By Jonathan Monovich. Chips away at complex meaning and eventually strikes it, despite the occasional distracting surrealism.” Country Gold begins in a reverse Wizard of Oz fashion, transitioning from color to black-and-white. The story starts with Troyal Brux (Mickey Reece), a playful take on Garth Brooks, professing his idolization of […]
Approaching the Unknowable “Others” – Comic Drunks, Crazy Cults, and Lovable Monsters: Bad Behavior on American Television
A Book Review by M. Sellers Johnson. While Diffrient advances contemporary television scholarship…readers will also find this book to be light, entertaining, and likely relatable to modern TV consumers’ apparent affinity for dubious moral ethics.” Within our televised small screens and the world they inhabit, bad behavior persists in social […]
Low Cost, High Reward – Blumhouse Productions: The New House of Horror
A Book Review by Thomas M. Puhr. It’s this nebulous balancing act between artistic risk and bottom-line business that makes such companies so fascinating, and books like this one so illuminating.” Not a week seems to go by without a new horror movie bearing the Blumhouse logo making the rounds, […]
Music to Film Streaming: An Interview with Carl Chery on the Hulu Docuseries RapCaviar Presents
By Jonathan Monovich. A lot of times you see shows that reference hip-hop, and it doesn’t feel like it’s made by people that live/breathe it. That was what I was thinking about during the making of RapCaviar Presents and was something that was constantly top of mind. We set out […]
Don’t Let It Drain – Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game
By Matthew Sorrento. Just what the pinball tribe needs, and offers a whole lot for feel-good indie fans, too.” This new release, aptly titled Pinball, celebrates the game, its ignored legacy, along with an important page in its history. Those (mostly older) who sing the famous hit from Tommy do […]
The Lost Burlesque Auteur: The Films of Lillian Hunt
By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. What remains so striking about Hunt’s films is how openly both they and their supporting promotional material clearly sought to appeal to a female audience, well beyond the cliché of the porn-consuming scopophilic male.” While American burlesque cinema flourished in popularity during in the 1940s and 1950s, […]
Borzage in the Beginning: 1922’s Back Pay and The Valley of Silent Men
By Jeremy Carr. Two 1922 Borzage features are now available on Blu-ray/DVD, thanks to the laudable efforts of Undercrank Productions and the Library of Congress.” The arrival of any Frank Borzage film on DVD or Blu-ray is a noteworthy occasion. But when there are two packaged together and they are […]
Tyranny and the Canon: Problems in Todd Field’s Tár
By Christopher Sharrett. As a way of addressing woke culture, it has precious little to say, especially as it irresponsibly conflates the culture with sexual predation, a glaringly different matter, unless the film is aimed at those with grievances about women having too much power…. There is so little music […]
Bargaining with the Devil: Bill Skarsgard and Landon Liboiron’s Soul of a Man
By Dávid Szőke. Eerily beautiful in recapturing the early Gothic film.” Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “Bon-Bon” (1832) is a grotesque retelling of man’s futile endeavor to tempt immortality by making a Faustian contract with the devil. Set in a French wine cellar, the original story pulls the reader into […]
Sonic Violence: Cinematic Rape, Sound, and the Body in Lipstick (Lamont Johnson, 1976)
By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas. Lipstick stands as a largely underrated film when it comes to the often complex representation of the male rapist in fictional film. Sound often plays second fiddle to the supremacy of the visual in cinema… yet as this example indicates, it can play a significant part in […]