January 2012
2 posts
6 tags
Young Adult (2011)
YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN.
by Danielle Lee
I was a little worried, going to see Young Adult during a visit to my suburban California home town, that I would too readily identify with main character Mavis Gary, played by Charlize Theron.
A 37-year-old that too easily wriggles into the shallow high school characters she writes for a once-popular YA (industry shorthand, she explains to Sweet...
5 Perfect Uses of Music
by Andrew Root
Film scores and soundtracks can be cynically derided as telling the audience what to feel; a cheap shortcut to poignancy or a false sense of excitement. It’s kind of an unjust argument. The music is meant to enhance and support the emotion of a scene. Simply put, that’s its job. But music can be used in some innovative and thrilling ways which elevate the sequence and create...
December 2011
22 posts
STORM SYSTEMS OF GROUP SUFFERING: A 2011 YEAR END LIST AND CATCH-ALL OF THE ZEITGEIST USING EPISTOLARY FORMS
by Evan Scott Bryson
Of the two people I’ve ever loved—the one is in Afghanistan, and the other I dumped on Tuesday. I’m ready for 2012. I’m ready for anything.
—
5 December 2011
Hey Evan,
[…] also, mom said you got quite emotional on the phone last...
The Year in Review
2011 MOVIE CHARACTER FANTASY FOOTBALL DRAFT
by Chris & Elizabeth Cantwell
(with Special Guest Judge Brendan Joyce, Fantasy Football Expert)
We’ve watched a lot of movies this year. And as the NFL playoffs approach, what better way to take stock of those films than with a fantasy football matchup? We listed out all the major films to hit U.S. theaters in 2011, then went about a quick ...
4 tags
The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)
by Andrew Root
Jim Henson was dead, to begin with. A freak bout of pneumonia had taken away the man who was at the centre of countless projects and characters; the very voice of Kermit himself. Richard Hunt—who performed Beaker, Scooter, Sweetums, and Statler, among many others—had also died, and the number of beloved characters that had been shelved out of respect was ever growing. How could The...
4 tags
A Christmas Carol (1951)
I WEAR THE CHAINS I FORGED IN LIFE
by Letitia Trent
Unlike most kids between eight and twelve, I dreaded Christmas break more than I dreaded school, and I dreaded school almost every day to the level of sickness. Dread made my stomach churn while on the inevitably long bus rides (we always lived at least ten miles from town); dread made me plan exactly by which door I’d enter the school...
7 tags
White Christmas (1954)
WHITE CHRISTMAS, DECONSTRUCTED
by Elizabeth Cantwell
As most of my friends know, I tend to conceptualize movies in terms of brief, disconnected scenes that for whatever reason stuck in my mind. (So: “The Godfather is the movie where there’s a cat on Brando’s lap, and people are making some kind of red sauce, and Al Pacino is in the rain, and they shoot James Caan at a toll...
It's A Wonderful Life (1946)
IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE?
by Chad Perman
It’s easy to lose track of your life. All of us do it, in one way or another, locked up so tightly in our own heads - our own private little worlds - that we lose sight not only of The Big Picture, but of even our own smaller pictures: our families, our friends, the things we set in motion, the lives we impact and influence on a daily...
Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992)
AN INTERVIEW WITH KEVIN MCCALLISTER ON THE 20TH YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF HIS ABANDONMENT
by Bebe Ballroom
He is forty minutes late. The pigeons in Central Park have taken the seat on the bench next to me. His hot chocolate is cold chocolate now. My phone buzzes and sends the pigeons scattering. He has sent a text message. It reads:
Traffic! ={
He shows up twenty minutes later, walking briskly in...
4 tags
National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (1989)
GETTING THE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS RIGHT
by Erica U.
All month I’ve been contemplating which holiday movie I wanted to write about and I’m embarrassed to tell you how much time I spent googling “obscure Christmas film.”
It wasn’t that I wanted to put on airs of sophistication or intellectualism (I watched several seasons of The Hills and went to see Superbad the night it came out; No...
A Christmas Story (1983)
AMAZON REVIEWS AS WRITTEN BY THE CHARACTERS OF A CHRISTMAS STORY
by Michelle Said
Red Ryder Carbine-Action 200-Shot Range Model Air Rifle (Compass in the Stock)
The best present of all time!!!!!
by Ralphie (Hammond, Indiana)
This is my dream gun! I have wanted this BB gun for so long! It’s basically perfect in every way imaginable! Not only is it ideal for playing cowboys and indians but...
4 tags
Keanu Reeves Week: Thumbsucker (2005)
THUMBSUCKER, or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Keanu Reeves
by Andrew Root
“Why are you talking like that?”
Pre-2005, Keanu Reeves was a joke to me. He was one of the only actors to whom I would not give a chance. I felt personally affronted when I found out that he had played Don John in 1993’s Much Ado About Nothing, a film based on a Shakespearean play, for god’s sake....
4 tags
Keanu Reeves Week: Johnny Mnemonic (1995)
HACK YOUR OWN BRAIN
by Elisabeth Geier
My brother was sitting in his usual seat. Glaring at his phone. I had a movie to watch. He had dibs on the living room.
“You wanna watch Johnny Mnemonic?” I asked.
“You wanna get stoned and watch Johnny Mnemonic?” he asked back.
I’m not one to get stoned and watch a thing, but I knew this movie sucked. Maybe it would suck less on drugs. Maybe...
5 tags
Keanu Reeves Week: The Matrix (1999)
I CAN ONLY SHOW YOU THE DOOR, YOU’RE THE ONE THAT HAS TO WALK THROUGH IT.
by Katie West
The other day I was watching Transformers: Dark of the Moon. (Don’t judge me.) At the beginning of that movie, there’s a depiction of the first moon landing. Sure, in the movie the entire reason for going to the moon was to discover the crash site of a robotic alien race, but it was still amazing. The...
6 tags
Keanu Reeves Week: Speed (1994)
IT’S JUST LIKE DRIVING A REALLY BIG PINTO.
by Liz Shannon Miller
In most major metropolitan areas around the world, taking the bus is a natural part of life, with no stigma attached. In Los Angeles, though, taking the bus is seen by many as weird and dangerous; a last resort for those struck by the tragedy of being carless. So of course a movie about a bus gone amuck is set in this...
4 tags
Keanu Reeves Week: The Lake House (2007)
THIS (TIME) MACHINE KILLS REALISTS
by Bebe Ballroom
I’ve been staying with my grandmother in a retirement community for the elderly and the disabled. I am neither elderly nor disabled and so I am not actually allowed to be here. It’s sort of like the ill-advised movie In Her Shoes starring Toni Collette and Cameron Diaz except that this is rural Missouri and I’m not Cameron Diaz. ...
4 tags
Keanu Reeves Week: Point Break (1991)
by Edward Montgomery
“Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophical wreck.”
- Immanuel Kant
The ocean only seems overt.
Though Heraclitus has been immortalized contemplating the quiet flux and power of a river over time, to me, the ocean still seems the bigger mystery. It is something that cannot truly be explored, regardless of our...
5 tags
Keanu Reeves Week: Bill &Ted’s Bogus Journey...
YOU MIGHT BE A KING OR A LITTLE STREET SWEEPER, BUT SOONER OR LATER YOU DANCE WITH THE REAPER
by Michelle Said
I assume that you are familiar with Bill S. Preston, Esquire and Ted Theodore Logan, they of metalheaded duncehood and the time-travelling phone booth. And I will assume that you may be in your 20s or 30s and you may have seen this movie and its predecessor as a child. I will assume it...
5 tags
Keanu Reeves Week: Parenthood (1989)
LIFE IS WHAT HAPPENS TO YOU WHILE YOU’RE BUSY MAKING OTHER PLANS.
by Brianna Ashby
I sat on the toilet for at least ten minutes, crossing and uncrossing my eyes, trying to make sure that the faint pink line that had appeared in the window wasn’t a figment of my imagination, or an optical illusion, or some strange shard of refracted pinkness that was magically hovering just over that...
4 tags
Keanu Reeves Week: River's Edge (1986)
TAKE ME TO THE RIVER.
by Letitia Trent
Keanu Reeves’ brand of blank-faced, affectless, trying really hard acting is easy to mock: you’ve probably intoned “I know Kung Fu” at least once since The Matrix came out. His presence as a pretty-but-not-terribly-talented actor can hide the fact that Keanu Reeves tackles challenging roles as often as he does mainstream ones. The most well-known...
5 tags
Hugo (2011)
LIFE IS BUT A DREAM.
by Chad Perman
I go to the movies because of movies like Hugo. I believe in movies because of movies like Hugo. And not to put too fine a point on it, but this entire site basically exists because of movies like Hugo.
Martin Scorsese’s first truly family friendly film (yes, really; Taxi Driver this ain’t) is a cinematic love letter to those of us who’ve...
@BWDR →
A Bright Wall in a Dark Room has joined the Twitter masses. You know what that means. Follow us here!
November 2011
5 posts
5 tags
Melancholia (2011)
LIFE IS ONLY ON EARTH AND NOT FOR LONG.
by Letitia Trent
Melancholia opens with eerie, dream-like, slow-motion scenes: A woman clutches her child as she trudges through wet ground on an immaculate golf course, another woman watches as wisps of energy leak form her fingertips, and a horse falls down slowly as the sky turns dark. Wagner’s overture from “Tristan and Isolde” plays...
5 tags
Catching Hell (2011)
“AND THAT’S A CUBS FAN WHO TRIED TO MAKE THAT CATCH.”
by Elizabeth Cantwell
My husband is a huge fan of the Chicago Cubs. Like everyone I know who’s a big Cubs fan, this loyalty goes back in his family for generations. His uncle’s father (who went by the nickname “Lefty,” after his pitching arm) secured the family’s first season tickets in the 40’s or 50’s, and accepted...
6 tags
Drive (2011)
“THERE’S A HUNDRED THOUSAND STREETS IN THIS CITY.”
by Edward Montgomery
Step one for this essay is the communal recitation of our postmodernist plight:
“Nothing is simple these days. Little is whole. We are part technology, part broken-family, part digital, part unknowable, and incapable of belief in mystery. Our days are blurs: commutes forgotten over pixel-strings of...
3 tags
Troubled Water (2008)
by Sarah Malone
I first drove into Middlebury, Vermont late on a Sunday afternoon in August. It had been cool up in the mountains, but the valley was wide with sun and there was no breeze, and everyone in the car, loudest of all the friend who’d insisted we needed to gulp down a breath of if not city than at least town air, forgot that wish for the more immediate one of gulping down ice cream....
4 tags
Cloverfield (2008)
PEOPLE ARE GONNA WATCH THIS.
by Liz Shannon Miller
Nothing kills me in a horror film like the details. Endless CGI wastelands are not nearly so heartbreaking as a half-burned photograph of a family vacation, or a beheaded teddy bear waiting for the return of the child who loved it. Intimate details like those are the secret sauce that makes movies like The Exorcist so terrifying —...
October 2011
6 posts
Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)
THE FIRST RULE OF VAMPIRISM
by Emily Yoshida
When it comes to art, I’m a big fan of rules – always have been. While it’s certainly fun to see wild displays of creative abandon done well by filmmakers I admire, it is just as equally a joy to see an artist shine from within the confines of a game they did not invent. Perhaps that’s why I’ve come to be such a...
4 tags
The Blair Witch Project (1999)
THE WAITING IS THE HARDEST PART
by Erica U.
My older sister went to see The Blair Witch Project before I did; she was always the cool early adopter. She was the first to play me Morrissey and Cure tapes, which she borrowed from the emo boy who stocked shelves at our small town grocery store. You could watch the overnight workers shuffling like ants in a glass farm, restoring inventory...
Rosemary's Baby (1968)
WE THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE
by Andrew Root
Roman Polanski’s landmark horror/drama (and his first American film) is an awkward movie for at least the first 90 minutes. In the first scene following the credits, Rosemary (Mia Farrow) and her husband Guy (perhaps so named because he could literally be anyone else, but is here played by John Cassavetes) are being shown an apartment. They...
50/50 (2011)
by Elisabeth Geier
This morning, Adam went for his regular run. He took the same route as always, and looked both ways crossing the street. He went home, showered, and got to work on time. This afternoon, Adam is sitting in a doctor’s office, being told that he has a massive, malignant tumor along his spinal cord, and he may or may not die within the year.
“How can I have a...
4 tags
Contagion (2011)
AWAITING THE INEVITABLE
by Matt Moore
In your standard horror movie, there’s actually a lot of hope. You hope the main character survives. It’s a driving function of the character, regardless of their background, because we all have one thing in common: we don’t want to be dead. So whether you’re being chased by Leatherface, battling Freddy in dreams, making it through...
September 2011
17 posts
7 tags
Dazed and Confused (1993)
PARTY AT THE MOON TOWER!
by Danielle Lee
Obviously a fond look back on “the best years of [your] life” is going to include getting wasted in the woods. Driving a car blasting “Free Ride” in your Chevy Chevelle Super Sport on your way to score Aerosmith (circa Toys in the Attic!) tickets on the first day of summer. Building a wooden bong in shop class! 1976.
Or your modern-day equivalents,...
8 tags
Can't Hardly Wait (1998)
CLASS OR SEX? WHAT SHALL I DO?
by Michelle Said My high school years were not all that special. I fell into a group of girls on the first day of school that would be my friends for the following four years. Two of those girls were my best friend for three years and then my worst enemies for one year, for reasons that are too complicated to go into here (we are still not friends). So, I was...
Wonder Boys (2000)
by Brianna Ashby
“In my experience, I have found that the solutions to all of life’s most intractable problems are not found through any form of intellect or cleverness. They are solved simply by moving on.” – Carl Jung
It’s been raining all day. As I write I can hear it coming down, steady and insistent, and I keep getting lost in the hushed cacophony of a million drops of water hitting...
Superbad (2007)
LOVE IS STRANGE: SETH + EVAN 4EVA
by Erika Schmidt
Superbad is a love story.
You might not realize it until the very last frames of the film, when Seth (Jonah Hill) and Evan (Michael Cera) have finally scored impromptu dates with their respective crushes and are parting ways at the top of a suburban mall escalator. As Seth descends on the escalator with Jules (Emma Stone), he turns to look back...
Sixteen Candles (1984)
I’VE NEVER BAGGED A BABE
by Tess Lynch
I am going to admit to several embarrassing things over the course of this review/essay; it’s not right to avoid these topics when you’re writing about a movie whose characters orbit around a big burning mass of embarrassment. They’re governed by humiliation, these teenagers — the orthodontia! The panties made public!...
Can't Buy Me Love (1987)
THE CAPTAIN OF THE FOOTBALL TEAM AIN’T GOT SHIT ON ME
by Chris Cantoni
High school. High school never changes. It’s been almost twenty-five years since Can’t Buy Me Love came out, and, in twenty-five more years, high school will still be the exact same thing: a place to put teenagers so they can socialize and form cliques and try to figure out who they are. In other words, it sucks.
...
4 tags
Real Genius (1985)
IT’S A MORAL IMPERATIVE
by Elizabeth Wilcox
I don’t know anyone who dislikes Real Genius. I’ve been trying to figure out precisely why that is. In keeping with the spirit of the movie, I’ve come up with a sort of preliminary equation/hypothesis:
[80s Nerd Revenge Narrative x (Val Kilmer + College Dorm)] ÷ Authority FIgure Villain = “I Can Relate To That” + Nostalgia
How does this...
4 tags
Footloose (1984)
YOU EVER GET BUSTED FOR BOPPIN’?
by Elisabeth Geier
Junior year of high school, all the girls took dance for phys. ed. It was a zero period class, meaning it met before the start of the regular school day, early enough that for much of the year it was still dark when we got to the gym. I was no dancer, but few of us were; it was a way to get out of regular P.E., away from...
4 tags
Never Been Kissed (1999)
IF YOU FAIL GYM, YOU’LL NEVER GET INTO COLLEGE
by Katherine Spada
I was twelve years old when Never Been Kissed came out twelve years ago. Even then I think I knew that there was something creepy about the conceit of an adult posing as a high school student and then falling into a love triangle with an actual teenager and a teacher unaware of the disguise. Despite that, I genuinely loved...
Revenge of the Nerds (1984)
C’MON, GILBERT, LET’S GO TO COLLEGE
by Chris Cantwell
On the vinyl soundtrack for Revenge of the Nerds (which I got from Amoeba for one dollar), they laid in fart sounds during the refrain of the title track, something to the tune of “Revenge of the Nerds! (fart) Revenge of the Nerds! (fart).” The fart sounds are not in the movie version of the song.
I think this explains Revenge of ...
On Attending The Telluride Film Festival, part 2
by Edward Montgomery
There is a strange form of community in Telluride that forms around the festival. Telluride’s population is often split between thrill-seeking tourists, Hollywood titans on reclusive vacations, and simple townies that have come as part of a mid-life crisis or as an enviable denial of the need for a career. Aging hippies and long-time bartenders eye the crowd of...
3 tags
On Attending The Telluride Film Festival, part 1
by Edward Montgomery
One should not travel to Telluride reading about geology.
On my daily gondola ride into the town, I found myself staring at the striated ridges and ancient domes around me like a child in wonder at seeing the world for the first time. The gondola itself rises quickly out of Mountain Village (Telluride’s bastard, ski-town child) and hits an elevation of over 12,000’...
4 tags
Like Crazy (2011)
DON’T THINK ABOUT IT.
by Katherine Spada
I was twenty, and had just graduated from college a few months prior. My internship had yielded an unbelievable job offer that everyone told me was foolish to pass up. However, I’d already planned a gap year to travel, and that was not something I wanted to turn down. So off I went to Australia for six months, and that’s where I met...
L.A. Stories
by Almie Rose There are a lot of movies about Los Angeles so let’s just get the obvious ones out of the way: L.A. Story, Clueless, Chinatown, The Player, Valley Girl, even Boogie Nights. It’s not that I don’t love these movies; I do. But I’d like to focus on other L.A. movies that are more prone to radar slipping. Movies that, as a Los Angeles native, I really dig....