As my favorite Fiddler on the Roof song says, “Many times, many men, took our homes, took our lives. Kings they were, gone they are. We’re still here!” We are still here—that’s our gam zu l’tovah.
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Issue 100: Transcendence
October 2021
As my favorite Fiddler on the Roof song says, “Many times, many men, took our homes, took our lives. Kings they were, gone they are. We’re still here!” We are still here—that’s our gam zu l’tovah.
By keeping us insistently within Bauby's point of view, inside the diving bell, Julian Schnabel reminds us of the range of living and feeling still available to us, if we extend ourselves.
The web of influences upon Over the Garden Wall is vast, but everything coheres around a core of classical Americana, one rooted firmly in the northeast.
Frankenstein rests in the meeting place where the borders between transgression and transcendence touch.
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Featured Essays
Gillian Armstrong's Little Women recognizes that a truly strong home stays with us even as we leave it, that the changes in life’s seasons cannot diminish the inheritance we carry with us.
Joe Versus the Volcano is a film that lives almost entirely in its own world, asking Big Questions about Big Things—but its heart is large, and its magic deep.
Paris, Texas helped me, even while, in some ways, it failed me.
Secretary never exploits or stereotypes BDSM for sport; never uses it as a sideshow; never markets it as a pathology to overcome.
Steven Soderbergh’s adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s Out of Sight is a heist story, a sexy potboiler, a noir rom-com that resurrects and perfects the lost art of cinematic sexual tension.
Issue 99: Desert Island Movies
I’m drawn to Clue and In the Mood for Love, two movies that probably couldn’t be more different, because in both, characters use storytelling to investigate their cratered lives.
In my personal canon of films used to scope out how far a new friend is willing to indulge my rotted taste, Adore sits comfortably in the top five.
Grosse Pointe Blank, to me, is the definition of a desert island film: a foundational text, a perennial source of comfort, a go-to reference that lives, in the parlance of today’s youth and the adults who want to be like them, rent-free in one’s brain.
The History of the Seattle Mariners is the first cultural object I’ve encountered that painstakingly constructs a specific, relatable history—that of a single baseball team—only to use that construct to then gesture towards the futility of completion and the locks storytelling puts on our collective subconscious.
I carry Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again with me the way I do band-aids or Excedrin or a spare pen. I know it’s there in case of an emergency.
Almost Famous is not just a story about falling in love with life’s possibilities, nor is it just a story about falling in love with music; at its heart, Almost Famous is a film about falling in love with writing about music. It’s the story of how a boy became a critic.
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is a great animated film, a great superhero film, a great coming-of-age film, a great family film, a great action film, a great comedy, political without being preachy, innovative while honoring classical conventions, intellectually stimulating while also being wholly accessible—it’s the rare instance of an absolutely perfect film.
Stop Making Sense is a beautiful magic trick: show the stage for the hard concrete reality it is, then transform it into an island of motion and movement that’s unreal and exaggerated.
The richness with which I, Claudius renders the character of its underdog—the good and the bad, the inconsistent and the inexplicable—leads us to the deepest, thorniest questions about our place in history, and how things happen (or don’t) in turbulent times.
There’s something soothing about the illusion that I was meant to watch Yojimbo. It implies there’s some kind of order to the universe and not just a chaotic mess where kind people die too soon.
"People have flocked to the theater forever to feel something, to experience what it’s like to see a reflection of oneself, distilled in stark revelation. To share in communalized trauma or joy, to escape one’s daily humdrum and strife, and for a brief moment to possibly be cleansed by laughter or tears. To be brought closer into a fellow traveler’s shoes, or to learn about comparable travails and customs of foreign and alien cultures. To be punched in the gut with a vicarious experience. To share in what it means to be human."
Once I noticed the Kimberlys in Nora Ephron’s work, I couldn’t stop noticing them. If we’re accepting Ephron’s own assertion that real-life hurt and heartbreak can be put into fiction with impunity, what did she have against some woman named Kimberly?
It's the simple human lapses that embody the extraordinary effectiveness of no-budget documentary Hands on a Hardbody.
Instead of merely putting disabled characters on-screen, Take Shelter examines how they are treated in American society, and allows us to see how ableism is woven into that social fabric, from systemic failings to personal interactions.
Like many of its 1980s sci-fi contemporaries, the threat in Earth Girls Are Easy is humans, specifically those driven by greed and narrow-mindedness. But there’s also a lesson to be learned about our collective perception of the Valley—a place widely regarded as America’s vortex of vapidness.
Zosha Millman dives deep into David Lowery's latest film, The Green Knight, with special guests Fran Hoepfner and Kelsey Ford.
Speed Racer asks you to open up and go along for the ride with all its scintillating beauty, with all its dazzling heart.
The point of The Natural is not to give Roy Hobbs his longed-for second chance, but to destabilize the very concept of “second chances.”
