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Feature

Coming of Age, or, the Inversion of Expectations in The Last Picture Show

Life is not a stroll across a field – Boris Pasternak Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show (1971) reveals, in a poignant and compassionate tenor, the evolution of youthful expectations as they are molded, corrupted, and realigned by the passage of time. When youthful ambitions are seen through the prism of adulthood they refract strange […]

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Feature

To Desire Romantic Closure: Love as Avenue to Immortality in Wings of Desire

Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire (1987) is an ambitious, poetic meditation on the way we each inhabit our own inner world, skimming the surface of another’s truth and experience, but rarely penetrating it. We each occupy an individual landscape of memories, secrets, and fears. We seek repose and solace in the lives of others as a […]

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Feature

Badlands and the Taxonomy of Escape

“The world was like a faraway planet to which I could never return” – ​Holly, Badlands Terrence Malick’s directorial debut ​Badlands (1973)​ is in many respects a tale of escapism writ large over a collection of isolated interior and exterior landscapes. Our protagonists seek to construct their own mythologies and rewrite their own histories, with […]

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Feature Music & Film

Self-Isolation Soundtrack: Charting Interior Terrain with Eddie Vedder’s Into the Wild Soundtrack

As I walk The Hemisphere Got my wish To up and disappear -“No Ceiling”, Eddie Vedder Into the Wild’s ​(2007)​ soundtrack integrates all of the contours, nuances, and mysteries of the wild and tamed places and becomes a living moodboard of the American landscape. We can hear the winds sweeping across the canyons of Arizona, […]

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Feature Screengem

Screengem: Otto’s single earring in Repo Man (Alex Cox, 1984)

In Alex Cox’s directorial debut Repo Man (1984), Emilio Estevez’s character Otto Maddox muddies the traditional code of appropriate masculinity with his brazen take on counterculture sartorial expression. His swagger and screw the man credentials are made manifest by his solo earring, seen petulantly swaying from his left ear. There is a nebulous sensuality to […]