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Masters of the West: The Updated Canons of the Coen Brothers

Posted on by Ben van Welzen

Frances McDormand holding a gun in Fargo

Frances McDormand in Fargo

Ben van Welzen parses how the Coen Brothers reimagined such genres as the Western and film noir to create their own unique cinematic touchstones.

A snowy Midwestern crime thriller, a comedic bowling neo-noir, a bluegrass musical Odyssey, a greyish New York character piece, an Old Hollywood caper — these are all settings, genres, and cultural touchpoints that filmmaking brothers Ethan and Joel Coen traverse across their catalogue, among many more. Since their breakout neo-noir Blood Simple in 1984, the Coen Brothers have written and directed over a dozen films that navigate the Western canon, constantly drawing from and building upon stories and themes that have shaped our collective attitudes. From Shakespeare and Homer to Bob Dylan and Cormac McCarthy, the Coens condense centuries of thought into a filmography that forces these seemingly disparate figures and their artistic sensibilities to collide, intertwine, and assemble into a body of work that both celebrates the past and challenges audiences to reconcile this past with the modern media landscape.

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The Only Good Bug: Reading Starship Troopers

Posted on by Alex Brannan

Three soldiers in uniform converse

Neil Patrick Harris as Colonel Carl Jenkins, Denise Richards as Carmen Ibanez, and Casper Van Dien as Johnny Rico

Alex Brannan explains how Starship Troopers, both Robert Heinlein’s book and Paul Verhoeven’s film adaptation, operates in a satiric mode that can make it easy to miss its darker implications.

The cover of my copy of Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers declares the novel “the controversial classic of military adventure.” Heinlein won the Hugo Award for the book, as he did with several other works, yet he remains an albatross over the history of science fiction. Ideologically speaking, you could call him slippery, sticky, or simply confusing. Daniel Dickinson, in Modern Fiction Studies, posed the question of Heinlein’s alignment: “Is he some sort of literary chameleon, changing ideas, creeds, mores from work to work as he sees a philosophic New Jerusalem? Alas, this explanation is too neat, and is far, far from correct” (128).

Dickinson argues, as others do, that the founding belief of Heinlein’s philosophy was a libertarian championing of “the individual over the group” (128). Glancing briefly at the world of literary criticism, however, it is clear that Heinlein is not so simple as this. Literary scholar Tom Shippey identifies an often-discussed contradiction in Heinlein’s work. Shippey argues that Heinlein’s writing indicates a “deep respect” for the United States government while also “presenting simultaneously extreme and convincing criticism of the incompetence of democratic government” (279-280).

This contradiction makes reading Heinlein’s fictional political structures a somewhat arduous task. One could read Starship Troopers as a treatise for a primarily militaristic republic organized into an elitist hierarchy. The textual evidence for this is certainly foregrounded. The soldiers are taught a blind allegiance to military rank. Service members are the only citizens who are allowed to vote. On the other hand, the rigidity of these structures is not uncritically presented.

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Monthly Movie Round-Up: May 2025

Posted on by Establishing Shot

Two men aim guns at each other while laying on a wooden floor
A man's face is superimposed over buildings
A delivery person (Charles Jang) in a jacket and baseball cap rides a bike through the middle of a New York City street carrying a takeout food order
Two teenage girls in school uniforms stand beside each other in an office
Close-up of a man's face reflected in a window as he looks at the rain and colored lights outside
A woman stands in the rain with her head snapped back and her hand on her face
The Killer; Loving Vincent; Takeout; Strike; Manhunter; Snake of June

Every month, Establishing Shot brings you a selection of films from our group of regular bloggers. Even though these films aren’t currently being screened at the IU Cinema, this series reflects the varied programming that can be found at the Cinema and demonstrates the eclectic tastes of the bloggers. Each contributor has picked one film that they saw this month that they couldn’t wait to share with others. Keep reading to find out what discoveries these cinephiles have made, as well as some of the old friends they’ve revisited.

Alex Brannan, contributor | Take Out (2004)

In light of Anora winning the Academy Award for Best Picture earlier this year, Shih-Ching Tsou’s solo directorial debut (Left-Handed Girl) recently premiering in Critics’ Week at Cannes, and the Cinema showcasing indie auteurs this summer, I sought out Baker and Tsou’s Take Out (2004).

Take Out centers on Ming Ding (Charles Jang), an undocumented immigrant living in New York City who is hard-pressed to repay a steep debt. The film opens with a scene that could come out of a gangster movie. Two heavies bust into an apartment cramped with tenants. They violently throw open doors and strip sheets off beds looking for Ming. Ming is informed he has one day to pay back his debt to a local loan shark. In truth, the film couldn’t be farther from the gritty crime drama this opening scene suggests. Take Out is a character drama shot and structured in the vein of neorealism. As we follow Ming through his workday — working a delivery job that we are acutely aware will not earn him enough to cover his debt — the film reveals more about the financial struggle of him and his family. The big city swallows him whole without a second thought, abandoning him to his own devices and shattering the illusion of the American Dream in the process. The camera, meanwhile, is deployed in a handheld vérité style that is queasily cramped within tight apartment walkups and the bustling kitchen of the restaurant at which Ming works. Shots hover awkwardly close to other characters, as if the viewer is simply another worker shouldering their way past people to get to the fryer.

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“Off We Go!”: Why Run Lola Run (1998) is One of the Most Energetic Movies Ever Made

Posted on by Jesse Pasternack

A woman with bright red hair screams

Franka Potente as the titular character in Run Lola Run

Jesse Pasternack explains how the indie classic’s non-stop propulsion is achieved through its music, editing, and more.

Run Lola Run (1998) is one of the most energetic movies ever made. Everything about it, from its narrative to its editing and even its music, combines to create a cinematic experience that will get your blood pumping. 

The movie takes place in Berlin and follows Lola (Franka Potente), a young woman who has a boyfriend named Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu). One day, Manni calls her and tells her that he lost a package he was supposed to deliver for a crime boss named Ronnie (Heino Ferch). If Manni can’t give Ronnie 100,000 marks when they meet up in 20 minutes, Ronnie will kill him. The passionate Lola immediately sets off on a series of adventures to save Manni’s life.

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“Would You Kill For Me?”: Aesthetics of Sensuality in Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight and Black Bag

Posted on by Alex Brannan

The theatrical release poster for the film Out of Sight, featuring George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez.

Poster for Out of Sight (1998)

Alex Brannan, one of our newest regular contributors, considers how Steven Soderbergh uses genre elements to create the eroticism of Out of Sight and this year’s Black Bag.

Steven Soderbergh is a director whose long career has involved a fascinating migration across genre boundaries. From a certain angle, his career is defined by a canny ability to experiment with genre characteristics such that the familiar appears exciting. Soderbergh established himself with his 1989 debut film Sex, Lies, and Videotape, a formative “indie blockbuster” that set the tone for a lucrative and rapidly shifting American independent cinema in the 1990s (Perren, 16-17).

Perhaps most well-known for his Ocean’s trilogy of heist films, Soderbergh’s films have intersected with many genres: legal drama (Erin Brockovich), science-fiction (Solaris), dark comedy farce (The Informant), sports drama (High Flying Bird), biopic (Che and Behind the Candelabra), psychological thriller (Side Effects and Unsane), horror (Presence), neo-noir (The Good German and Out of Sight), and various crime films. None of these films are as simple as these genre signifiers imply, though. To call Out of Sight a neo-noir and leave it at that puts an incorrect picture of the film in a potential viewer’s mind, and it also drastically undersells what Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Frank are doing. Genre hybridity in Hollywood film may be nothing new — Janet Staiger argues that the Hollywood film has never been “pure” in terms of genre categorization (6). But Soderbergh’s ability to fuse genres into engines of entertainment is of particular note.

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Killing the Future: The Formal Rule-Breaking of The Last Jedi and Its Vitriolic Reception

Posted on by Ben van Welzen

Rey and Luke in The Last Jedi

Rey and Luke in The Last Jedi

Critically acclaimed yet divisive amongst fans, Rian Johnson’s Star Wars sequel has had a lasting effect on the franchise, as explained by Ben van Welzen, one of our newest regular contributors.

“Let the past die. Kill it if you have to.” These words, spoken by antagonist Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) in Star Wars Episode VII: The Last Jedi, were ubiquitous in the criticism and analysis of the film upon its release in 2017. Correctly citing it as writer/director Rian Johnson’s thesis when creating the film, detractors have used it to bash Johnson’s callous approach to a beloved franchise while admirers have used it to praise the fresh voice and new life he brought to the seventh film in a 40-year-old series. In the eight years since the film’s release, every new piece of Star Wars or Rian Johnson content reopens the court of public opinion and reignites the debate on whether The Last Jedi demolished the franchise’s past, present, and future, or if it was the fruitless attempt of a loving fan to send the canon in a new direction. Though this debate will never resolve, the intense outrage has left its mark not only on Star Wars media, but on Disney and big-budget blockbuster franchise film on the whole. After overwhelming negativity, the creative team course-corrected for the final entry in the trilogy and in the years that followed, effectively reserving a seat for the mass public in the writers’ room from then on.

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