Mann’s cinema is that of love and longing on a life-and-death scale—all that matters are the compressed moments we have in which to share it.
PositionContributing Editor
JoinedJune 1, 2018
Articles31
Travis Woods is a Contributing Editor at Bright Wall/Dark Room. He lives and writes in Los Angeles.
As a teen, he stole the Corvette of a WBO world heavyweight boxing champion. He has a dog and a tattoo of Elliott Gould from The Long Goodbye. Bob Dylan once clapped him on the back and whispered something incomprehensible. He always keeps a Jim Thompson paperback in his back pocket and a karambit knife in his boot. These are the only interesting things about him.
Inasmuch as Wild Things uses the humid deliria of South Florida to serve as a representative paradigm for the vulgar desperation of American life as a whole, so too does it presciently use Sam Lombardo to presage the “Florida Man” trope of the 21st century—maniacal, insanely confident men who make headlines by getting self-ensnared in bizarre, Rube Goldbergian schemes of their own making, men whose unflagging confidence in their own intelligence blinds them from their own blood-simple naivety.
"You got to move forward because you can't change the past. You can only live in the present. And you just try to make it as full and bright and be as righteous as you can be. But it's rough, man. You know, we're human beings and we have a lot of temptation."
Something Wild is an atomic undressing of genre clichés, lies, and costumes. As with the best of Demme’s work, it uses a genre getup solely as an excuse to explore the truth, the realer-than-real funkyjunky Americana (and its multiculti makeup) that so many of Demme’s characters can be at first oblivious to (or costumed appropriators of).
"He’s backsliding. Falling into old, bad habits. And he has to admit, he more than kind of loves it. It’s almost as if, during these last three months—the sobriety, the no smoking, the celibacy—he was pulling undercover duty again. Except this time, the role he'd been playing was the version of himself the rest of the world wanted him to be."
Summer of Sam uses the Son of Sam as a kind of roving metaphor, the face of the toxicity that beats in Vinny’s heart and the conflict that troubles Ritchie’s soul, the name of the lusts and fears that well within each man in equal measure.
I am Travis’ Essay on Love, Sex, Masculinity, and Fight Club.
Infinity Pool is a synesthetic kaleidoscopia of narcotic dread, a mesmeric tour map into the nature of human identity and the death drive that motors it, defines it, obliterates it.
Underneath its reputation, unseen and unloved, Hal Ashby's 8 Million Ways to Die is also a kind of secret miracle, one of the best L.A. crime films most have never given half a chance.
The exultant brilliance of Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets is that, equipped with so very little, it was able to discover the truth; the tragedy of Targets, the terror of it, is that it still remains that truth.
In John Carpenter’s 1983 adaptation of Stephen King’s haunted-car novel Christine, the road to hell is paved not with good intentions, but with time.
This is Withnail and I: Hilarious, tragic, less a cohesive narrative film and more a series of rowdy and ruddy vignettes—like stumbled stops along a pub crawl—designed to make one laugh until crying, and cry until laughing, in equal, sorrowful, comical measure.