Notes from the sketch book

How do you make a movie about the total collapse of the American character without the audience running out of the theatre in a panic? In the summer of 1982, John Carpenter released The Thing, and the audience did just that—they ran, they recoiled, and they rejected it. The cinematic representation of extraterrestrial contact and invasion from 1951 to 1988 serves as a barometer for American cultural anxiety, charting a distinct and evolving trajectory of paranoia and conspiracy. By analysing six seminal films—Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), The Thing (1982), They Live (1988),...

In the first subject of the Among Us collection we look at two films that tap into the nightmare of paranoia and fear over two decades.

Science teacher Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) wakes up on a spaceship light years from home with no recollection of who he is or how he got there. As his memory returns, he begins to uncover his mission: solve the riddle of the mysterious substance causing the sun to die out. He must call on his scientific knowledge and unorthodox ideas to save everything on Earth from extinction... but an unexpected friendship means he may not have to do it alone.   I popped along to the cinema to check it out...   Gosling has spent the last ten years nailing...

How do you take someone who’s been drawn and redrawn until he’s basically just a corporate logo—and make him feel like he’s actually breathing? That’s the big trap with iconic heroes: they turn into statues. By the late ‘80s, Batman was headed straight for a pedestal. He was becoming this grim, stiff monument of "detective fiction" that had lost its spark. A Breyfogle comic is to remember why we fell in love with this stuff in the first place, before everyone started insisting that "graphic novels" had to be somber and "literary" to matter. Breyfogle didn’t give us a literary...

Hearing the news about Robert Duvall passing at the age of 95 didn't feel like a sudden shock. It was more like watching a massive, weathered book finally snap shut, one that I've been thumbing through my whole life.  Duvall always felt omnipresent to me, he was old even when he was young. Think back to his flickering moments as Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird. I was probably first aware of Duvall during my first trips to the cinema during the 90s where despite the standard of the actual movie he would always be a stand out giving...