Travis Woods, Author at Bright Wall/Dark Room

Honeysuckle Murder: (A Memorandum on) Death in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (and the Futility of Writing About It)

A crackerjack pulp thriller that alternately smirked and shocked its way into defining both a expanding cinematic genre and a director’s burgeoning career with its gallows vantage, Double Indemnity also maybe lets slip the secret of life as it nuzzles up against (and makes a joke, seduction, and parable out of) death itself.

Adam Sandler in Uncut Gems | art by Brianna Ashby

This Is How I Win: The Cosmic Humanism of Uncut Gems

Travis Woods·

Issue 81: Sacrifice

Uncut Gems is itself an uncut gem—jagged and terrifying on the outside, yet encompassing a startlingly beautiful and cosmic humanism within.

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976) | art by Tony Stella

I Can’t Give You Anything But Love

Travis Woods·

Issue 80: A Fine Mess

John Cassavetes’ The Killing of a Chinese Bookie is a masterpiece, not in spite of its messiness but rather because of it.

Leonardo DiCaprio as Rick Dalton in ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD | art by Brianna Ashby

Still Here

Travis Woods·

Issue 79: Best of 2019

A Journey Through The Funky Fanfare of Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood

Elaine May's MIKEY AND NICKY (1976) | original poster by Tony Stella

A Tunnel in My Head

Travis Woods·

Issue 75: Elaine May

Mikey and Nicky is not the story of two men attempting to escape the mob, nor two men reckoning with themselves—it's the story of two boys wholly unequipped to mediate the complex emotions and responsibilities of male adulthood.

Richard Gere in Breathless (1983) | art by Tony Stella

You Americans, You Only Think About Sex

Travis Woods·

Issue 72: Thirst Traps

Breathless is at once a ferociously horny and formally audacious remake of Godard’s hyper-referential film, as well as an all-or-nothing, frenetically American and self-aware meditation on desperately empty people lost in the thrall of the pop culture that gives form to their wants and needs.

No Way To Managua: Bridging the Forces of Fate and Identity in William Friedkin’s Sorcerer

Travis Woods·

Issue 71: Resilience

Obsessed with manifesting Sorcerer’s message on film, Friedkin failed to see he was living that very message during its sanity-snapping production: that which is behind us cannot be returned to. All one can do is persevere for as long as possible into the fates that our pasts have shaped for us.

Does It Ever End?

Travis Woods·

Issue 70: Going Long

Inherent Vice is a film that tricks us into settling in for a noir about a man solving a mystery, and instead presents us with a man confronting a melancholy truth: everything—lives, eras, and loves—comes to an end.

Year of the Buffalo Girl

Travis Woods·

Issue 69: 1994

A trio of 1994 Hollywood mainstream softcore films (Disclosure, Color of Night, and The Last Seduction) are each, in their own way, gripped with masculine fears concerning established sex and gender roles and the women who refuse to conform to them.

(S)he Eats Planets: On Mandy, Grief, and Mandy

Travis Woods·

Issue 67: Best of 2018

Mandy is a visionary catalogue of the ways in which we attempt to survive, embrace, or succumb to the pain of living with death, and what happens when we lose the one thing that holds our world together.

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia | art by Tony Stella

Ain’t No More Chances

Travis Woods·

Issue 66: Food

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is a skin-flayed, nerve-burst confession, a self-loathing crucifixion of the kind of hyper masculine pathology that poisoned Peckinpah's personal life, but inspired his deliriously compelling art.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Noir Fan

Travis Woods·

Issue 65: Ingmar Bergman

Ingmar Bergman's second film is a tonally-daring Expressionist chiaroscuro of broken lives attempting to escape a rain-soaked nightworld of broken dreams.