This is a perfect movie. Wow. Prepare for a hare-brained argument for why this movie should be praised much more highly than it has been.
On its surface, this is a film about three adult men in suburbia who suspect that their new neighbors are up to something nefarious. A familiar kind of story told dozens of times. Obvious analogues that come to mind are Rear Window and Disturbia, but the trope of “our neighbors are up to something” is…
A central insight of psychoanalysis is that what you forget can be as important or even more important than what you remember. The thought is that forgetting is an active psychic process. Forgetting is not just an accident; it’s a subconscious action. Therefore, paying attention to what we forget can teach us about the aspects of ourselves that we want to forget most deeply. [Hypothetically. This thought neglects the necessity of an outside analyst, but I’ll set that aside for…
In his book on photography, Roland Barthes made the distinction between the “studium”- the point of the photo that the photographer tried to capture-vs. the “punctum”- aspects of photos that grab or “prick” the viewer that the photographer may never have considered or anticipated. Consider a photo of Taylor Swift in a crowd and your friend is in the background. The photographer likely wasn’t trying to take a picture of your friend, but photography grabbed her image too. I like…
I’m a firm believer in evaluating a piece of media based on the genre of thing it is. It makes less sense to evaluate a something as a film in a general sense than it is estimate it against other romances, Indy films, exploitation films, etc. Rap world is an excellent, hilarious YouTube film. Even though it was screened in theaters-and boy would I have loved to have been at one of those-it is a film made for YouTube. It…
A feminist critique of American Masculinity. The direction is great and amazingly illustrates Bateman’s vanity without objectifying the women in the film. I’m glad I watched this film for its tone, kind of an amazing achievement, but a lot of the iconic scenes and twists had been spoiled for me. That’s what happens when you’re late to the party!
In 1967, Marshall McLuhan published a book based on an aphorism he has had coined in his writing about new technologies and their effects: _The Medium is the Message._ One of its central ideas is that technology communicates to us on a level other than any specific piece of content. The means by which something is communicated matters as much as the specific idea being conveyed. It would be strange to read Shakespeare in a newspaper because the physical material of…
