The Disaster Area: From ‘Airport’ to ‘Airplane!’ – Part Four
Part Four of a Four-Part Disaster Movie Series by Bill Bria
Understanding Nobuhiko Ōbayashi: From ‘House’ to ‘Hanagatami’
“No director has been able to replicate Nobuhiko Ōbayashi’s iridescent, hallucinatory and infectious passion for film.”
‘But I’m a Cheerleader’: Celebrating 20 Years of Style and Sincerity
“In cinema, it’s tough to depict sincerity without it coming across as contrived or sickly-sweet, but it’s a feeling that myself and many others yearn for, especially when it comes together as beautifully as it does in ‘But I’m a Cheerleader.'”
Formative: Prince ‘Purple Rain’ (1984)
“The affinity I have for Prince, and the things that I learned from his music — and continue to learn — is different than what my mum took away from it decades earlier; the music, and the connection we share with it, is something I find myself returning to regularly.”
Formative: Love and Rockets ‘Express’ (1986)
“‘Express’ felt like music that was made FOR ME — not my parents, and certainly not the other teenagers I knew who liked music that seemed boring and soulless.”
EP Review: Twin Peaks ‘Side A’
“The strength of ‘Side A’ is the acceptance of its limitations — now is perhaps not the time for rock bands to reinvent the wheel, but instead to provide some kind of solace, support or guidance.”
Mythic Conduits for Intimate Pain in Edgar G. Ulmer’s ‘The Black Cat’
“While ‘The Black Cat’ does not share many explicit connections with Poe’s 1843 story, both texts use archetypal symbolism to explore painfully intimate experiences (in Poe’s case, addiction and mental disarray, and in Ulmer’s case, psychological trauma).”
Escape to Paradise: The Unusual Sweetness of ‘Carlito’s Way’
“What both Pacino and De Palma vividly convey throughout the film is that there’s absolutely nothing dubious or spurious about Carlito’s conviction in his ability to evolve.”
Album Review: Arca ‘KiCk i’
“Taken as a whole, ‘KiCk i’ is a delirious tour-de-force, a compilation of experiments that don’t fully cohere but still build up to an intriguing final image.”
From ‘Sex’ to ‘Girls’ to ‘Insecure’: HBO’s Feminist and Intersectional Chronicle
“HBO has come a long way in representing the intersectionality of race and gender.”
Why Criticism: Against Nostalgia
“More than ever, it is crucial to contemplate what this nostalgia phenomenon means for the future of the arts and our discomfort with the new. Will there be a ‘new’ in the new world?”
Putting the Record Straight: In Conversation with 70s Rock Icon Suzi Quatro
“Right now, I’ve never felt more creative.” – Rhys Handley Interviews 70s Rock Icon Suzi Quatro About Her Career and the 2020 Documentary ‘Suzi Q’
Why Criticism: Dismantling the Boys’ Club in Horror
“The main reason I write about horror movies, aside from having a deep and abiding love for them, is that I have a perspective unique to me. But, for certain men, that’s not enough.”
Local Heroes: Ben Flanagan on Odeon Chelmsford
“Local Heroes” is a Vague Visages column dedicated to movie theater memories and the theatrical experience.
The Code Complex: Robert De Niro, Jake LaMotta and ‘Raging Bull’
“‘Raging Bull’ — a complex character study about methods and codes of conduct — all too often gets reductively tagged as Scorsese’s toxic masculinity sports movie that allowed De Niro to lose (and gain) weight in pursuit of an Oscar.”
Martin Scorsese, ‘Mean Streets’ and Caravaggio’s Moment of Illumination
“In Caravaggio and Scorsese’s art, the silent actions of male and female characters speak louder than words. We don’t need to hear Holofernes scream to understand what Judith has taken.”
Album Review: Phoebe Bridgers ‘Punisher’
“Bridgers, like all her millennial contemporaries, contains multitudes as yet unseen. She is living any number of lives all at once — but, at the core of it all, there’s still a vulnerable child of the 90s adrift in a merciless world…”
Tearing Down the Monument: Sean Connery’s 1970s
“In my hatred for the Bond franchise, I feel I may have done a disservice to its star. I have always had a tendency to discount Sean Connery as an exquisitely sculpted statue, capable of filling out a tuxedo very nicely but little else.”
Collecting Movies with Brady Daley
Greg Carlson Interviews Brady Daley About Movie Collecting
World Cinema Project: Behind Closed Doors – ‘The Housemaid’ and ‘Insiang’
“One of the great joys in viewing the films amassed under the World Cinema Project banner is discovering the richness of a nation’s cultural and scenic backdrop.”