Don't go in the light, no wait, go into the light! - The Last of the Great 70s Dads, First Bad 80s: Craig T. Nelson in POLTERGEIST (1982)

The year of 1982 was, as we cineastes know, the great year of American science fiction and fantasy. Not only did we get enduring faves like THE ROAD WARRIOR, CONAN THE BARBARIAN, BLADE RUNNER and THE THING, there were two movies from the Spielberg camp, ET, and POLTERGEIST. Like a capstone to the great 70s, 1982 was a time to regroup on issues of masculinity, fatherhood and the outsider relation to the social order. A dad was notoriously absent from...

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Flo, the Great and Powerful: THE GREAT ZIEGFELD (1936) and the Ludovico Flu

I've been sick all week with a terrible flu--hallucinating, vomiting, sleeping round the clock-- and it all comes to a head and makes sense with THE GREAT ZIEGFELD (1936). I was raging with fever, sleeping in torrid bursts of super dreamy weirdness.  I wound up at the movies, of course, in 'the Martha Graham Dance Cinema Annex,' with girls smoking Virginia Slims everywhere while calling their moms and using the rail up to the aisle seats as...

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Language! Drinks! Cake! Oppression!

Watching Tarantino's INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS for the sixth time recently all I could do was absorb the language barriers; all those dinner parties I sat through in Buenos Aires while intellectual friends of my ex-wife talked in rapid fire Argentinian Spanish suddenly came into clarity. Quentin's whole film is about being at one of those dinner parties. Is he dating an Argentinian? Or wait, no, Che! Che es claro! C'est un chick francais.Either way, when...

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