THE TALKATIVE KID, THE THOUGHTFUL ADULT – 25 Years as an Online Film Writer

25 years ago today, a young inexperienced journalist with a passion for gabbing about film took to the Internet on a journey to add his voice to the growing throng of web-based personalities, and yet another new amateur movie blogger was born. Eventually branding himself a “Cinemaphile” – that is, someone who prefers the experience of watching films in theaters instead of at home – he became tirelessly motivated by the panache of more experienced critics while he was formulating his own distinct voice, one that sought to add a little flair and wit to the mix while mirroring the values of an eccentric juvenile. Sometimes that aroused anger in readers, other times surprise and dismay. But it was all part of being in a fun and exciting new frontier, back when cyberspace was mostly in the grasp of computer nerds and the clap-backs came from genuine, hardcore film buffs. They didn’t just argue or dismiss a review, either. Some of them added enlightening contexts that were previously lacking, or at least had the patience to educate their target instead of just cutting him or her down to size. Those exchanges reflected the unspoken importance of criticism in a time when the validity of it was coming into doubt, just as the online world was allowing an entire generation of spectators to plug in and add their voice to a crowd of millions.

"The Shining" Revisited

What is it about the Overlook Hotel that casts such an ominous cloud? How do the mysterious, inexplicable events surrounding a small and isolated family affect the terror they inflict on one another? These are just two of the broad questions hovering over a long mystery in “The Shining,” a movie of ageless dexterity that also remains one of the more fascinating case studies in academic film analysis. When it arrived in theaters over four decades ago, the conventional wisdom at the time had been swift and dismissive: the exacting hand of one Stanley Kubrick had lost sight of a cogent vision, supplementing the famous source material by Stephen King with so much surrealistic ambiguity and nonsense that he had released a labyrinthian mess instead of a probing psychological essay. But much like his own “A Clockwork Orange” and “2001: A Space Odyssey,” time has offered a generous reassessment, and now the picture is usually seen hovering towards the top of most lists of the greatest horror movies ever made. When I first encountered it at the age of 15, my admiration for its technical skill and tone were undermined by an inability to decipher the clues. What was happening to the Torrance family? Were they being haunted by ghosts, pitted against one another by elaborate mind games? Would they have been seen if the young boy at the center of the action were not clairvoyant? Or were they simply imagined by people whose sanity had been compromised by isolation? Over 20 years and dozens of viewings later, I can finally speak with confidence on some of the great paradoxes the story weaves.

"American Beauty" Revisited

Like the French Algerian Meursault and Holden Caufield after him, the character of Lester Burnham has soared above the peak of lively resentment and been canonized as one of the great antiheroes of modern pop culture. His presence in “American Beauty” plays to the ongoing call for the everyman’s rejection of procedure, which has been necessitated by the steady decline of the modern workforce in a culture that imprisons them in cubicles and conforms their thoughts to a script of faux courtesy. Traces of that distinction were first visible in the comedy “Office Space,” released in the same year, but this was the moment where the ideology found its most unflinching force: a man whose brutal honesty felt like a nudge towards obliterating the conventional wisdom. Consider how much of the film about him involves the silent bewilderment of supporting players, right down to a wife and daughter who can only look on, in stunned silence, while a pathetic shell of a man suddenly discovers his voice. Perhaps they are surprised to find he still has a spine. Perhaps they are mourning the inability to continue using him as a scapegoat. Or maybe it’s because they can no longer see beyond the ceiling of what he is gradually tearing down.

The Winds of Hope - 2018 in Review

In Hollywood’s second year as a force of dissent in the climate of Trumpism, no greater achievement resonated with the public more than “Black Panther.” Against all forecasts and most common trends it was a movie that broke the barriers of its genre, becoming the first film featuring a significant cast of black actors to cross the billion-dollar threshold. In a time when there is more demand for the representation of minorities in studio output, this was comforting: it meant that the mainstream element was, at long last, reflecting the diversity of modern American society, and doing so while sneering gleefully at traditionalists still pining for more of the same. Those were the sorts who nursed their cynicism into indignity, particularly as their more favored choices – violent action vehicles and remakes – often stalled at a box office overrun with the audacity of inclusion.

"The Black Cauldron" Revisited

“Legend has it, in the mystic land of Prydain, there was once a king so cruel and so evil, that even the gods feared him.” The opening narration inaugurates the curse shrouding the fabled black cauldron, an object of such immense danger that its very mention instills dread in the hearts of commoners. Although centuries came and went while it lay dormant, obscured by the spells of defensive witches, a new enthusiasm has gripped the totalitarian forces of the Horned King, who pursues it with persistent determination. In his possession, the cauldron would unleash the frightening power of necromancy, allowing its possessor to raise an unstoppable army of dead soldiers, essentially making him immortal. And all of creation would succumb to this destructive curse, including those whose personalities necessitate the enthusiasm of the audience: a teenage adventurer who dreams of heroism, a clumsy bard, a distraught princess, a furry and inquisitive beast, a snarky sprite and an oracular pig, who also provides the key to discovering the whereabouts of the coveted relic.

It Started With a Cauldron...

The imprint of “Cinemaphile” didn’t come to realization until 2004, but its function – and with it my identity as a web-based film writer – were founded six years prior, during the hot summer months of 1998. It was the morning of August 4 when I awoke to the arrival of a new VHS copy of Disney’s “The Black Cauldron” lying on my doorstep – a defiant and strange little discovery, like a rough gem refusing to remain hidden. Its release announced not only the recognition of a problematic production, but also the gradually emerging power of Internet campaigns; while access to the world wide web was still slowly catching on, a small petition gained enough momentum to earn the notice of Joe Hale, the film’s producer, and Roy Disney, then a key decision-maker in the studio’s home video market. A year’s worth of signatures and aggressive write-ins (mine among them) had scored a long-awaited victory in a time when the Mouse House was barely interested in reflecting on troubled times of the past. After “The Little Mermaid” reignited a key fire in the enthusiasm of moviegoers, their preceding endeavors had been cast in a shadow, with this release apparently being the most notorious stain on their reputation.

Lessons from Criterion: "The Ascent" by Larisa Shepitko

The gifted Larisa Shepitko was 39 years old, four films into her career and on the verge of more when “The Ascent” first emerged as a blip on the radar, placing her among the most promising new commodities of 1970s Russian cinema. Patterned in the tradition of a persistent arsenal of anti-war hits about the Nazi occupation, hers was an adjunct that also drew upon more precarious sources – particularly the legend of Jesus Christ, who like the hero of her story became a willing sacrifice as penance for the sins of others.  Was there a thread running parallel between both that she felt mirrored the context of the war? Perhaps a reasoning, or a justification, for the history we know was to follow? Her protagonist, the stone-eyed Sotnikov, is not exactly a warm and embracing personality, and early on he is handicapped by ailments – and then a gunshot wound – that keep him from more profound gestures. But even as the prey in a doomed hunt he materializes, unbroken in his humanity, as a willing casualty in the jaws of fate, even though the key figures among him seem all too eager to use his martyrdom as their own safeguard.

Predicting the Winners of the 90th Oscars

Heading fretfully into its 90th year, Oscar is set to descend on a bold and foreign new climate when the curtain rises on Hollywood this Sunday. He has never been one to scoff at the wide array of political trends that dominate his parties, to be sure, but even he must be sensing a strange air looming over the 2018 ceremony. It was, after all, the year that sexual abuse dominated the headlines and diminished the glitz of the city’s bright lights. And now in the final hour of those revelations, the notorious #MeToo movement looks poised to flip the script on the industry right down to its most treasured traditions – including the annual practice of handing out those famous gold statues everyone covets.

A Most Volatile Year

If you were a movie enthusiast at all during the last twelve months, the persisting narrative was less about finding good entertainment and more about searching for necessary distractions. A substantial ration of that search came down to two ongoing controversies: the ethical implosion of the Trump administration, and the alarming news of sexual assaults coming out of Hollywood, both of which dominated the headlines like dark clouds lingering over our mental periphery. On any normal year either scenario would have warranted responses of shock and disbelief (if not vocal action), but in a climate where sexism and race relations have dangled dangerously off the edge of social balance, potential alarm was replaced instead with an almost paralyzing despair. In the recent past it would have been almost absurd to assume those problems running so rampant in the age of information. But now, after hate culture has risen back into fashion, each new revelation simply played like another reason to withdraw from reality.

"Last House on the Left" Revisited

In some underhanded way a horror film has the capacity to contemplate one’s destructive tendencies just as it does to abuse and torment the souls of the innocent. More perceptive directors discover those possibilities not by holding out optimism in bleak scenarios, but usually by looking through the cracked mirror of passive acceptance. That is the sort of wisdom that informs many of the early Wes Craven pictures, several of which were made with a distinction that raises them above the more sensationalized Hollywood gorefests of later times (even his own). To most they possess the foresight to see a purpose beyond the astonishing violence, and to regard them is to understand that there are some terrible side-roads one must walk before the fates can restore light to an obscured path. But what is one to make of “Last House on the Left,” his nihilistic debut, which by all indications ought to have been one of those endeavors forever lost in the wastes of oblivion? Like a painful secret it persists achingly through the minds of those who discover it, often to a point of mystification; decidedly outside of conventional standards and made quickly and cheaply in a span of weeks, little was there to announce it as anything other than just another trenchant exercise in the murderous tendencies of the disturbed. And somehow that was far more than enough.

"The Exorcist" Revisited

“The movie is one of the greatest and most hypnotic ever made, a work of sheer genius from the first frame until the last.” – taken from the original Cinemaphile review of “The Exorcist”

So well-known and influential are the underlying devices of William Friedkin’s “The Exorcist” that few among modern filmgoers now remember the power of their source. Perhaps the most notorious of all horror films, it was the product of a time still concealed in the facade of restraint when it came to visiting the devious corners of a filmmaker’s mind. Shock was always possible – as had been most apparent by Hitchock’s “Psycho,” or Wes Craven’s “Last House on the Left” – but rarely did it stick so persistently in the mind, invariably undermining one’s sense of individual control. We could rationalize how to get away from a crazy killer or how to avoid a menacing threat lurking around the corner, but how did one evade being possessed by a demonic entity? What sense of recovery would have been palpable? Some argue that implication can singlehandedly be credited with changing the trajectory of the entirety of the genre, which by that point had been dominated by homicidal minds or ambitious monsters in lurid fantasy. Here was a movie about real people, real situations and real considerations of faith, in which an innocent teenage girl became the unknowing victim of spiritual violence that stretched beyond existing moral implications. Few among those early viewers can say they walked away from the picture unchanged by the experience, and those that claim otherwise may not be the sorts you prefer to keep company with.

The Cinema Soul

Life as I know it began in the fuzz of an old television screen. Through it I gazed into what felt like projections of dreams, images frozen in a procedure of motion that meant we were free to imagine, to wonder, to long for adventures outside of the monotonous grind. Sometimes those realizations came out of old cartoons, other times sitcoms, and other times old Atari video game cartridges. But movies were something more. They seemed to withstand the erosion of time, of earthly cruelties meant to wither and decay all that was necessary to inform our futures.

I sensed this the first time I saw “The Wizard of Oz,” probably the most important live action film of my youth. For me it was as current as the visual of my schoolmates running across the playground, and made more profound by the belief that those peers could sprout wings and take off midflight if they felt inclined. That, I believe, is one of the primary strengths of a timeless picture: if its images could reach you in a way that blurs the lines between worlds, then they slip past the notion of mere escapism and become extensions of personal experiences. For what seemed like years after I would often reflect on Dorothy’s adventures – in film and in book – and how my own would seem had that cyclone come and carried me away instead. And Oz, as whimsical as other worlds come, felt like the hidden fortress of a backyard daydream that could become tangible with just the right squint of a young eye.

2016, A Eulogy

Like a substantial ratio of my readers, I don’t leave 2016 with a sense of relief or accomplishment – I walk away nursing significant mental wounds. Among recent annual passages that carry with them an arsenal of perplexing human experiences, few could be considered as volatile – or indeed as troubling – as what went on over the course of the last twelve months, when social structures were rattled by startling political fallout, world violence reached a new facet of severity, and entertainment industries faced rather troubling dichotomies. It was also the year of the death of celebrity – both literally and figuratively. As famous names from the reveries of the past faded from mortal grasp, others lost their hold on their very reputations, in a time when the lone successor seemed to be corporate entities intent on exploiting the hard-earned dollar of the escapists and the feeble-minded.

In Memoriam, 2016

I am compelled to make a few remarks about the loss of Carrie Fisher and instead am driven to expand the focus, thanks in part to the rather surprising death of Debbie Reynolds, her mother, just a day after she herself succumbed to a heart attack. In a year of so many losses and a tremendous tone of shock, the simultaneous demises of both a mother and daughter just 24 hours shy of one another is unprecedented – an event so unsettling that even those who are removed from the mourning process must regard the occasion with some level of confusion. Peers and admirers on social media have taken to the internet to denounce this troubling year as a source of disgust, perhaps, because it has been clouded by memories we desperately want to forget. But entertainment figures, for better or worse, are symbols of an idealism we treasure in our minds; when they produce good work, it becomes something meaningful. And when they die, we are compelled to react with sorrow not because we knew them personally, but because their work provided us a roadmap towards self-discovery.

De Palma (2015)

Like most 20th century directors working in the wake of the golden era, Brian De Palma’s sense of craft was not so much a divine creation as it was an enacting of the rich experiments of Alfred Hitchcock. Such wisdom is cursory to any serious record of modern filmmaking, and “De Palma” – the new documentary about his notorious career – begins with a discussion about “Vertigo,” the most direct of his Hollywood allegories. “What he was doing,” De Palma describes, “was creating these romantic images and then killing them off. And that’s what we as directors do all the time.” It is a precious morsel countless others have discussed in unison with their laborious practices, and certainly Hitchcock’s most treasured film is regarded as autobiographical for most, but do his lessons reverberate as consistently as they should? The famed creator of “Dressed to Kill” doesn’t believe so; in a two-hour sit-down that involves crawling through his catalog one picture at a time, the most persistent of points is how Alfred’s shadow has been so dimly cast by those working within his traditions, unless you happen to be him. Perhaps that says more about the subject at hand than those who have freely abandoned the structure of their important ancestors, but far be it from any fascinated observer to interrupt the lines of thinking of one of the more popular creators of the medium.

Contention in the Contest: A Final Word on the 2016 Academy Awards

Audiences who descended on the Dolby Theater in Hollywood on Sunday night were certainly expecting active discussion about the diversity issue at the Academy Awards, but when Chris Rock took the stage to open this year’s ceremony, they probably didn’t expect it to be as sharp and insistent as it wound up being. What it also was, even amongst the numerous laughs, was an opportunity for the comedian to use his tongue to spread around the underlying blame of the issue, even to those on his side of the aisle. In one of the night’s most memorable jokes, his aim fell directly on Jada Pinkett-Smith, who lashed out after her husband, Will Smith, wasn’t nominated. “Jada boycotting the Oscars is like me boycotting Rihanna’s panties,” he shot back. “I wasn’t invited!”

2015: The Final Curtain

Few things calm the turbulent waters of the world better than the presence of a good movie. They are an act of release, a culmination of visceral desires to liberate audiences from the confines of ordinary existence in order to propel them towards mental or emotional enlightenment. Good ones can educate about the paths we neglect to walk, but greater ones will show us the way to them, like roadmaps to a destination of one’s better self. And in more paradoxical scenarios, some can even rouse the fires of rebellion burning within, giving us windows into places and people that are on the razor’s edge of negative extremes. A balance of both is key in establishing some level of connection to our personal structure, and who would we be if we didn’t know how to deal with the downtrodden as equally as we do with the fantastic and absurd?

The New Revolution

We are both blessed and befuddled to be part of the growing accessibility of knowledge. What once must have been sought out in the corners of obscurity is now constantly at our fingertips, and our incessant thirst for information has been quenched by a rush of new devices plugged into the outer-reaches of cyberspace. The advancement of modern technology is, by all measures, the new frontier of the human existence. Fifteen years ago it was seen as remarkable that anyone with a home computer could plug into a worldwide network to exchange ideas and communication; now, even those realities seem primitive, and with the advent of tablets and smart phones people can now swap data while constantly on the move, never losing sight of their busy lives even while the Internet stretches their conscious focus.

Wes Craven, 1939 - 2015

“Horror films don’t create fear. They release it.”

That quote – as well as many morsels of seasoned wisdom, both on screen and off – is now all that is left of the man that once was the gifted Wes Craven. Gone at the age of 76 due to brain cancer, the assemblage of dedicated fans that he acquired over the course of a prosperous 40-year career must now unite in contemplative pause, jolted by the shock of his sudden passing all while trying to remain in perspective of celebrating an extensive backlog of notable film accomplishments. Many referred to him as the “Master of Horror” during the height of his popularity, and perhaps that title is as apropos as any singular classification can be; he was a pioneer that brought foreboding ideas to the height of their fearsome possibilities. What was a scary movie, really, other than a collection of grotesque visuals meant to inspire momentary outburst in local multiplexes in the early years of cinema? When he took hold of the concept, he did the unthinkable: trapped it all into a context of shuddering realism.

Precious Wisdom from a Silent Balcony

From the first moment that movie criticism awakened these youthful senses, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert have been at the driver’s seat of my creative aspirations. In life, they took on an almost mystical essence as figureheads of a quiet destiny; while they years have chugged along, the remains of their influence reverberate with the kind of astounding richness that settles within, and adds drive to an evolving perspective. That their careers – and their interactions – now remain frozen in a stasis of countless YouTube videos and ongoing personal discussions is as inspiring as it is haunting, and for nearly every week of my adult life I have ventured into their world for more thoughtful insight. That world seems much smaller now that their guidance in informing our future has been silenced by mortality, and yet they remain a symbol of the enduring work ethic of movie journalists. How they did it for so long, and so tirelessly, is a prospect few of us can begin to comprehend, much less compete with.