masculinity ← Walter's World

Book Club (2018)

Sep

12

2018

“Club Sandwich” On the surface, Bill Holderman’s Book Club (2018) is a delightful romantic comedy. The film concerns four middle-aged women with various lifestyles who meet periodically to discuss books they’ve chosen to read together. The engaging star power of the central cast provides the movie with plenty of comic energy: Diane (Diane Keaton) is ...

Sully (2016)

Oct

28

2016

“Eastwood’s Flight” Despite his political orientation, Clint Eastwood makes films which do something far more complicated that jingoistic patriotism: his cinema interrogates the impact of war trauma on the lives of everyday Americans. In his first directorial efforts, Play Misty for Me (1971) and High Plains Drifter (1973), Eastwood foregrounded traumatized Americans on a home ...

Mad Men: “Maidenform” (2008)

Dec

1

2015

“Can There Be Two Don Drapers?” In the 19th century, the theatrical melodrama built its structure around moments of emotional tension which would end scenes, acts, and sometimes the play itself, allowing people to contemplate the high stakes of morality on display. Characters would freeze into a stage picture, and the curtain would go down ...

Aloha (2015)

Dec

1

2015

“Underlining Masculinity” Cameron Crowe’s latest film, Aloha (2015) is not nearly as bad as you’ve been led to believe. Yes, Emma Stone, with those huge eyes, plays a one-quarter Hawaiian and one-quarter Chinese fighter pilot, and Bradley Cooper is as irksome as he usually is, but the film is certainly no worse than that most ...

Casino Royale (2006)

Dec

1

2015

The Worlds of Bond’s Body In Casino Royale (Martin Campbell, 2006), James Bond (Daniel Craig) tracks a terrorist, Alex Dimitrios (Simon Abkarian) to downtown Miami. The villain enters a Body Worlds exhibition, which he is using as the drop location for a satchel containing a bomb. Why would Dimitrios choose the controversial display of preserved ...

Mad Men: “The Jet Set” (2008)

Jul

5

2014

Televisual Meditations on a Literary Emergency The study of the adaptation of literature into moving images has become mired in a pedantic fixation on how poorly film and television does in capturing the greatness of their written forebears. The fascinating AMC televisual drama, Mad Men provides an opportunity to theorize more complex relationships between the moving ...