In the pilot episode of Mike Judge’s sorely underrated music history series Tales from the Tour Bus, Judge explains he wanted to do the show because he found it funny that conservatives constantly bemoaned the violent, drug-fueled antics of gangster rappers when so many country legends were just as wild, if not worse. Any good student […]
A Million and One Places to Go: Revisiting the Art of the Hustle in Susan Siedelman’s Smithereens
Do you have a picture in your head of New York? Does it come from real life? Or the memory of art? I know the New York I see when I close my eyes. It is rooted in history but still basically myth, culled from photographic histories of the births of punk and hip hop, […]
Anarchist Cody Wilson Takes on the Government in The New Radical
It’s difficult to watch a documentary like The New Radical without bringing in your own biases. That’s likely the point, considering the title and the subject matter. It’s supposed to feel alienating and disarming, to make you consider viewpoints that aren’t your own, and certainly to make you a little bit angry and defensive. And […]
Unsung Genius is on Display in Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story
In 2017, it’s not unusual to learn about women who have made major advances in science, technology, literature but have never been given the real credit they deserve for it. Rosalind Franklin was almost certainly the person who made the actual discovery of the double helix. Alice Guy’s husband took credit for the movies she […]
Three Billboards and the Exploitation of Black Activism
Around the midway point of Martin McDonagh’s new film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Frances McDormand’s righteously angry Mildred heads to work, only to find a post-it note on the door from her co-worker Denise (Amanda Warren) reading “I’ve been arrested :(” Mildred is immediately aware that Denise’s arrest is because of Mildred’s war against the […]
Pop Rehabilitation: Jawbreaker
Not content to let their pop passions go unloved by the masses, Loser City staff have banded together to provide Pop Rehabilitation to the works that have been unjustly maligned and forgotten. Today Nick Hanover revisits Darren Stein’s underappreciated 1999 flop Jawbreaker, which he argues was a far more representative teen film experience than its more successful peers and successors. […]
Patti Cake$, Brigsby Bear, Logan Lucky and the New Sincerity in Film
Out in the real world of 2017, the dominant theme might be “destroy everything,” yet a number of indie films this year have offered a much needed reprieve from that by focusing on sincere stories about escape through creation. These films don’t shy away from depicting the trauma and fear of the real world- it […]
Dystopic Homesick Blues: Series 7: The Contenders
Because the world is always a mess, we’ve decided to look back at dystopic works and examine why they remain so potent no matter how many years have passed between their creation and now. This week’s installment is on Daniel Minahan’s Series 7: The Contenders and its warning that the media’s commodification of white rage and […]
Visual Domination: Angelina Jolie’s Sexual Power in Mr and Mrs. Smith
“A woman must continually watch herself. She is always continually accompanied by her own image of herself.” This is because, as John Berger puts it in Ways of Seeing, “to be born a woman has to be born…into the keeping of men.” In male-dominated Hollywood, women’s careers are entirely in the keeping in men. Hollywood, […]
Pop Rehabilitation: Constantine
Not content to let their pop passions go unloved by the masses, Loser City staff have banded together to provide Pop Rehabilitation to the works that have been unjustly maligned and forgotten. Today Nick Hanover makes the case that Constantine is the best film DC has made this century, regardless of how hard they now try to pretend […]
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