There tend to be two different ways that movies deal with any sort of American immigration. First there’s the white savior syndrome, wherein the noble but one-dimensional foreigner trying to get a green card is saved by a grumpy, cynical, but secretly angelic white city-dweller. And, as a result, they both learn to be better […]

Here’s an audio interview I conducted with character actor Daniel Franzese, star of Bully, Mean Girls, The Missing Person, and the upcoming remake of I Spit on Your Grave. In the course of an hour, Daniel told many detailed stories about how he was cast in Bully, despite Larry Clark’s intense dislike of him, how […]

Those of us lucky enough to have seen Exhausted*, the 1981 John Holmes sycophant-umentary, may remember something the now world-weary director Julia St. Vincent, said on the DVD commentary. She described Holmes’ pursed lip expression during his moment of climax as one of his “monkey faces.” Now as the title character in MacGruber, the adaptation […]

Here’s a 30-minute Q&A with Vincenzo Natali, the director of Splice, which I recorded after a screening of the film last week. Vincenzo was very composed and self-effacing and was willing to answer any question (including a deliberately absurd one I asked early on). Those who haven’t seen Splice may want to skip through this […]

There’s a reason the public, and especially those within the industry, consider Hollywood executives as the unofficial whipping boys for the evil studio system. It doesn’t only have to do with their need to justify their jobs by offering up extraneous and contradictory notes and suggestions for filmmakers to improve their products. It isn’t just […]