I love it when my friends are well published. But this is a rare occasion. Two of my favorite writers on film — one a recent graduate of Seattle Pacific University, the other a recent graduate of SPU’s MFA in Creative Writing program — are featured in the new issue of Bright Wall/Dark Room.
Lauren Wilford gives an epic and insightful close read of Vertigo. The essay is now featured in its entirety at RogerEbert.com.
It involves a thought experiment. Wilford proposes that we
…experience “Vertigo” through the eyes of its female lead, Judy Barton. What was once a mystery becomes a horror film, a story of anxiety so profound that it approaches body horror.
In the same issue: Alissa Wilkinson on The Birds.
(But you’ll have to buy the issue to get that.)
Congratulations, Lauren and Alissa!
Looking forward to the day you and your significant others all decide to move to Seattle.
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The backlash against Starbucks’ holiday cups is going too far.
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Steven Greydanus, at Crux, writes:
In the cultural upheaval following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, a wave of German historical films cast a critical eye back to Germany’s painful 20th-century history.
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These new German historical films or “German heritage films” are typically accessible and popular in form, classically realistic in style, and moralistic in tone, inviting viewers to empathize with historical figures or characters in historical contexts in their individual choices to collaborate or to resist, and to contemplate what we would have done in that situation.
He goes on to compare and contrast two films about “faith, conscience, and state-sponsored evil”: Sophie Scholl: The Final Days and The Ninth Gate.
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For anyone who’s been paying attention…
