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Scream Is Not a Parody. It’s the Moment the Genre Turned Around and Looked at You.
The phone rings. Casey Becker answers. She is making popcorn. She is alone. The caller is friendly, flirtatious. He wants to talk about movies. “What’s your favorite scary movie?” Casey plays along. She likes horror. She knows horror. She has seen Halloween. She is, in every recognizable way, a horror movie audience member: she has…
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Network Is Not a Satire. It’s a Business Plan.
In 1976, Paddy Chayefsky wrote a film about a news anchor who has a nervous breakdown on live television and becomes the highest-rated show in America. The film was called Network. It was received as satire. It won four Academy Awards. It was praised for its prescience, its anger, its willingness to imagine a world…
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Mulholland Drive Is Not a Puzzle. It’s a Suicide Note.
Everyone wants to solve Mulholland Drive. That’s the first mistake. The second is thinking David Lynch wants you to. Since 2001, the film has generated more decoding attempts than perhaps any American film of its era. Reddit threads, YouTube essays, academic papers, all trying to crack the sequence, identify the “real” timeline, map the dream…
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Birdman, or: The Man Who Couldn’t Stop Being the Thing He Used to Be
Salieri was never chosen. That was his tragedy. Riggan Thomson was chosen. He was chosen spectacularly. He was loved by millions, paid by studios, recognized on the street, worshipped in the dark of a thousand multiplexes. He wore a cape and flew across screens and the world said: you matter. Then the world stopped saying…