This article was written as a response to a number of people I know who didn’t see much anything worthwhile in the film in question. I liked it a whole bunch, and basically just wanted to state, as cogently as I could muster, why. Any feedback, dissenting or otherwise, would be wonderful.

In Clint Eastwood’s pivotal Boston-noir piece Mystic River (2003), Tim Robbins plays a broken man named Dave who was, as a young boy, abducted, abused and raped by a couple of pedophiles. In the wake of the murder of his childhood friend’s daughter, Dave’s long-fragile psyche begins a tragic descent into complete psychosis, and after his wife arrives home late one night to find him watching “some vampire movie” in a despondent slump, he makes the following desperate and disjointed attempt to explain things to her:

Know what I was thinking about? Vampires… [t]hey’re un-dead, but I think maybe there’s something beautiful about it. Maybe one day you wake up and you forget what it’s like to be human. Maybe then it’s okay… They [the kidnappers] were wolves, and Dave was the boy who escaped from wolves… They took me on a four-day ride. They buried me in this ratty old cellar with a sleeping bag. And man, Celeste, did they have their fun… Dave’s dead. I don’t know who came out of that cellar, but it sure as shit wasn’t Dave. You see, honey… it’s like vampires. Once it’s in you, it stays.

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Hilltop Hoods have matured something shocking. It began in 2006 with The Hard Road, an album that underscored the standard Hilltop hedonism with genuine ideological passions, and this was stylistically emphasised the following year, when the group rereleased the album with remixed symphonic orchestral backing. Their ambition, however, is only crystallized with 2009’s State of the Art, which is a record altogether more comfortable with its own seriousness than The Hard Road is, and yet a good deal more serious than A Matter of Time or The Calling. State of the Art feels like the real deal, where the prior four releases were varyingly insufficient drafts (no pun intended, although it’s worth noting that the album, particularly “Last Confession”, is very Drapht-esque).

The work of Woody Allen reveals perhaps some of the most instinctively recognized preoccupations and consistent attitudes of contemporary screenwriting. In all of his most celebrated and well-known films (Annie Hall {1977}, Manhattan {1979}, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask {1972}, Match Point {2005}) there exists innate cursors of the screenwriter’s opinions and attitude towards his craft that will, in this essay, be evidenced not just by the films themselves but by Allen’s own remarks, as made in Eric Lax’s Conversations with Woody Allen: His films, the movies, and moviemaking. Not only this, but through discussion of the three of the four films mentioned, as well as Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), common story patterns, character types and treatment of themes will be explored, as they pertain to Allen’s writing and the aforementioned opinions he holds. Read the rest of this entry »

The cinematic phenomenon that would retroactively be known as film noir began in a world without television. This fact has several bearings on the issue of discussion, but the main focus of this essay will be to show how this film cycle, its traditions and its sentiments, has integrated itself not only into a world with television, but into television itself. As television programming has moved steadily toward an easier, cheaper and more accessible form of entertainment than the movies, many televisual genres have been born, from the classic soap opera (The Bold and the Beautiful, Dallas) to quirky drama-comedy (M*A*S*H, Northern Exposure) to simple horror shows (The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits). The questions before us are, what of television noir, how has it happened, and does it succeed? Read the rest of this entry »

Wonderbread is currently experiencing a shortage of regular material, due to the overwhelming academic responsibilities that must claim all university students in the middle and end of every year. Rest assured, within a few weeks, these responsibilities will be fulfilled and there will be a surplus of subsequent material to post, including pieces on Georges Melies, Fritz Lang and Orson Welles. I, for one, can’t think of anything more exciting.

I was having a bed-time gander through Chris Turner’s Planet Simpson the other night, and I came across his chapter on Bart as Punk Icon. Turner’s observations are astute, and more than valid (his basic contention is that Bart Simpson rekindled for the West a sense of jubuliant individualism and anarchy that had most notably been achieved in the past by the likes of Joey Ramone and Johnny Rotten), but reading his argument, I came across the quote that both spawned the conception of this jotting and gave it its title. I found the idea interesting, so I thought I’d write it down real quick, float it, see what people make of it. Read the rest of this entry »

Neo-noir, its pitfalls and its triumphs in Rian Johnson's "Brick"

American cinema has been going to darker and darker places with the high school institution since the nineteen eighties tried to pass it off as a funland of pretty people and carefree antics. John Duigan’s Flirting (1991) wanted to give the trope of high school romance the proper tragic angle of which Shakespeare found it so deserving. Todd Solondz’ Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995) introduced a genuine savagery to the picture that had not really been seen outside of horror films (Brian De Palma’s Carrie trumps all cards in this regard). The Virgin Suicides (2000) upped the ante considerably by portraying High School and the years of adolescence as an oppressive Hell. However, it took until 2005 and an under-experienced independent filmmaker named Rian Johnson for high school to finally undergo marriage to that cinematic pinnacle of bleakness and despair that exploded onto Hollywood in the forties. Brick, the film in question, is exactly what people say it is: a teen film noir.

The film tells the dirty story of Californian teenagers who seem to exist adrift in a sea of guideless tension, completely void of adult involvement or assistance, hardened and wise to even the most vile acts of human nature. Johnson is not pulling any punches with this premise – his kids are all very real, damaged and dangerous people, some of them capable of murder, and one of them (loner anti-hero Joseph Gordon Levitt) capable of intense psychological warfare, the stakes of which are simply deadly. Read the rest of this entry »

Something's after something in the children

Note: All quotes from A Nightmare on Elm Street or its DVD commentary refer to New Line Entertainment’s 2007 2-disc release of the film.

Of every social and sexual terror that has ever gotten under the skin of Western civilization, the ones that disturb most deeply are indisputably those that involve children. There is something about children that society deems untouchable, in a range of ways. We firmly believe that they live in another world, an alien but safe world, and that all matters adult are forbidden there. When these lines are blurred, base fears are released inside of us. Violence and sexuality become fundamentally worse when children are involved, fundamentally reprehensible.

Although these are protective tendencies, there’s no denying that this separation has resulted in a mild fear of children as well. They are the final and most extreme of all Robin Wood’s examples of The Other, a completely alien creature whose psyche we are vaguely amazed that we ever shared. Because of this, Horror films had begun to integrate children into their canon of Others as early, I suppose, as Rosemary’s Baby (Polanski, 1968 ), although The Omen (Donner, 1976) and Halloween (Carpenter, 1978 ) are better examples. It wasn’t until a certain Wes Craven made his mark on the cycle in the mid eighties that the concept of children in Horror was quite masterfully inversed. In A Nightmare on Elm Street (Craven, 1984) the children are not the monster; they are the victims, and the monster is ours. Read the rest of this entry »

Steven Weber looking ready to steal Christmas

The Shining is, at its core, a story about “human monsters”. The phrase is used more than once in King’s novel and deserves its place as a pivotal concept to his story because it is not a horror fable with social subtext, but one about social horrors with a supernatural backdrop. To those who are only familiar with Kubrick’s version, a brilliant film but poor adaptation, one very fundamental difference between the two should be addressed. In King’s vision, Jack Torrance is not The Madman in a Horror Film. He is a damaged, alcoholic, unfulfilled writer with a history of anger management, one who tries with all his might to be a good man and fails. The Shining is his story, and it’s a tragedy. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s something endlessly captivating about Anthony Perkins’ performance as Norman Bates, cinema’s seminal psychopath. His boyish goofiness is part of it. His tragic schism from the reality of his mother’s death is another. But I don’t think it’s completely out of left field (nor, I imagine, was it completely out of Robert Bloch’s mind when he created the character) to purport that the most darkly fascinating thing about Norman Bates is his ostensible normalcy. When detective Arbogast firsts encounters Norman, in the scene on which I’d like to focus, he is relaxedly reading on a porch chair, munching from a bag of candy. He is soft-spoken but friendly, conversational but uncontroversial, open-faced but un-foolish. Even his name, one letter away from being the word itself, is blandly normal. Read the rest of this entry »