At its core, Spencer is a film about belonging—or more aptly, about one’s failure to belong.
Both Josef von Sternberg’s The Scarlet Empress (1934) and Hulu’s current series The Great use the opulence of the Empress’ court to tell the story of Catherine's rise as a triumph of light, elegance, and beauty over a twisted, grotesque darkness.
This month on the podcast, we’re at the juncture of maximalism and mid-century modern, tackling Peyton Reed’s rom-com Down With Love with special guest Fran Hoepfner.
I am thinking of films as haunted houses. I am thinking of Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons.
The magnificent, obsessive care to detail synonymous with Stanley Kubrick’s filmography is perhaps best represented and utilized in his 1975 masterpiece, Barry Lyndon.
Brian De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise is decadence splashed on celluloid, a celebration of the shine of glam rock, and a preemptive funeral for the scene officiated by the dark underside of the business.
Peyton Reed's Down With Love cleverly uses exaggeration, artifice, and opulence to rocket it past pastiche and into a new space where it utilizes the genre’s shenanigans in order to comment on the genre itself.
The Remains of the Day is a prolonged and aching rumination on what could have been—what might have been—at another time, or at least in another Britain. If you can name another film that personifies so astutely those feelings of regret and melancholy, guilt and repentance, I’ll eat my top hat.
Luchino Visconti's Ludwig is a beautiful puzzle, an imperfect gesamtkunstwerk.
On The Queen of Versailles, the hollow promise of opulent exteriors, and what happens when everything falls apart.
The original Matrix takes a question—What comes to mind when you think of opulence?—and revises it into a statement: Opulence is what comes to mind when you think.