Originally published on The Solute Roger Ebert ends his review of It’s a Wonderful Life with a story. “At a seminar with some film students in the 1970s [Frank Capra] was asked if there were still a way to make movies about the kinds of values and ideals found in…

Originally published on The Solute Listen: Eraserhead has come unstuck in time. It’s autumn, 2012. I’m lying on a bed in a dorm room in Tennessee across from my roommate’s life-sized poster of himself. …

This article first appeared on The Solute It seems hard to believe now, but in 1953, Dr. Seuss’s picture books were just a side gig. Like most commercial illustrators, he spent the first half of his career as a kind of Renaissance man, bouncing between advertising, men’s humor magazines, political…

Originally published on The Solute Content note: This article references sexual assault Like all of the films in Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project, Dry Summer comes with an introduction from Marty himself. He says he didn’t see the film until it was rediscovered as part of the Project, and after…

Originally published on The Solute Once upon a time, you had to actually grow up with someone to reminisce about your shared childhood. But now, thanks to the mass media, people from wildly different backgrounds can connect online over the TV and movies of their youth. Spongebob shirts and Little…

Originally published on The Solute Well, Christmas is over. The gifts have been unwrapped. The pretty paper’s gone into the garbage. The tree’s starting to shed dead, dry needles. The lights are coming down (or at least they will sometime in the next month or two). And when the rush…

Originally published on The Solute Content note: This article discusses sexual assault and incest Unreal people are well-represented in Twin-Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. Of course, there’s the explicitly fantastical residents of the Black and White Lodges: the White Horse, the Arm, the Tremonds (nee Chalfont), BOB, and MIKE. And…

Continued from… Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Originally published on The Solute I know I’ve spent this whole series trying to prove that the Dark Age of Animation was not, in fact, an error. …

Continued from… Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Originally published on The Solute Who Framed Roger Rabbit? deserves more credit than any other single movie for ending the era. …