Smart Words About Cinema
Paranormal investigators Margaret Matheson (Sigourney Weaver) and Tom Buckley (Cillian Murphy) spend their time finding the fraudulent in every outbreak of the weird and inexplicable. “We look for red lights,” Weaver’s perpetually pinch-faced prof lectures her class. “Discordant notes … things that shouldn’t be there.” And there you have it, the spot-on definition of Red Lights, [...]
[originally published in Film Comment, July-Aug 1992] A Greimasian semantic rectangle will foreground the structural importance of the cat in the complex of signifiers generated from the notion “human”: [see diagram at right] The founding term in the film is human (S), represented by the image of Ripley as the strong woman. The antihuman (-S) [...]
In Scream 2, the question of whether a sequel can be better than the original film becomes a running gag, with participants intermittently suggesting examples. For Wes Craven, it’s just another of the many self-referential gestures in his Scream films and elsewhere. But for film lovers, it’s a game worth playing. Enthusiasts differ on whether [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 64-65, March 1980] As a horror movie, Alien is appropriately concerned with collective nightmares (being chased and caught; the monster is below us, now above us; someone we know is, in fact, not human), and lustfully derivative of the genre’s white-middle-class fears that give rise to the nightmares (loss of [...]