On Not Drinking Windex I often tell my students to make a good film, put two characters in a cardboard box, and imagine what they’d begin doing to one another. The Guilt Trip (Anne Fletcher, 2012) is such a film, about a son (Seth Rogen) and his mother (Barbra Streisand) who drive from New York ...

Tarantino’s Not So Sweet Bad Ass Song, or The Sauerkraut Western Revisited For at least the first 90 minutes of its bloated 165 minutes, Django Unchained is, if not a great film, at least a very good one. However, given the ending, I don’t think the things that interested me are those that interest Quentin ...

The Shot Heard ‘Round the Cinema Parental Guidance is the sort of film—a crowd-pleasing holiday release, mildly funny with a seemingly simplistic “family is good” message—that academic critics avoid like the plague. This is a tremendous mistake. Of three holiday releases—The Hobbit, This is 40, and Parental Guidance—the latter is the most sociologically significant. There ...

Javert’s Tightrope Act Claude Lelouch’s Les Miserables, one of the many very good film adaptations of Victor Hugo’s 1862 novel, begins with an intensive close-up on actor Jean-Paul Belmondo’s  face. It is a pivotal scene in the novel, when Jean Valjean realizes that his behavior tormenting a young chimney sweep has failed the test a ...

Forty Candles, No Light Judd Apatow’s new film, This is 40 purports to be for people like me: white, middle-aged, married. In some areas, the film scores well. There is a certain angst—not quite a mid-life crisis, but a gnawing reality that more than half of your life is over and it’s about time to ...

We are Such Star Stuff As Cinematic Dreams Are Made On In the middle of “Who Speaks for Earth?,” the last episode of Cosmos (1979), which gets my vote for the greatest American television show of all time, Carl Sagan worries passionately about the threat of global thermonuclear war. After having explained the 20th century ...

What’s Surprising about This Dream Ship? The success of the film spin-offs of Bavarian comedian Michael Herbig’s Bullyparade (ProSieben, 1997-2002), Germany’s televisual equivalent to the U.K.’s Monty Python’s Flying Circus (BBC, 1969-1974) and the U.S.A.’s Saturday Night Live (NBC, 1975-present), is of considerable importance to a new, World Cinema-focused media studies, as these very popular ...

Captive Space In his review of Cowboys and Aliens (2011) for Entertainment Weekly, Owen Gleiberman declares: “the gifted director Jon Favreau stages a kind of mini-Rio Bravo set in a dusty mining town full of cowards and bullies.” Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, 1959) is not the John Wayne Western that first comes to mind. That ...

There, but seemingly never back again. Once upon a time, there lived a guy who loathed the guy who wrote about the hobbit who lived in a hole in the ground. In 2001, I was happily writing crazy popular reviews for an arts monthly in Bozeman, MT. Despite writing whiteness and masculinity critiques of a ...