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 […]
The Shining 2.0 or: How New Media Changed Film Analysis
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 […]
Zero Dark Thirty: Embarrassed No More
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, […]
The Future Catches Up With The Past: Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets
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, […]
Rolling Thunder and the Poverty of the Vietnam Cinema
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, […]
The Philosophy of the Double Bill (Or, How To Stop Worrying and Love Technology)
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 […]
Fifties Hysteria Returns: Doomsday Prepping in a Culture of Fear, Death, and Automatic Weapons
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 […]
Surrealism and Sudden Death in the Films of Lucio Fulci
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Dedicated to the memory of Rick Lopez. The films of Lucio Fulci, the Italian horror filmmaker, are usually lumped in with those of other ‘gore’ specialists, but it seems to me that this is just one component of Fulci’s work. Running through all his films is […]
2012: The Apocalypse That Never Happened
By Anna Carius. It seems that the Mayans got it wrong. The end of the human civilization, portrayed with such gusto by Roland Emmerich in 2012 (2009), did not happen after all. So if you looked forward to “finding out the truth” and experience that “the end is just the […]
9 Day Hobbit: An Exploration of Cinematic Time
By Diarmuid Corkery. Well before Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of The Hobbit was released, it had already caused controversy among tentative fans due to two disclosed revelations. The first is a decision taken by the director to divide J.R.R. Tolkien’s book into three back-to-back epics. Considering the text itself is […]