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Spoiler Alert
Here’s what happens when Hollywood makes a really bad movie out of your novel. You cringe, you pretend you don’t care, you laugh when they play the bad movie’s theme song at weddings you attend, and...
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“The House We Live In”: Elizabeth Bishop on the Big Screen
When I first traveled to Rio de Janeiro to research all things Elizabeth Bishop, in 2002, I did not understand how or why everyone—from university professors to taxi drivers, artisans, artists, and...
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Hell on Wheels
During one of the most lucrative Thanksgiving weekends in Hollywood history, moviegoers hooked on the Hunger Games franchise once again embraced the vision of a populace preoccupied by blood sports....
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Silver Belles
When you think about it, there are not many Christmas-movie heroines. But then, nobody ever put Barbara Stanwyck in a corner—and with Christmas in Connecticut’s Elizabeth Lane, she gave us a character...
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Masterpiece Theatre: Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning
All this week, we are bringing you some of your favorite posts from 2013. Happy holidays! My favorite movie of last year—the best movie of last year, I would argue—wasn’t nominated for any Academy...
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Tearjerkers
Still from Cinema Paradiso, 1989 Looking at this year’s Best Picture nominees, I realized that while I had liked three, nine out of nine had made me tear up—including The Wolf of Wall Street. Fellow...
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Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head
A still from Noah. Animals, ark not pictured. Early in Darren Aronofsky’s new movie, Noah, the title character, played by Russell Crowe, comes across an antediluvian beastie, a cross between a dog and...
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The Dadliest Decade
Why were the nineties so preoccupied with fatherhood? Robin Williams as Peter Banning in Hook, 1991 Some decades are summed up easily, the accretion of cliché and cultural narrative having reached such...
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Snapping, Humming, Buzzing, Banging: Remembering Alan Splet
Millions of Americans heard the name Alan Splet (1940–1994) for the first time as a punch line on television. The occasion was the 1980 Academy Awards, where his sound design the previous year, on...
View ArticleStill Slacking After All These Years
Everyone’s talking about Richard Linklater’s Boyhood at the moment—as well they should; it’s a remarkable film—but in honor of the director’s birthday, you should revisit his first feature, Slacker,...
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Sartre and Borges on Welles
Theatrical release poster, 1941 In a sense, that poster doesn’t lie: everyone was talking about Citizen Kane. In another, more accurate sense, that poster does lie: not everyone was joining in that...
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Lost in Translation
Why has Italian cinema lost its appeal abroad? A still from La grande bellezza, 2013. It must be the Ponentino—the wind from the sea—blowing through the baroque gardens, or the scent of the Roman pines...
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Made in Hollywood
Budd Schulberg’s centennial. Budd Schulberg (center) at the Watts Writers’ Workshop, ca. 1965. “My problem,” novelist and screenwriter Budd Schulberg told Kurt Vonnegut at the close of a 2001 interview...
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HAL, Mother, and Father
Watching the sixties and seventies through 2001 and Alien. From 2001: A Space Odyssey It was April 1968 and my father was sitting in a theater in Times Square watching 2001: A Space Odyssey, certain...
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The Way the World Ends
Being the last man on Earth. From In the Mouth of Madness, 1981. On a recent Sunday evening, trying to relax, I turned on the television and saw an ad for a new comedy series called The Last Man on...
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Dismembrance of the Thing’s Past
Running dog-Thing. The Thing scampers across the Antarctic tundra in a dog suit. A Norwegian helicopter gives chase with bad aim and incendiaries. It’s in humanity’s best interest to kill the dog...
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Houellebecq’s Been Kidnapped—Good for Him!
From The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq. In 2011, when Michel Houellebecq failed to show up for a book tour in the Netherlands, his three-day absence fueled ridiculous rumors: Had he disappeared? Was...
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Drunk in Love
Sixty-four years later, The Tales of Hoffmann continues to delight and perplex. A still from The Tales of Hoffmann. Lovers of the recherché have flocked to see Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s...
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The Death of The Dying Swan
Ballet at the movies. A still from The Dying Swan, 1917. In the 1980s, Hellman’s launched an extensive campaign to rebrand its mayonnaise products as health conscious. Between shots of garishly pink...
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Special Effects
Sharia law goes to the movies. From a District 9 poster, 2009. In 2009, halfway through my second deployment as an infantryman in Iraq, I was made company armorer. Instead of spending days in the...
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