Some movies seek to entertain. Others have the gall to make one think. The truly perverse, like those by, say, the Coen Brothers, attempt both at the same time. After watching the Belgian black comedy-mockumentary Man Bites Dog (1992), I cannot shake this (masterfully crafted, in my opinion) three-branch classification system. I can’t tell what the film is up to. I’d heard of the movie before seeing it, almost always summarized in the same way: a documentary film crew follows... Read more
Way back in the early 2010s, when the world was coming to terms with the epidemic of sexual assault on college campuses, Slavoj Žižek told a joke. I wish I could share the clip, but among countless YouTube videos from channels called “I WOULD PREFER NOT TO” and “The Based Bureaucrat,” I have been unable to locate one. Let me relay it from memory in my own voice. “As our understanding of what constitutes assault changes, so will our ways... Read more
Hairspray: Simply Divine What do Ric Ocasek, Debbie Harry, Sonny Bono, and Ricki Lake have in common? Why, they’re all in John Waters’ Hairspray (1987), of course (I tried looking for something a bit cleverer—scavenging through astrological signs and looking over how death and birth months might be loosely tied together—but to no avail). Music, music, music, and talk TV—that about sums up this Baltimore-centered take on early-60s racial integration. Like me, many people might have seen the aughts-era remake... Read more
John Waters’ Cecil B. Demented (2000) asks the tough questions like “what kind of shlock is Hollywood turning out these days” and “can you scorch the roots of starlet to the point that she goes full Batty Hearst” (Patty the batty even appears in the film). As usual, Waters follows a gang of punks and outcasts in Baltimore, though with a(nother) twist. This group wants to make the great American outlaw film—Easy Rider (1969) in the style of G.G. Allin.... Read more
“Mystics” get a bad rap these days. Casting a wide net as I prepared to write my dissertation, I recall checking out a book called something like Marxism and Mysticism, expecting a life-changing mash-up of the material and the spiritual. Instead, it was a book almost entirely about why proletarians don’t get that they’re the subject of history. Fair enough, I suppose. But even more mundane thinking places the “mystical” in the realm of the purely obfuscatory: religious nuts, tarot... Read more
This really ought to be about David Lynch. But I can’t bring myself to give the man short shrift, to jot down a few thoughts to be done with it. More often than not I freely draft these mini reviews as a way to keep my typing fingers limber, creatively speaking anyway. Some weeks I can give them the time they deserve; others, I can do little more than channel a mouthful of air and hope for the best. Lynch... Read more
I had a bad week. I mean a really bad one. This was a Stroczek (1977) kind of week, the kind that separates the boys from the men and definitively and unreservedly placed me on the side of the boys. There was no lesson to the last seven days, no positive one anyway. But, of course, having such a bad time leads, nevertheless, to questions. Questions like: how does one go on? And, most important of all, what movie should... Read more
Great expectations sour easily. And, no matter what John Crowe Ransom would have us believe, we encounter art in history and (most lamentably of all) in particular moods. When a cold waylays me, soup nourishes, but it doesn’t taste the same. When you’re depressed beyond human understanding, Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011) elicits nothing but caustic remarks and other vituperations (don’t ask). In a word, we, like, live in time and space, man. What, then, do I make... Read more
As much as I love Max Shreck’s portrayal of Count Orlok in 1922’s Nosferatu, the “vampire” has long been one man to me (unless Bill Skarsgård changes matters!): Klaus Kinski. Kinski, of course, was Werner Herzog’s greatest frenemy. Their on-set battles were legendary, as was Kinski’s violent personal life. Who else could have played Count Orlok in the German New Wave filmmaker’s Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979)? What makes his performance stand out, however, is not his aggression or rage. Quite... Read more
Why you! Yes, you! What day is today? Unfortunately, not yet Christmas Day, when we can expect both the anniversary of the savior’s birth as well as the release of Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu (2024). Like any cultured moviegoer, I have been lighting my Advent candles, so to speak. In the lead up to the auteur’s newest release, my plan has been to watch as many adaptations of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) as possible. We’ve got Murnau’s 1922 silent classic; there... Read more
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