A Tale of Two Heroines: Revisiting the Past with Gone with the Wind (1939) and The Wizard of Oz (1939)
In the year 1939, two blockbuster movies burst onto the big screen in brilliant technicolor, forever changing the face of American film: Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz. On the surface, the heroines of both films have…
Aliens Just Like Us: The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) & Under the Skin (2013)
“Every village and small country place is full of people who’ve just come and settled there without any ties to bring them. The big houses have been sold, and the cottages have been converted and changed. And people just come…
A Deluge of Dark Water(s): The Dark Waters of Dark Waters (1944), Dark Waters (1993), Dark Water (2002), and Dark Waters (2019)
When I was a child, I thought I was surrounded by bad guys. This is not a metaphor. I had the creeping suspicion that everyone I knew—my grandma, the dentist, the children’s pastor at my church, my pre-school teachers, everybody—was…
Love Jones (1997) & The Photograph (2020): The Value of Words
Nearly 25 years ago, the producers of the independent gem Love Jones had a modest and honest goal with its romance. They sought to make a modern film about African-American life that did not use violence and/or recreational drugs as…
Superman & The American Way: The Music of Superman (1978) & Man of Steel (2013)
The first Superman comic was published in 1938, kick-starting the superhero genre and introducing the world to a new hero who would eventually come to fight for “truth, justice, and the American way”. There have been many iterations of the…
The Bright Abysses of The Lighthouse (2019) & Sunshine (2007)
“And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look upon God.” Exodus 3:6 (NKJV) The story of Moses and the burning bush has rattled my being since I was old enough to understand its nuances. An all-consuming fire…
Gavin O’ Connor’s Miracle (2004) & The Accountant (2016)
“But you looked at me and I could see your mother in your eyes I thought about the things she lost and how she always cries And how your daddy tries to fight the truth with Bombay gin And I…
Hell Is Behind That Door: Suspiria (1977 & 2018) and the Curse of Knowledge
How does one go about remaking Dario Argento’s blood-splattered hallucination Suspiria? One doesn’t. Were one to try they would wreck upon the shoals of its bewildering non-plot and nightmarish visual logic. The most a writer or director can do is…
Whose Playground Is This?: The Florida Project (2017) & The Beach Bum (2019)
Florida was a meme long before the internet. A vacation destination, a retirement home, a place where dreams came true—all the manufactured joy money can buy. For all of Florida’s appealing façade, it often seems that common sense gets trapped…
The Pains of Being Human: The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot (2018) & The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part (2019)
We all live with the weight of our life’s choices. Some of those choices we seem to forget about by moving on with our lives. Others linger with us for a long time, perhaps even the rest of our lives.…