Ciara and Dean appeared on Darren Mooney and Andrew Quinn’s podcast The 250 to talk about Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation. Check it out:
The Plumber Is a Sour Clash of Class and Gender [Certified Forgotten]
After directing Australian New Wave classics Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Last Wave, Peter Weir made The Plumber, a television film that — like Steven Spielberg’s Duel — was released theatrically in overseas territories. It’s a forgotten middle child of Weir’s filmography. Not a ground-breaking piece of art like the dreamily stylish Picnic at Hanging Rock nor a universal cultural touchstone like later Weir films Dead Poets Society or The Truman Show. But beyond its beginnings on television, the pleasures The Plumber offers are more off-kilter. It goes down satisfyingly sour.
I wrote about Peter Weir’s TV movie The Plumber for Certified Forgotten! You can read it here.
Modern Times – The 250 episode 274
Darren Mooney and Andrew Quinn of The 250 podcast had me on to talk about Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times! Check it out here:
It Happened One Night – The 250 episode 273
I appeared on The 250, Andrew Quinn and Darren Mooney’s podcast about the IMDB top 250 movies of all time, to talk about It Happened One Night! Listen here:
Gimmicks Aside, The Tingler is Fucking Fantastic [Unwinnable]
William Castle, King of B-movies, loved gimmicks. Giving audience members a certificate for a one-thousand-dollar life insurance policy in case Macabre caused them to die of fright. Red/blue glasses so you could see or hide the ghosts in 13 Ghosts. A forty-five-second “fright break” to leave and get a refund if you were too scared to watch the rest of Homicidal.
I wrote about The Tingler for Unwinnable! You can read it here.
Michael Collins Remains an Irish Cornerstone 25 Years Later [Paste]
25 years ago, Neil Jordan was coming off directing The Crying Game and Interview with the Vampire. He had two box office hits and a screenplay Oscar under his belt. So, naturally, he spent his Hollywood cache on a biopic about Irish republican Michael Collins.
The result occupies a peculiar place in film history and Irish culture. Despite being a major studio release, it faded from the consciousness of the international film community more or less immediately. But in Ireland, it remains a cornerstone of both pop culture and popular history: We’ve all seen it, probably lots of times, so it’s a big part of how we understand our nation and its history. For me, and I’m sure millions more, when I picture some of the most significant figures in Irish history they look like Liam Neeson or Alan Rickman.
I wrote about the 25th anniversary of Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins for Paste magazine! You can read it here.
Circle Calls Our Conscience To a Vote [Certified Forgotten]
Aaron Hann and Mario Miscione’s 2015 film Circle opens in a dark room. Fifty people are waking up, confused and disorientated. They don’t know why they’re here or what’s going on. They’re standing arranged in concentric circles around a black dome with red lights. Then there’s a flash, and they start dying.
Every two minutes, one of them is killed. It can be from a beam of light that comes from the dome. It can be if someone tries to leave, stepping outside the small red circle under their feet. But every two minutes, someone dies. The early parts of Circle are nervous chaos, as the group’s attempts to figure out what the hell is going on are interrupted by another death. They talk about what they remember from before they woke up here. They discuss if there are any connections between the people in the room. They theorize about how they might buy time. But every two minutes, flash, another body drops.
I wrote about Circle, talky sci-fi and cynicism for Certified Forgotten! Read it here.
Revisiting Steven Spielberg’s Undersung Masterpiece, Catch Me If You Can [Film Daze]
Catch Me If You Can is a well-loved but still underappreciated film: the kind of movie that, were it made by almost anyone else, would be rightfully thought of as their masterpiece. But it was made by Steven Spielberg, who has made so many masterpieces that Catch Me If You Can gets lost in the shuffle. But at almost two decades’ distance, it stands out as a shining bright spot of the latter part of Spielberg’s career. It is one of the films that made me fall in love with cinema.
It’s one of the films that I watched as a kid that really blew up what I thought films could be and do. I have watched it so many times, and I’m always taken off-guard by how extraordinarily well-made it is: impeccably structured, bursting with extraordinary performances, and so goddamn exciting. Just as thrilling as the first time, every time.
I wrote about Catch Me If You Can for Film Daze. Read it here.
How Christopher Landon Is Reinventing The Slasher Movie [Fangoria]
Slasher movies occupy an unusual position within horror, and within film in general. As a genre, its scope is extremely narrow, yet its formula is endlessly replicable: somebody stabs a bunch of teenagers, culminating in a face-off between the killer and the final girl. Laurie Strode fended off Michael Myers and launched a thousand imitators.
The slasher movie’s peak, both creatively and in popularity, is also when it was most reviled critically. In the 1970s and 1980s, slasher movies were considered the bottom of the barrel, barely inching out pornography in artistic merit (and second only to pornography in VHS rentals). Critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert were so disgusted by the original Friday the 13th that they told their viewers to write letters of complaint to its producers and star Betsy Palmer. It’s only in the subsequent decades that slashers have been taken seriously enough to recognize that great slasher movies are great movies, period. Yet simultaneously, the genre has gone into decline.
I wrote about Christopher Landon’s recent run of slasher movies, Happy Death Day, Happy Death Day 2U and Freaky, for Fangoria! (Fangoria!!!) You can read it here.
God Help Bobby and Helen: Panic in Needle Park at 50 [Crooked Marquee]
“God help Bobby and Helen,” reads the original poster. “They’re in love in Needle Park.” Helen (Kitty Winn) leans on Bobby (Al Pacino, in his first starring role), arm around his shoulder and eyes downcast; Bobby kisses her cheek. It’s not clear from the still image of the poster if Helen is hanging onto him carefree and in love – a candid shot in motion as she laughs and moves – or if she’s out of it and can barely stand. The film itself answers: both.
I wrote about The Panic in Needle Park on Crooked Marquee for its fiftieth anniversary. Read it here!
The Sundae 