Note: This essay was originally written to accompany a screening of Gap-Toothed Women, Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers and Always For Pleasure for Nowhere Film Club, on April 3, 2025 A Blank Buffet: The Documentaries of Les Blank Gap-Toothed Women (1987, United States, 31 mins) Directed by: Les
Romantic comedies and achieving conventional happiness in unconventional ways
David Lynch passed away today. He was 78.
Tetsuo is a great film. Tetsuo is a film about sex. It is a film about sexual repression and how you can find purpose and love in embracing the parts of your sexuality which are abject and freakish.
Slasher films are about male killers inflicting sexually charged violence upon female victims, as punishment for their sexuality. Black Christmas, however, presents an overtly feminist political subtext.
There is a tension in Carnage between Mackay’s clear desire to create a new language of transgender cinema versus her tendency towards homage and pastiche. Here, the pastiche wins.
In the face of the fall of the Soviet Union and the apparent total cultural victory of liberal democracy, a general malaise set over the West. What does one do when your way of life appears to have beaten out all others?
...in Cat People (1942) and Crimes of the Future (2022).