Reaction Shots

  I was not predisposed to like this film. I am a huge fan of the source material, Carlos Fuentes’ novella “Aura” and I made the mistake of reading reviews that were less than appreciative. To be sure, there are of necessity, differences in the authorial voices. The plot is easily recounted: Sergio Logan, scholar/lady’s man, is led to accept a position for Consuelo, a wealthy widow, to bring order to her late husband’s library and ready his memoirs for publication. Our scholar demurs and is ready to brush off the old lady, until he meets her daughter Aura. In short order, things get weird. Sergio’s predecessor, Fabrizio, appears on the scene, our scholar is possessed of jealousy and after a while – days – he accidentally kills the librarian. Mother and daughter impress on the scholar to dispose of the body and blackmail him into staying. Beyond this point, it becomes clear that the daughter is not the old woman’s daughter, but an emanation of the old woman’s will, conjured by s...

  Before we get too far along down this road, I want to reflect on some elements of horror film as a genre and some of the ramifications of those elements. Critical theory and textual analysis in the service of reviewing pop culture seems to strike people as overkill. “It’s just a movie!” Sure, but by dismissing out of hand the work of dozens (if not, thousands) and the investments, costs, and returns of a collaborative work of any magnitude reveals more about the dismissal than the work itself. It also speaks to how little attention we pay to the very pop culture we consume on a regular basis, from movies to sport to music. I didn’t apply any great amount of analysis to “Mad Love” simply because, despite its being a study in psychological deterioration and rife with some pretty interesting examples of deviance and queer theory, it has at its heart, that most indefinable element: fun. Seriously. “Fun” may not be the first word that comes to mind when we think of “horror”, b...

                                            It has become an annual tradition of mine to plunder the treasure stores of films that are, more or less, loosely or strictly, categorized under the rubric of “horror”. The definition is probably looser than some would like, but the baseline is some degree of unease, the macabre, and seasoned optionally with a monster type critter. My pal Tim Kozlowski draws a line at films like “Silence of the Lambs” which does wind up on horror film lists, and which I actually do understand, but I’m not sure I can fully support, either. I’m not sure if it’s because it’s not preposterous enough, too damned good a film (not that there aren’t great, genre-transcending examples), or too multivalent that it can’t be simply stuffed into the “horror film” box. That said, I would be more inclined to assign the Ridley Scott sequel “Hannibal” to the che...

I've spent the better part of the hour watching Lynch's short works, some I've seen, some not; but one of them is " Scissors " and I've got to single it out because it's one of those pieces of his that hits some emotional place of anguish and beauty (in me, anyway) that some of the more intense points in his feature work do. I have in mind the fever points in Blue Velvet when Jeffrey and Sandy start to unravel before the enormity of Frank Booth's crimes. Both of them just kind of go to pieces - I'd say out of nowhere, but there was a constellation of evil that brought them to this moment. It is utter trauma, but MacLachlan and Dern sell it so intensely, it's more rattling than anything Dennis Hopper does in the movie. He does this again in "Mulholland Drive" during the "La Llorana" scene. After everything Watts has been through, again there's this fever pitch of something like abject terror and a peculiar grace. Th...

This post was originally written back in 2016. As with other such posts, I'm not re-editing or updating them...unless something substantial in my point of view has changed. It would be churlish to dismiss “Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark” as a mere trifle. It’s way fun, for sure, but it’s so much more. Of course, it’s Lucas and Spielberg’s love letter to the serials of the 30s and 40s, but if it were only that, it wouldn’t have the staying power it has. That staying power doesn’t come just from the enthusiasm of two nostalgic men-children; it comes from a constellation of immense talent and I don’t think it’s too much to say, genius. The introduction of Indy isn’t melodramatic; it’s straight up iconic. Has any other modern film star been repeatedly “iconic” as Harrison Ford? Not just Indiana Jones and Han Solo, but the way he’s carried himself through his career; even later Ford seems so much better than the roles he’s been in (even, that word again, in “Indiana Jon...

During the recent past, I’ve watched for the first time and even re-watched some romcoms that I hadn’t thought much of before or had remembered fondly but couldn’t recall why or in one instance, freaking loved (“Trainwreck”).  But what comes back to me over and again is that in terms of genres, the romantic comedy is the one that lends itself to the greatest possibility of subversion and yet, is most often the most cringe-inducing within the framework of the genre (the majority of works in the field tend to be formulaic and hacky to the point of amnesia, hence, why I vaguely remember most of them.) Exceptions abound, of course, and the definition of what precisely a romantic comedy is can be fairly broad. For my purposes, a rom-com is set piece with two main protagonists who come together as a result of hopefully funny set-ups, break apart owing to miscommunication/differences in values or one farts in bed and the other doesn’t, but come back together – most of the time – owing to ...