Though I regard Howard Hawks as one of the greatest American filmmakers and have written about the use of amorality or nihilism as a fundamental structuring principle in his comedies, the Hawks film that I might regard as his absolute greatest (on certain days, it’s my favorite) remains a very neglected title: his sublime and… Read more »
Guest post by Jon Vickers. “One of the signs of underdevelopment is an inability to establish links, to gather experience and grow,” states Sergio (Sergio Corrieri), Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s bourgeois intellectual protagonist who idly roams the streets of Havana on his existential odyssey through much of Memories of Underdevelopment (1968). Set in 1961 between the… Read more »
Guest post by Chris Forrester. In The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye, 1996), a lesbian video store clerk seeks out the history of a Black film star from the ’30s as she tries to make a movie of her own. Swoon (Tom Kalin, 1992) retells and relitigates the Leopold and Loeb murder case with a more… Read more »
There are many films which seem to be influenced by Joseph Campbell’s famous book The Hero of a Thousand Faces (first published in 1949), which is about his conception of an archetypal storytelling pattern known as “the hero’s journey.” They include but are not limited to Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (1977), The Lion… Read more »
Guest post by Caleb Allison. The rules and regulations of the Depression-era dance marathon in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? seem simple enough. Rocky (Gig Young), the film’s imperiously duplicitous emcee, runs through them with all the vigor and verve of a carnival barker to open the film. Contestants get a 10-minute break every… Read more »
Guest post by Chris Forrester. “It doesn’t suck,” offers a character at one point in Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls — a tease, or understatement in one way or another, from a film not uncommonly heralded as the worst of all time. In context, it’s a throwaway line of dialogue from the film’s doe-eyed, sharp-witted protagonist; outside… Read more »