Ethan Warren, Author at Bright Wall/Dark Room

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.

A Human Drama Thing

Ethan Warren·

Issue 98: Underdogs

It's the simple human lapses that embody the extraordinary effectiveness of no-budget documentary Hands on a Hardbody.

Polyphony Abounds

Ethan Warren·

Extras

Two films featuring Michael Nyman's "Fish Beach" seem so utterly opposed that it’s hard to believe they could share anything at all, but a deeper shared resonance can be drawn out thanks to the particular ways that Nyman’s style of composition works upon picture and viewer.

How It All Came Crashing Down

Ethan Warren·

Issue 96: Best Laid Plans

With Southland Tales, Richard Kelly asked audiences to deal with the bleakest aspects of their current reality via a tonally ambiguous, hyper-taxing, incomplete narrative. When you look at it that way, even its sub-half-million box office take might sound high.

The Tale of the Bad Object

Ethan Warren·

Issue 95: 1971

Tales of Beatrix Potter is a loose collection of concepts and elements that barely coheres, but manages to engage—and even delight—in spite of what should be overwhelming flaws.

Abstract Tenderness

Ethan Warren·

Issue 94: Forgiveness

The Straight Story represents the Lynchian world redeemed, a pocket of America that battled dread and violence and won, earning its just reward.

The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet (all images courtesy of the Sundance Institute)

Sundancing with Myself: Dispatches from a Virtual Festival

Ethan Warren·

Festivals

If there was any tangible loss in a virtual Sundance, it wasn’t the loss of celebrity sightings and frostbitten extremities; it was the loss of a shared narrative on what the week had provided.

Who Could Ask For Anything More?

Ethan Warren·

Issue 92: Music Redux

If anything unites Gene Kelly's classic musicals, it’s a belief that no past experience could be horrific enough to prevent you from letting loose that whole-human-race encompassing smile and falling in love with life all over again.

Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams | Universal Pictures

Between Heaven and Iowa

Ethan Warren·

Issue 90: Frames

In the soft focus of his gaze, Costner shows us a man seeing his own life superimposed onto itself, the uncanny vertiginous struggle to reconcile your existence as someone’s child with your existence as someone’s parent, the effort to locate your own life through triangulation between lives spent and lives just beginning to unfold.

I Grew Up Thinking Feelings Were Cool: Cooper Raiff on Shithouse

Ethan Warren·

Interviews

In describing Cooper Raiff’s emergence onto the independent film scene, it’s easy to lean on what sounds like a novelty hook: at just 23 years old, he’s written, directed, starred in, and co-edited a college-set romcom that went on to win the Grand Jury Prize at South by Southwest.

Out There in the Dark: A Theoretical Investigation into the Link Between Sunset Boulevard, Eraserhead, and The Shining

Ethan Warren·

Issue 87: Billy Wilder

Three seemingly dissimilar works are united by three seemingly diffuse concepts that all lead back to the same place: the unique capacity of film to evoke some of the mind’s most indescribable sensations.

Emily Watson and Adam Sandler in Punch-Drunk Love

The Purest Thing in the World

Ethan Warren·

Issue 86: Dealer's Choice

On Knuckle Sandwich, the Paul Thomas Anderson Movie That Wasn’t.