By Christopher Sharrett. While writing an essay on the post-Vietnam film Rolling Thunder, I thought of William Wyler’s much-applauded 1946 film The Best Years of Our Lives, about three veterans returning at the close of World War II. I revisit this film often, but as much as I appreciate it (I am as moved as [...]
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. “I said no to Hollywood. There you have no freedom to create.” (Bielinsky to Federico Fahsbender) “Film audiences won’t find in [The Aura] an accessible or agreeable story. Also, the film doesn’t show a bit of sympathy or good intentions for any of the characters. I’m talking not only [...]
By Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. “Watch new blood on the eighteen inch screen The corpse is a new personality Watch new blood on the eighteen inch screen The corpse is a new personality.” (Gang of Four, “5:45,” from the album Entertainment! [1979]) Television shows such as I Was Impaled (2012-) and 1000 Ways to Die (2008-) [...]
By Celluloid Liberation Front “The former enemies of North and South are united again in common defence of their Aryan birthright.” (D.W. Griffith in The Birth of a Nation) “A single Negro regiment would have a remarkable effect on Southern nerves… A war of this kind must be conducted on revolutionary lines while the Yankees [...]
By Hampus Hagman. In Iron Man 2 (2010), Tony Stark discovers that his deceased father has left behind coded sketches for a revolutionary new element that could not be realized during his lifetime due to technological limitations. It is up to the son to decode these and use the means at his time’s disposal to [...]
By Christopher Sharrett. I write this comment on Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty more out of a sense of moral obligation and outrage rather than as an evaluation of a serious work. I find nothing at all to recommend this film, so impoverished is it at every political, moral, aesthetic, and philosophical level. I should [...]
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. “Targets are people…and you could be one of them!” (Tagline for Targets) Peter Bogdanovich got his start as a critic and historian, conducting interviews with some of cinema’s most illustrious directors in their twilight years, which were published first in a variety of books and magazines, and finally collected in his [...]
By Christopher Sharrett. I recently happened upon a very good Studio Canal DVD of the John Flynn/Paul Schrader film Rolling Thunder (1977). The film, of some distinction at least as a symptom of profound problems within US ideology in the 70s, has always been to me, in Norman Mailer’s words, a “dark fascination,” and one [...]
By Sarah Myles. The perfect double bill is an elusive, mythical thing. A single entertainment event comprised of two unique artistic expressions. A tradition steeped in social history and Hollywood controversy, the evolution of which has shaped our cinema trips for decades and shapes our home-cinema experiences today. First becoming popular in the 1930s when [...]
By Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. “Consider Your Man Card Reissued” (Print ad for Bushmaster Firearms) I write this as I watch in sadness, surrounded by a bank of televisions at the gym, all conveying images of the “theatre” of war that is now America at Christmas in 2012. The slaying of school children and their teachers [...]