comedy

Fluid Dynamics: Sexual Displacement in Billy Wilder’s ‘The Apartment’

Fluid Dynamics: Sexual Displacement in Billy Wilder’s ‘The Apartment’

Billy Wilder’s most savage of American comedies, The Apartment, skewers corporate culture and patriarchal structures while challenging viewers to read its spills and overflows as more than just accidents.

Camp and the Hyperreal Telenovela in Almodóvar’s ‘All About My Mother’

Camp and the Hyperreal Telenovela in Almodóvar’s ‘All About My Mother’

In All About My Mother, Pedro Almodóvar leverages hyperreality through a camp lens to narrate a story that is as rich in theatricality as it is in the nuanced emotionality of the dream.

Comedy Series ‘The Afterparty’ Is Among the Last of Its Kind

Comedy Series ‘The Afterparty’ Is Among the Last of Its Kind

The second season of Apple TV’s funny, inventive, and self-indulgent comedy whodunnit The Afterparty is utterly unnecessary in the best way.

Lenny Bruce vs. Lenny Bruce: The Real and the Imagined

Lenny Bruce vs. Lenny Bruce: The Real and the Imagined

There are two Lenny Bruces: 1. the real-life subject of thoughtful documentaries and biographies, and 2. the TV/movie hip mentor and accidental deity.

French Pop Cinema of the 1960s Brings Tintin to Life Twice Over

French Pop Cinema of the 1960s Brings Tintin to Life Twice Over

Tintin is one of the secret engines of 20th Century pop culture in Europe and Hollywood, as shown in these James Bond-like movies for the elementary school crowd.

Communitas and Comfort Television

Communitas and Comfort Television

Through the glow of comfort television, we experience communitas – that feeling of “the lost heaven” of the collective – and, for a time, we are relieved of our existential alienation.

Jaboukie Young-White Shows Off Music Chops on Debut

Jaboukie Young-White Shows Off Music Chops on Debut

Jaboukie Young-White’s clever wordplay, creative use of metaphor, and engaging storytelling prove he’s adept at applying his perceptive talents to music.

Pee-wee Herman: The Existentialist at Play

Pee-wee Herman: The Existentialist at Play

Pee-wee Herman forever lives in a cosmos without a supernatural giver of laws. In such an existentialist world, Nietzsche says, we must be like children and invent a world of meaning, lest we be consumed by the great void.

Can Barbiecore Put Some Color into Corporate-World Fashion?

Can Barbiecore Put Some Color into Corporate-World Fashion?

Barbiecore might be more than a summer phase. The Barbie movie has some women thinking it’s time we rocked the pink in corporate-world fashion.

3D ‘Robot Monster’ Boasts Sex, Destruction and Space Apes

3D ‘Robot Monster’ Boasts Sex, Destruction and Space Apes

Robot Monster‘s reputation as a best/worst movie might be challenged in this 3-D format showcasing a boy’s libidinous dreams.

What ‘The White Lotus’ Conveys About the Fraudulence of Perception

What ‘The White Lotus’ Conveys About the Fraudulence of Perception

Through its storytelling method of glances, we see The White Lotus‘ critique of our tendency to extrapolate that which we do not understand, and to fill gaps in our knowledge with ideologies, mythologies, learned stereotypes, and meme-logic.

Fashion Is the Loose Thread in the ‘Barbie’ Movie’s Pink Armor

Fashion Is the Loose Thread in the ‘Barbie’ Movie’s Pink Armor

The pink fashion in the Barbie movie may seem like feminism, but if you squint deeper into the pinkwashing, you’ll spot some loose threads that you just have to pull.