“Look around you, this is the uprising.” When Children of Men was released in 2006, it flopped. It had nothing to do with the filmmaking. Visually, this is one of the most striking films of the last two decades. It flopped because the story was too real. The politics...
Off of Broad Street, deep in Scott’s Addition between warehouses and alleyways, is a black hole in the wall filled with music, vintage VHS, and (perhaps most importantly) Richmond’s preeminent collection of horror-themed pinball machines. I came to Wax Moon on a cool evening, unsure of exactly what I was looking for, until an all-black,...
“You have to learn how to kill.” In Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark, the vampires aren’t sexy. There’s nothing particularly interesting about them. They’re not Eurocentric romantics; they’re pure Americana, highway drifters chasing the night. They burn. They kill. Nihilism is fundamental to their vampirism—a Vampira Americana, if I may...
“Dick Laurent is dead.” The one road you might never leave is David Lynch’s The Lost Highway. Released in 1997, between the cathartic black box of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and the bruised dreamscape of Mulholland Drive, The Lost Highway might be Lynch’s low-key masterpiece. This film is a frontier: an interplay of visuals and...
