Think about the last great film you watched. Think about the villain. The hero. The moment that made you hold your breath. Now think about the person who made that moment possible — the one who authorized it, enabled it, set it in motion from a distance. The one who was there, in the background,…
The Decade of Anchoring Others For the better part of a decade, David Dastmalchian’s primary function in Hollywood was to make other people’s visions more real. He was the ground wire for Heath Ledger’s Joker. He was the psychological stress test for Denis Villeneuve’s thriller. He was the emotional anchor for James Gunn’s action spectacle….
Six Days Between the Cut and the Coffin Stanley Kubrick delivered his final cut of Eyes Wide Shut to Warner Bros. on March 1, 1999. He died six days later, on March 7, of a heart attack in his sleep. He never gave a single interview about the film. He never explained his intentions, never…
Audiences believe they are choosing entertainment. What they are actually choosing is the avoidance of discomfort. Mark Wahlberg has built a career on knowing the difference. The Choice That Is Not Really a Choice Every weekend, millions of people stand in front of a movie theater marquee or scroll through a streaming menu and make…
A mother whose daughter has been murdered, raped, and left to die does not think about what to wear in the morning. That was Frances McDormand’s reasoning when she insisted that Mildred Hayes, her character in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, wear the exact same blue jumpsuit every single day of the film. Not a…
We live in a society that is completely obsessed with the illusion of perfection. From the carefully filtered images on our social media feeds to the highly manufactured public personas of our favorite celebrities, we are constantly bombarded with the message that flaws are unacceptable. We are taught that to be loved, to be successful,…
“I am just a character actor.” Paul Giamatti has said variations of this line for decades. It sounds like humility. It sounds like a man comfortable in his lane. But watch what he does with that label. He takes it and builds an empire of insecurity so vast, so detailed, and so psychologically precise that…
The Most Uncomfortable Scene in Cinema Is Also the Most Honest Five minutes and twenty-six seconds. That is how long the alley fight lasts in John Carpenter’s They Live. Two men. A pair of sunglasses. And one of the most psychologically accurate depictions of human denial ever committed to film. Critics in 1988 called it…
Somewhere inside an Amazon fulfillment center, a woman sorted packages during a grueling shift. She moved slowly, deliberately, blending into the fluorescent haze of the warehouse floor. She looked tired. She looked like she belonged there. She looked like every other seasonal worker trying to survive another day. She had four Academy Awards at home….
“She did not care what you felt. She only cared how intensely you felt it.” We have spent fifty years calling Diana Christensen a villain. It is the wrong diagnosis, and the misdiagnosis is costing us. Villains have ideology. Villains have desire. Villains want something beyond the metrics. Diana Christensen wanted nothing beyond the metrics….
