The Mumpsimus

I have discovered that links to the video and text essays I created some years ago for Press Play and Indiewire no longer work, so I am going to begin archiving them here. Since it's October, I'll start with a couple of horror and Halloween-themed pieces. Since Rob Zombie has a new movie out this month, and Willow Catelyn Maclay has just published what seems to me a significant look at the attraction of Zombie's films (a better essay than my own work here), this seems like a good piece to start the archival process with... CINEMAS OF CRUELTY! Press Play , October 2013 The feature films that Rob Zombie has made between 2000 and 2013 create new styles of emotional and perceptual disturbance from the corpses of cultural products past. True to his name, Zombie reanimates dead tropes, turns, and troubles into powerful attacks on our expectations and desires. By summoning the spirit of previous movies, particularly, Zombie encourages us to think we are watching a...

Over at Press Play, I have a brief text essay about and a video tribute to Christopher Lee , who died on June 7 at the age of 93. Here's the opening of the essay: Christopher Lee was the definitive working actor. His career was long, and he appeared in more films than any major performer in the English-speaking world — over 250. What distinguishes him, though, and should make him a role model for anyone seeking a life on stage or screen, is not that he worked so much but that he worked so well. He took that work seriously as both job and art, even in the lightest or most ridiculous roles, and he gave far better, more committed performances than many, if not most, of his films deserved. Read and view more at Press Play.

Press Play recently posted a new video essay I created on Satan in cinema along with a brief text essay . Here's the beginning of the text essay, should you need some enticement... The character of Satan seems far more appealing to filmmakers than the character of God. This may be for reasons of propriety: one should not, perhaps, make too many images of God. But since when has Hollywood cared about anything other than money and stardom? God isn’t any good for either. Omnipotence is just too boring. There are devils in most films, because most films are melodramas of one sort of another, and no melodrama works very well without some embodiment of evil. But Satan himself (or herself or theirself or anyself — Satan, like every angel, fallen or not, is any gender and every gender) is a less common figure. One of the most powerful Satanic representations in film history wasn’t even technically of Satan: it was Mephistopheles in Murnau’s Faust , still one of the most visual...

  Press Play has now posted my new video essay with a brief accompanying text essay about the great new science fiction action movie political parable satire call to revolution Snowpiercer , directed by Bong Joon-Ho, a filmmaker I am especially enamored of. ( Memories of Murder is easily among my favorite movies of the last 15 years , and back in 2010 I defended Bong's previous film, Mother , from the criticisms of Richard Brody at the New Yorker .) As a little bit of extra, below the fold here I'll put some thoughts on elements of the remarkable ending of the film...