The Tropicana
i. The Shrine
He was eleven the first time he snuck downtown to visit the Tropicana, accompanied by some older boys from Bishop Pinkham Junior High. He no longer recalls what season it was, but he feels that it had . . .
Category Archives: Brick 108
Murmuring in a Dream of Freedom
We are masked. Mine is black with white elephants parading across it, the fabric from my local Nigerian seamstress, who now sells them in the front window of her shop. His is simple black, warrior-like and fitting for this October . . .
On 28 Weeks Later (Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, 2007)
It’s a measure of how underrated Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 Weeks Later is that when I recommend it to people, they’re often startled. There are probably a couple of good reasons for that. First, horror as a genre still seems . . .
On Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Werner Herzog, 1972)
First the steep mountain and clouds, then a red line of movement, and closer still, a cannon and a priest, a statue of the Virgin Mary, two Spanish women awkwardly carried in covered litters, the chained and enslaved Inca men . . .
On Underground (Emir Kusturica, 1995)
In April of 2020, a friend called me from Los Angeles to tell me that Chris had killed himself. Someone had found him in his Venice apartment. We had all gone to film school together in the late 1990s—I somewhat . . .
On Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1974) and My Name is Not Ali (Viola Shafik, 2011)
I consider Ali: Fear Eats the Soul to be the masterpiece of the iconic German filmmaker, Rainer Werner Fassbinder. In the movie, Fassbinder confronts the taboos of a conservative German society with a story of race, migration, class, and intergenerational . . .