By Christopher Sharrett. Hopper’s is a surprisingly radical statement for a filmmaker known for his very inconsistent political thinking.” What to say about Dennis Hopper? In his day he could be a pain in the neck, publicly brandishing his neuroses, failures, and addictions – in the new Severin edition of […]
A Magnetic Mystery: David Lynch’s Lost Highway
By Jeremy Carr. Lynch at his storytelling best.” David Lynch can tell a pretty standard story when he wants to. While films like The Elephant Man (1980), Blue Velvet (1986), and The Straight Story (1999) surely have their moments of classically “Lynchian” eccentricity, their fundamental plots unfold along relatively orthodox […]
A Growing Influence – Hollywood in China: Behind the Scenes of the World’s Largest Movie Market
A Book Review Essay by Dina Iordanova. Author Ying Zhu reflects the changing fortunes of Hollywood in China and shows clearly that Chinese film culture can exist both with and without Hollywood.” In the fall of 2016 l had a two-month long stint as visiting professor at the Beijing Film […]
Sacheen Littlefeather, American Hero
By Gary D. Rhodes. Some on planet earth were ready to hear Littlefeather. Too many in Hollywood were not, alas, thus tarnishing the tinsel in Tinseltown.” Sacheen Littlefeather, the civil rights activist and actor booed by many attendees at the 1973 Academy Awards, has passed away at the age of 75. […]
We Can’t Go Home Again: Kevin Smith’s Clerks III
By James Slaymaker. The quality of Clerks III hardly matters. It is, by all conventional standards of critical assessment, a fiasco – a dramatically inert, visually flat, poorly paced mess from start to finish. Yet, for those of us susceptible to Smith’s charms, the handmade, ‘let’s put on a show’ […]
For Jean-Luc Godard: 1930-2022
By Christopher Sharrett. One of the great innovators of the cinema…the supreme artist and intellectual engaged with his era.” When I first encountered Godard decades ago, I thought he might be better off writing essays rather than making films, since he seemed interested in making philosophical points about the image […]
Triggered: The Post-Traumatic Woman and Narratology in HBO’s Westworld
By Keith Clavin and Christopher La Casse. As the show develops, we come to learn that some of the hosts are not ‘forgetting’ the traumas inflicted upon them…. Despite a wipe of their memory caches regarding prior ‘narratives’ (earlier roles they played in the park’s performances), they seem to be […]
Between Compliance and Resistance: Mapping the Careers of Wallace Fox and Nipo Strongheart in Early Hollywood
By Andrew H. Fisher. Taken together, their careers allows us to see Hollywood Indians as agents of film history, rather than merely as objects of the cinematic gaze.” During the early decades of the twentieth century, Hollywood seemed to be full of chiefs but not enough Indians. Thanks to the […]
Katabasis and News of the World
By Ken Hall. The journey undertaken by Captain Kidd (Tom Hanks)…through Texas causes him to pass through ‘alien territory’ in a double sense. He is not closely acquainted with some of the locales which he encounters nor with the routes to those locales. Perhaps more important is the underlying strangeness of the […]
The Rules of the Game: Laura Wandel’s Playground
By Christopher Sharrett. Wandel has us pondering a crucial concern: is education predicated on patriarchal-capitalist ideology, as would seem most obvious, or do we confront, at this level of human development, some inherent savagery in the species (a problem with ‘human nature’)?” I was very happy to read on this […]