Bela and Boris Episode 1: Where the Monsters Came From
Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff were two middle-aged, foreign, struggling actors who became huge stars thanks to Dracula and Frankenstein
Tourmaline on Transgender Storytelling, David France, and the Netflix Marsha P. Johnson Documentary
"Too often, people with resources who already have a platform become the ones to tell the stories of those at the margins."
Is there an art to dubbing movies and TV? Yes, and Germans have mastered it.
It turns out that there are plenty of reasons why dubbing became a thing in Germany while other European countries took the subtitling route. Inevitably perhaps, the story includes Nazis, Communists and…
Ghostbusters is a Surprising Antidote to Lovecraft’s Dismal Worldview
Ghostbusters is a perfectly structured film. Desire lines are clear scene by scene. Act breaks are sharp and propulsive. Every payoff is set up early in the film, including Mr. Stay-Puft. The…
This Future Looks Familiar: Watching Blade Runner in 2017
I would not call the world of Blade Runner strange, because it’s the opposite of strange. It’s familiar. If you subtract the flying cars and the jets of flame shooting…
I Saw “Mother!” So You Don’t Have To
Mother! is what happens when a dude has an idea he thinks is brilliant and no one checks him on it.
Technobabble
UK podcast star Helen Zaltzman of The Allusionist helps me figure out why one set of poorly understood pseudo-scientific terms can sink a scene, while another set can make a…
Keeping ‘Insecure’ lit: HBO cinematographer Ava Berkofsky on properly lighting black faces
Any brown person who’s taken a selfie in the club can tell you cameras aren’t made for us. Yet in Insecure’s club scenes, dark-skinned protagonists like Yvonne Orji’s Molly continue…
Night of the Living Dead – Horrors of Copyright
A quick look at George Romero's feature debut and the copyright issues that shaped the zombie genre.
Divine Trash Documentary 1998
The life and times of Baltimore film maker and midnight movie pioneer, John Waters. Intercut with a 1972 interview of Waters are clips from his first films and recent interviews…