Filmsuck

Heatwave Horror

In this Filmsuck Summer Film Series (FSFS) episode we're focusing on horror films set in vacation settings. We discuss the beachy shock effects of Jaws and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, and especially concentrate on the lakeside summer camp slasher terrors of Friday the 13th. Our special guest Ian Miller joins us to discuss the original Friday the 13th (1980), which was written by his father, screenwriter Victor Miller, whom Ian admits suffered from "Mommy issues." Hence his resentment of sequels featuring Jason as the iconic killer, when Jason's mother was meant to be the REAL killer.

The Girls of Summer

We're kicking off our Filmsuck Summer Film Series (FSFS for short) with a tribute to films and TV about teen girls making the most of their magical interlude of freedom. We're also sharing some partially hidden gems that you might not know about: 2018 indie film Skate Kitchen and its current HBO series spin-off Betty, both directed by Crystal Moselle, about the NYC adventures of a real-life female crew of skateboarders, and the 2019 directorial debut of Oliva Wilde, Booksmart, a hilarious comedy about two high-achieving nerd-girls who spent their high school years studying and decide, on the eve of graduation, to have all their teenage fun in one epic night.

Halston Held Hostage by Ryan Murphy

This week we're taking on the Ryan Murphy Problem by examining the new five-episode Netflix series Halston, produced and co-written by Murphy. It stars Ewan McGregor as the famous one-name fashion designer whose spectacular rise backed by huge corporate money made him a king of NYC in the Studio 54 era, and whose equally spectacular fall in a cloud of cocaine powder stripped him of nearly everything, including the Halston name. It's great material. So the question is, how does Murphy manage to screw it up?

Tallulah Bankhead - Never Boring

In this episode of Filmsuck we justify our love for Tallulah Bankhead, the sensational star of stage, screen, radio, and television whose outrageous wit, frank enjoyment of recreational drugs and alcohol, and wild sexual adventuring made her as famous as her acting from the 1920s to the 1960s. She used to tell reporters, "Say anything about me, dahling, as long as it isn't boring," and we do our damnedest to honor her request.

Tennessee Williams on Film

Happy 110th birthday, TW! In this episode of Filmsuck we're reveling in the mind-blowing film adaptations of Tennessee Williams' great plays such as A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), and Night of the Iguana (1964). The most celebrated American playwright of the mid-20th century, Williams' riveting explorations of tormented sexuality, lacerating family trauma, the sick cruelty of the dominant culture, the desperation of the marginalized, and the "devouring" face of God make for a surreal and unforgettable cinema of excess.

Bridgerton: WTF

This is, in a way, a continuation of last week’s special Anti-Valentine’s Day episode about “peak libido” and unsexy cinema and television, because we’re talking about the supposed counter-example of Bridgerton, which is getting raves for its red-hot period-piece sexiness. Special guest co-host Emily Robbins helps Eileen fathom the Regency romance subgenre in order to understand the phenomenon that is Bridgerton, which is such a huge hit on Netflix, it’s kind of…bizarre.

Anti-Valentine's Day and Unsexy Cinema

Today in honor of this awful holiday we're doing an anti-Valentine's Day episode, lamenting the dreary unsexiness of most film and television of our time. We're wondering if it's part of a much larger phenomenon--the depletion of erotic energy in our collective existence that's running alongside the depletion of other planetary resources. That's the topic of the book we're discussing entitled Peak Libido: Sex, Ecology, and the Collapse of Desire by our very special guest, Dominic Pettman, university professor of Media and New Humanities at The New School for Social Research.

Fascinating Fascism

In the latest Filmsuck episode we take on the depressingly timely topic of fascist aesthetics, in terms of historical development and cinematic representations. For example, did you know that the success of the notorious white supremacist film Birth of a Nation (1915) inspired both a resurgence in the Ku Klux Klan but also their adoption of the full white-hood-and-robe uniform featured in the film? And that before that point, KKK members had dressed in motley carnivalesque costumes more similar to the Q Anon rioter outfits worn to storm the capitol building on January 6th? Some other questions we consider include: why are the Nazis, whose professed ideology was arguably anti-art, anti-intellectual thuggery, frequently portrayed as highly cultured dandies in movies? And--if we consider the dapper Nazi villains of Hollywood as part of a fascist continuum with the Germanic tribe cosplay of the Q Anon rioters--is there such a thing as a fascist aesthetic?

YES WE FRAN

Dolores and Eileen talk All About Fran--i.e. writer-humorist-raconteur-ultimate New Yorker Fran Lebowitz--in the new Martin Scorsese docuseries Pretend It's a City, now playing on Netflix. We celebrate Fran L., "public wit," mordant naysayer, and the last bohemian standing, representing a lost gritty urban paradise of art, books, music, and hanging out smoking, drinking, and eating with fellow creative types. 

Oscar Wilde and Film

Happy 2021, all! Here's our first episode of the bright new year, featuring Filmsuck's new co-host, Dolores McElroy! We're talking about Oscar Wilde as wit, socialist, decadent, and aesthete, whose ideas about the fabulous lives that belong to the people by right and the importance of embracing the fantastical in art can readily be applied to the mass art of film. Part of the suckage of cinema in our time can be traced to the societal embrace of realism and moralism in art, both tendencies opposed by Wilde. We focus on the eerie and opulent black-and-white 1945 MGM adaptation of Wilde's only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, as our favorite of the many Wilde adaptations--you know, the one with the great, gruesome Ivan Albright painting shown in Technicolor? Take a listen.