Friday, February 3 2012
Kafka Noir: ‘The Sickroom’ and ‘A Country Doctor’
Serge Marcotte's The Sickroom compresses Franz Kafka's A Country Doctor into a nightmarish rush of hard-boiled film noir cynicism that, like all the best literary adaptations, is simultaneously faithful and unique.
Wednesday, October 26 2011
Tough Guys Recite: The 5 Best Poetry Spittin’ TV Characters
Every generic hero on TV can finish a poetic quotation or identify a poignant quatrain (down to the line numbers). But few can spit Tennyson or Yeats with such venom as these guys.
Friday, October 7 2011
Jean-Teddy Filippe’s ‘Forbidden Files’: Found Footage Lost (and Found Again)
Oddly missing in histories of the "found footage" genre, Jean-Teddy Filippe's "Forbidden Files" offers intriguing glimpses at horror and fantasy flickering into an uneasy camcorder reality, ten years before The Blair Witch Project made it fashionable (and lame).
Thursday, July 28 2011
Robot Dreams: ‘Transformers’ and ‘Sex Kittens Go to College’
Retro Remote nominates Sex Kittens Go to College as Transformers' true precursor. The problem with Tranformers-type franchises is that the criticisms can only annoy people by reminding them of what they have chosen to ignore.
Friday, May 20 2011
Killing Osama bin Laden and David Mamet’s Special Ops Drama, ‘The Unit’
Viewing the world through a haze of vaguely remembered TV shows, tough-guy dialogue and TV jingles, the news about Osama bin Laden’s death quickly turned thoughts to The Unit, the TV series created by once-great writer David Mamet.
Thursday, March 31 2011
Betty Boop and Bimbo Get Into a Sexual Tangle in ‘Barnacle Bill’
The Fleischer Studios' Betty Boop cartoon Barnacle Bill embraces the pleasures of the perpetrator far more than the fate of the victim, where a cute cartoon pup gets to be a sexual predator and stoke our prurient interest in the 'joy of punishment'.
Tuesday, February 22 2011
What ‘La Femme Nikita’ Has to Say about Egypt and Former President Hosni Mubarek
La Femme Nikita's miserable and corrupted world of moral dead zones and US-sanctioned torture forces its hero to make a real-world choice between pragmatic collusion or principled, perhaps doomed, resistance.
Tuesday, January 11 2011
Frankie Goes to Hollywood & Gets There Behind the ‘Wheel’ of a Classic Commodore 64
'Frankie Goes to Hollywood' on the Commodore 64 is a surrealist nightmare in 16 colours, where GTA-style freeform roaming rules, and the band's sexual imagery forms a hedonistic scavenger hunt for aponia, the Epicurean absence of pain.
Wednesday, November 10 2010
Paul Robeson: A Resonant Voice That Will Never Be Fully Silenced
Modern day 'political' celebrities can't hold a candle to Paul Robeson, who always flaunted his politics even when it was perhaps most dangerous to do so.
Friday, October 22 2010
Prime-Time Nuclear Destruction: ‘Medic’, ‘A Flash of Darkness’
When it comes to prime-time half-hour visions of nuclear destruction, there's none better than Medic episode, 'A Flash of Darkness' from Valentine's Day 1955, a surprisingly bleak eruption of nuclear despair.
Friday, September 17 2010
Can You Imagine Standing in Line Just for a Newspaper?
'Suddenly and with little warning: STRIKE!' So began a 17-day newspaper delivery strike that prevented newspapers from getting to newsstands and doorsteps, as immortalised in the 1945 short, 17 Days: The Story of Newspaper History in the Making.
Tuesday, August 10 2010
‘Leave It to Beaver’ Is Probably Closer to Real Life for People Today Than Many Would Admit
Leave It to Beaver's problem is not that it no longer fits modern social concerns, but that it does so too blatantly. God forbid a modern hipster should let loose a chuckle and thus irrefutably acknowledge dull suburban ambitions!
Thursday, July 1 2010
The Seven-Layered Arsenic Cake of Madame LaFarge and Other Crime Classics
Crime Classics, a 1953 CBS ‘true crime’ radio series, seems to be something of a slap in the face to audiences’ sense of identification and notions of self-importance, presenting a vision of a callous and petty world where the individual matters little, and their thoughts and feelings matter less.
Wednesday, May 26 2010
Pete Seeger’s ‘Rainbow Quest’: The Anti-TV, TV
Somewhat awkward, clunky and charming on his TV show, Pete Seeger seemed to trust the viewers in the same way he recognised that TV's priorities don't represent the priorities of the people he meets in his travels.
Thursday, April 29 2010
Robert Culp: From ‘I Spy’ to ‘Hickey & Boggs’
Robert Culp and Bill Cosby's wit and warmth in I Spy also established a foundation of fragility and fatalism for Culp's despairing Hickey & Boggs.
Thursday, March 25 2010
Beyond Barthes: Shawn Michaels vs The Undertaker, Wrestlemania XXV
If any wrestling match has crossed over to the emotional realm, it's the epic bout between Shawn Michaels and The Undertaker, but is it enough to bring sensitivity to professional wrestling?
Monday, February 15 2010
The Simpsons, ‘Radio Bart’ Part 2: ‘Ace in the Hole’ and Jessica McCllure
'Radio Bart' may not offer any solutions, but it manages to compress an extraordinary amount of media history, compassion, manipulation and cynicism into a sharp, quick and funny 20-minutes or so.
Thursday, February 4 2010
The Simpsons, ‘Radio Bart’ Part 1: Floyd Collins and Kathy Fiscus
'Radio Bart' draws on 70 years of media history to position itself in that uneasy mix of altruism, morbid curiosity and callous self-interest.
Monday, January 4 2010
This New Year’s Eve Really Did End with a Bang
Nothing like spending New Year's Eve with couple of white guys pretending to be black guys during a war-time year worthy of blowing its own brains out.
Thursday, November 12 2009
The Prisoner: ‘Fall Out’
The Prisoner's unapologetic payoff of surrealism and absurdism heads into that artistic realm where meaning is defined more by resonance than by immediately identifiable relevance.
Tuesday, October 20 2009
Pete Kelly’s Blues
Jack Webb's glum radio series 'Pete Kelly's Blues' is a sigh of a tribute to the roaring '20s, a melancholic parade of blistering jazz and the pointlessness of its own nostalgia.
Wednesday, September 23 2009
The Frontier Doctor’s Fancy ‘Queen of the Cimarron’
Frontier Doctor's church-prescribing gumdrop-toting hero comes face to face with the unthinkable: a tough-talkin' hard-done bad-girl with money on her mind (gulp).
Thursday, August 27 2009
All in the Family: Gloria Sings the Blues
Where a thousand stone-faced social dramas have despaired over the decay of interpersonal relations and marital unity, this is the interpersonal angst of an Ingmar Bergman movie saved by a sitcom ending and a live studio audience.
Tuesday, July 21 2009
In the Wrestling Ring with Ric Flair, Where ‘Evil is the Natural Climate’
Ric Flair epitomizes Roland Barthes' 'perfect bastard', adopting a cowardly and devious state of jerkdom, elevating his coarse existence into some quasi-mythological state of being.
Thursday, June 18 2009
‘Have Gun - Will Travel’: Return to Fort Benjamin
With attempted justifications of military torture on our minds, Retro Remote heads back to the '50s TV Western to find a surprisingly tough moral stance on the U.S. military's destruction of human dignity and dehumanisation of 'enemy combatants'.
Friday, May 8 2009
Gidget’s ‘Dear Diary—et al.’ – and All that May Imply
As things start getting a little steamy, Retro Remote 'sinks into nothingness' trying to mix Gidget and some serious film theory.
