David Cronenberg's Videodrome is a contradictorily compact cinematic expanse of carnality and carnage.
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.
To watch Blow Out is to watch an artist confronting his deepest fears using the techniques and technology of the medium that had previously offered him salvation. That artist is John Travolta's Jack Terry. That artist is also Brian De Palma.
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.
Uncut Gems is itself an uncut gem—jagged and terrifying on the outside, yet encompassing a startlingly beautiful and cosmic humanism within.
John Cassavetes’ The Killing of a Chinese Bookie is a masterpiece, not in spite of its messiness but rather because of it.
A Journey Through The Funky Fanfare of Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.