
James Franco
The Monster in 'Mysterious Skin'
Greg Araki’s film Mysterious Skin (2006) is an adaptation Scott Heim's novel about two eight-year-old boys in Kansas who are molested by their baseball coach.
"Song of Myself": Why Walt Whitman Was the Original Kanye West
In this age of social media, self-promotion is the name of the game. We all have our little avatars, our little pictures and texts that we put out into the electronic world, that we hope get “liked.” Walt Whitman too was a self promoter, a performer, a...
Ambigu-Gus Van Sant
Gus Van Sant’s first film to be released in theaters was Mala Noche (1985), based on the memoir of the same title by Portland poet Walt Curtis. It depicts Walt as a gay convenience-store employee attracted to a Mexican migrant worker. His film...
Universalizing Art: 'The Disaster Artist' and 'The Room'
The Disaster Artist is a book about the making of a film called The Room, which came out in 2003 and has since achieved a glorified cult status as possibly one of the worst movies ever made; its director/lead actor/writer, Tommy Wiseau...
How to Structure Your Life: A Review of Corey Feldman's Biography, 'Coreyography'
I think I can learn a lot from Corey Feldman’s autobiography, Coreyography. At the age of three, he became the family’s breadwinner; with that came a host of unfair responsibilities for the young Corey. Does that explain how he turned into the...
Richard Prince, Roland Barthes, & Remythologizing the Myth of the Cowboy
Richard Prince came to the attention of the art world in the 1980s for appropriating the Marlboro Man advertisements into his own photographs. Eventually one of his Cowboy photographs would become the first photo sold for more than $1 million, but is...
Fassy B. Heats Up 'Twelve Years a Slave'
Twelve Years a Slave is a real account, written in 1853, by a man named Solomon Northup, a freeborn black man from New York who was kidnapped and sold into slavery. The book and the movie detail many of slavery’s horrors, as experienced by...
Revelation in ‘Mystic River’
In books like A Drink Before the War, Shutter Island, and Mystic River, the murder mysteries give the story movement, while the hidden traumas of the characters bubble up to the surface.
Spring Break: A Fever Dream
What is spring break today? In Spring Breakers, it is not the literal MTV-sponsored parties that take over and infect various beach locations across the American continent, although that version of spring break is certainly evoked for its...
J. D. Salinger's War
The Catcher in the Rye is Salinger’s war book. Although it’s masked as a coming-of-age novel, it is about a character dealing with PTSD. Holden is J. D. Salinger, working through his loss of faith in humanity and all of the atrocities he...
Jake Gyllenhaal Is the Perfect Gumshoe in ‘Prisoners’
Prisoners is awesome. I loved, loved, loved it. The atmosphere, the pacing, the framing, the acting, and the subject matter are all so good. I love that my man Jake Gyllenhaal is back as a hard-hitting actor. His detective Loki is mysterious...
Writing to Live in Hollywood
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Pat Hobby Stories and the Coen Brothers' Barton Fink are twisted, nightmarish takes on what happens when writers come to Hollywood—they're often crushed by the bureaucratic machinations of the small-minded...