Monster: Based On A True Story (2003), written and directed by Patty Jenkins. Aileen Wuornos: The Life and Death of a Serial Killer (2003); The Selling of Aileen Wuornos (1992), directed by Nick Greenfield. From 1989 to 1990, a ragged drifter, Aileen Wuornos, murdered seven men along a stretch of central Florida freeway. Her MO bore the […]
ON A CERTAIN TENDENCY IN THE BOND AND CLOUSEAU FRANCHISES (This piece was published as “BOND REVISITED, CLOUSEAU OBSERVED”, in FILM/PSYCHOLOGY REVIEW, Volume 4, #1, 1980, pp. 140-51. My remarks then were prompted by the latest Inspector Clouseau film, THE REVENGE OF THE PINK PANTHER , released in 1979, and sixth in the Clouseau series. […]
It’s as difficult to predict whether film stars playing lovers will sizzle sexually, as it is to foretell whether a mundane pair of actors will ‘click’. Hardly catastrophic when friends you’ve fixed up are turned off rather than wildly switched on. But megabucks and careers ride on a major studio’s faith that matching the latest […]
This Boy’s Life: directed by Michael Caton-Jones In the tradition of a classic bildungsroman, the autobiographical hero of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a sensitive adolescent, alienated from his repressive provincial surroundings. Stephen Daedalus’ vaulting ambition, his contention with narrow-minded paternal authority figures, identifies him with Icarus. That […]
Science fiction cinema has consistently, if unconsciously, manifested an intriguing split in its attitude toward the machine, treating it unabashedly as a dehumanizing oppressor while lovingly lingering over its gleaming gizmos. Crash, scripted nearly faithfully by David Cronenberg from English sci-fi writer J.G. Ballard’s 1973 cult novel, knowingly interrogates this ambivalence in a harrowing exploration […]
From his earliest researches, Freud frequently ground his clinical theories in the recognitions of art, liberally crediting the intuition of the artist that preceded psychoanalytic insights. Freud’s followers were quick to follow the master’s lead. Variably accurate versions of analytic theory soon spread to respectable and “fringe” artistic circles. Studies of art by analytically inclined […]
Robert B. Ray argues that mainstream American cinema has often death with a serious social ill by reducing it to a personal matter. The impact of racism or anti-Semitism upon a few individuals is portrayed, then a tidy reconciliation is served up involved a convenient change of heart or show of good will. Unwary viewers […]
The impact of troubling memories has always been a staple of movie melodrama, including a spate of contemporary films about adult survivors of child abuse who recover their mental health by retrieving past traumas i therapy. On a broader scale, genres diverse as the epic, western, comedy, war and weird movie have een pervaded by […]