Filmsuck

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.