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:
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!
Hitman Hart: Wrestling with Shadows Transcends the Genre It Pioneered [Fanbyte]
Hitman Hart: Wrestling with Shadows is one of the best documentaries about anything ever. It follows Bret “The Hitman” Hart’s last year in the WWF in 1997, as the promotion battles Ted Turner’s WCW in the ratings and the rise of antiheroes makes Hart’s status as wrestling’s number one good guy precarious. Like so many of my favorite documentaries, Wrestling with Shadows is about something narrow—vividly capturing a specific, strange moment in the history of professional wrestling—in a way that grasps towards the universal, telling a moving human story. Like so many of my favourite documentaries, I can’t believe how much the filmmakers totally lucked out in being there to capture this story. Yet Wrestling with Shadows tends to get slotted into the category “wrestling documentary” as a kind of ghetto. The assumption by wrestling fandom and the general public alike that it could only appeal to existing wrestling fans is self-fulfilling: Only wrestling fans end up watching it, proving that it could only appeal to existing wrestling fans.
I wrote about the amazing documentary Hitman Hart: Wrestling with Shadows for Fanbyte! Read it here.
A Woman Waging War: Ms .45 at 40 [Crooked Marquee]
Abel Ferrera’s directorial career has spanned grindhouse to arthouse, making his debut with a hardcore porn film – 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy (1976) – and ending up, four decades later, the subject of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The best of his films encompass both ends of the spectrum simultaneously, upending the very idea of each as the other’s opposite: grimy exploitation and transcendent beauty, all at once.
I wrote about rape-revenge classic Ms .45‘s fortieth anniversary for Crooked Marquee! Read it here.
Ivan Vasilievich Changes Profession [Exploits]
I wrote a short essay on the Soviet comedy classic Ivan Vasilievich Changes Profession for Unwinnable‘s zine Exploits. You can buy the issue here!
The Sundae 