Perhaps you remember that in old movies, a woman would be screaming and crying in rage or anguish, and oftentimes, a nearby man would say, “She’s hysterical!” And he might slap her, or, if it were available, inject her with a sedative. Hysteria used to be a medical diagnosis, and it was thought that the…
Bernie is based on Skip Hollandsworth’s 1998 article in Texas Monthly titled “Midnight in the Garden of East Texas.” It was so titled because of its similarity to John Berendt’s massive bestseller “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil:” a picturesque small town, a weird murder, bizarre and hilarious supporting characters, and a protagonist…
I have never seen an episode of Dark Shadows, the gothic supernatural soap opera that ran on ABC from 1966 to 1971 on which Tim Burton and Johnny Depp’s new movie is based. Based on what I’ve read about it, however, I’m pretty sure I’d like it: Vampires. Secrets. Magic. Melodrama. High camp. These are…
Chris Evans and Chris Hemsworth in The Avengers The Avengers I just saw a headline online that asked, “Is The Avengers the greatest comic book movie ever?” I don’t know what the writer’s answer was, but I know what my response to the question would be: No, it’s not the greatest comic book movie ever….
I’m currently getting divorced, so filmed engagements have started to irk me, and as I watched the opening scenes of The Five-Year Engagement, in which Tom (Jason Segel) fumbles through his proposal to Violet (Emily Blunt), I thought, “This is going to end in tears, you nitwits.” Sometimes a movie hits a little too close…
There was a period in the early 1990s when Whit Stillman was going to be the WASP Woody Allen. With Metropolitan and Barcelona, Stillman had made hyper-verbal, hyper-intellectual, and hyper-ironic comedies about privileged white people from the Northeast, been nominated for an Oscar for the former and lauded by critics for the latter. But 1998’s…
Unfortunately, most people only know about the documentary Bully because the Motion Picture Association gave it an R rating for an utterance of the word “fuck,” refused an appeal, and then, following a nationwide outcry orchestrated by the mogul and PR genius Harvey Weinstein, relented and gave the film a PG-13. The rating matters particularly…
Goon For a few years in the 2000s, one of my roommates was a skinny hipster Canadian who loved Belle & Sebastian and Alice Munro and David Cronenberg movies, and so it was surprising to me that the mix he made for the road trip we took to Montreal opened with the theme song to…
During the last ten years, Hollywood has been obsessed with turning young adult sci-fi and fantasy series into billion dollar film franchises, and not always successfully. For every Harry Potter and Twilight there have been movies like The Golden Compass and The Dark Is Rising. While the Harry Potter movies eventually became watchable, even good,…
Jeff, Who Lives at Home When I was getting my master’s in fiction writing, one of my professors had a rule that has stuck with me for the last 13 years: “You can only have one coincidence per story.” Characters should be the engine of the story; their actions, decisions, quirks and mistakes need to…
