blanket Bingo on my list, but it’s there and has been...
Sandra Dee’s Gidget Traipses Through Sexual Politics and a Troubled World
|Penny Folger| Gidget. What springs to mind for people when they hear this name, that is, if in 2024 they still know the reference? The beach? Actors surfing in front of a green screen? Maybe Sally Field? Gidget, from 1959 as directed by Paul Wendkos and starring Sandra Dee...
An Insolent Heart Hath Damned Thee: Original Sin at Miller’s Crossing
|Kevin Obsatz| I have a confession to make. I don’t know that I’ve ever “liked” a Coen Brothers movie on the first viewing. Possibly Raising Arizona—but I was probably only half paying attention to that one, as an eight or nine-year-old, on VHS. I doubt my parents would...
Uneasy Lies the Head that Wears the Hat
|Lucas Hardwick| I’m a bald guy, so when the temperatures drop and there's a perpetual nip in the air, I often find the top of my head gets a little uncomfortably cool. While confined to the contentment of my own home, where the dress code is free of the hassle of coordination and everyone is at liberty...
Paranoia, Failure, and Female Representation: Brian De Palma’s Blow Out
|Penny Folger| “There was no bigger disaster than Blow Out,” reminisces director Brian De Palma on the reception his film received when it was originally released in 1981. It’s a film that, 43 years later, is held in much higher esteem, even cited by Quentin Tarantino as...