This review first appeared on Fourth & Sycamore. No other filmmaker has ever better understood and better captured the experience of being a teenager in America than John… Read more “Don’t You Forget: A Review of Kirk Honeycutt’s John Hughes: A Life in Film”
Tag: Classic Film
Camp and Circumstance: The Problematic Wonder of The Lost World and King Kong
This essay first appeared on Fourth & Sycamore. Adventure is the name of the game for the first matinee double feature hosted by the Third Floor… Read more “Camp and Circumstance: The Problematic Wonder of The Lost World and King Kong”
Beat Up Men, Beat Up Machines: Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974)
Sam Peckinpah’s underappreciated 1974 classic Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is as ’70s as a movie gets. It’s dirty, grimy, sleazy, violent, and pessimistic, and… Read more “Beat Up Men, Beat Up Machines: Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974)”
To Be Good Is Not Enough: Falling Short of Genius in Five Easy Pieces
This essay was first published on Fourth & Sycamore. So far in our Third Floor Film Series we’ve watched Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film Vertigo, the groundbreaking… Read more “To Be Good Is Not Enough: Falling Short of Genius in Five Easy Pieces”
Fear, Fallout, and Fifty Foot Women
I wrote the following brief intro to the deeper themes in horror films about a year ago. I was going to be starting a series on the… Read more “Fear, Fallout, and Fifty Foot Women”
The Conversation, The Lives of Others, and Staring Inappropriately as Vocation
Being a writer means spending one’s life transgressing a rule we all learn as preschoolers: it’s not polite to stare. There is nothing at all polite about… Read more “The Conversation, The Lives of Others, and Staring Inappropriately as Vocation”
A Review Marilyn Monroe Day by Day: A Timeline of People, Places, and Events by Carl Rollyson
This review was first published on Fourth & Sycamore. Over half a century after her untimely death at age thirty-six Marilyn Monroe still captivates screen audiences… Read more “A Review Marilyn Monroe Day by Day: A Timeline of People, Places, and Events by Carl Rollyson”
Top 10 Films of the 1960s
This piece first appeared almost a year ago on the now defunct web journal The Samizdat. I realized in rereading it to post here that it omits… Read more “Top 10 Films of the 1960s”
Single-Car Runaway Trains: Broken Lives in A Streetcar Named Desire
This essay first appeared on Fourth & Sycamore. There is not a single emotionally healthy adult to be found in Elia Kazan’s steamy 1951 hothouse drama A… Read more “Single-Car Runaway Trains: Broken Lives in A Streetcar Named Desire”
Zabriskie Point (1970)
Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1970 film Zabriskie Point was a dismal failure both financially and critically. The second of three English language films the Italian master of existential languish… Read more “Zabriskie Point (1970)”
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