In The Lizzie McGuire Movie, adults are irresponsible, Italians are fake, rules don’t exist, vacation is life-changing, and everything turns out great.
PositionContributing Editor
JoinedAugust 16, 2021
Articles6
Olivia Rutigliano is a Contributing Editor at Bright Wall/Dark Room. She is also an editor at Lit Hub and CrimeReads and a PhD candidate in the English Department at Columbia University. Her work has appeared in Vanity Fair, Vulture, The Baffler, Lapham’s Quarterly, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, Politics/Letters, Truly*Adventurous, The Toast, on PBS Television, and elsewhere. Her research on stolen Academy Award statuettes led Mother Jones to name her “one of the country’s foremost experts” on the history of the Oscars, but unfortunately has yet to involve her in a real-life caper.
This is the nature of Big Night: not to find a way to serve the risotto and the spaghetti together, but to strip the brothers down to their common element.
Luca Guadagnino's Bones and All is a film that is full of flesh, but also anti-flesh: ethereality and ephemerality.
That Thing You Do! gleams with friendliness, gladness, soulfulness—the kind of personable perfectionism of a homespun masterwork.
On a plot level, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is about Indy saving his father. But on an emotional level, it is about Indy learning how to love his father, to accept his father’s guidance, and to discover how much his father already loves him.
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.”