|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… Continue reading
|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… Continue reading
|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… Continue reading
|Nicole Rojas-Oltmanns| Even though Wesley Snipes, John Leguizamo, and Patrick Swayze are all cishet men playing gay drag queens, I actually love To Wong Foo (1995, directed by Beeban Kidron). The drag is really fantastically done. Also, there is small-town drama, RuPaul… Continue reading
| 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… Continue reading
|Andrew Neill| Let’s get a potentially uncool but nonetheless true thing about me out of the way right now: I am a huge fan of the American film director Wesley Wales Anderson. You probably know him as Wes Anderson. He’s one of my favorite directors—gotta be in the top three… Continue reading
|Dan Howard| In this day in age, television is just as common and almost essential to our daily lives as food or nature. Sometimes, it feels like it’s just always been around, but in fact, the first concept of what would ultimately become television, Facsimile Transmissions, was introduced… Continue reading
|Brogan Earney| By the early 2000s, the teen comedy genre was at the height of its powers. Movies like She’s All That, 10 Things I Hate About You, Clueless and many more, were pumped out monthly and guaranteed to bring box office success. Eventually, they became… Continue reading
|Doug Carmody| Bong Joon-ho’s The Host opens to scenes of tension and tragedy. First, in a politically overt sequence, an American doctor forces a Korean doctor to dump formaldehyde… Continue reading
|Jake Rudegeair| “Coming of age” always struck me as a flat phrase for something so bumpy, so relentless. It doesn’t really illustrate that slow erosion of our bodies and souls as we’re worn down by the slings and arrows of experience, cruelly and carelessly reformed over and over… Continue reading
