Email Author Alan Scherstuhl

Awards

• 2009 - Kansas City Press Club Heart of America Awards, published April 3, 2008

  "The Best Story of the Year"

• 2009 - Kansas City Press Club Heart of America Awards, published April 24, 2008

  "Desert Storm"

• 2009 - Kansas City Press Club Heart of America Awards, published September 11, 2008

  "Water Logged"

• 2009 - Kansas City Press Club Heart of America Awards, published November 13, 2008

  "What's At Stake"

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2013 Stories by Alan Scherstuhl

• Disconnect Plays on a Compendium of Contemporary Fears

  published April 10, 2013

  Identity theft! Cyber bullying! Runaway teens doing lurid cam shows! This ambitious, multi-storied, state-of-us-all ensemble drama plumbs our... More >>

• How Does Jurassic Park 3D Play When You Can't Fast Forward?

  published April 3, 2013

  "They do move in herds," Sam Neill marvels, purportedly gazing at his director's miracle dinosaurs but in reality directing his... More >>

• Detour Invigorates the Terrifying Minutiae of Claustrophobia

  published March 27, 2013

  Again and again, movies show you killing, but it's one in a thousand on-screen killings that might get you to feel something of what killing... More >>

• Wrong Is Real-Life Gone Strange

  published March 27, 2013

  If real life were like Wrong, Quentin Dupieux's sweetly unnerving experiment in ambient fucked-uppedness, your phone would ring before... More >>

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  G.I. Joe: Retaliation's a Battle of Dumb Pleasures Versus Your Higher Brain Function

  published March 27, 2013

  What must Bruce Willis have felt when he discovered that his seven or so minutes of G.I. Joe: Retaliation screen time offer much more... More >>

• The Host: Like Twilight, But With, Uh, Aliens

  published March 27, 2013

  Across America this weekend, wives and girlfriends will accompany their fellas to GI Joe: Retaliation, as boys-shooting-boys movies are... More >>

• Emily Mortimer's Leonie Is Stifled by Mortifying 'Poetry'

  published March 20, 2013

  Something all-too rare is squandered in Leonie: an ambitious lead performance by the stellar Emily Mortimer, that fiery swan so often... More >>

• Go Buy a Ticket for My Brother the Devil

  published March 20, 2013

  Look, before we venture into what could be considered spoiler territory, let's just say this: My Brother the Devil, Sally El Hosaini's... More >>

• Here Are Five Awesome/Crazy Theories About The Shining from Room 237

  published March 20, 2013

  Like the blood that gushes forth from the elevators of the Overlook Hotel, brilliant/ridiculous theories of what Stanley Kubrick’s... More >>

• The Batshit Genius of Michael Kupperman; L’il Abner’s Al Capp Gets a Bio at Last

  published March 20, 2013

  No exaggeration: I coughed hot soup out of my nose while reading the new hardbound volume of deadpan dadaist Michael Kupperman’s Tales... More >>

• The Roth Orgy

  published March 13, 2013

  Here’s a tale that explains everything: A young Philip Roth, trying to shove his teen brain through Ulysses, is struck by a... More >>

• Burt Wonderstone Vanishes What Steve Carell’s Best At

  published March 13, 2013

  Steve Carell’s gift is for men who might drown in their own obliviousness. Like his Daily Show reporter, or The... More >>

• CLIP's Ejaculating Teen Penises Are Not Actually Underaged

  published March 13, 2013

  "Underaged persons weren't involved in scenes of explicit sex and nudity" reads the title that announces the end of CLIP. The timing of... More >>

• The Old Boy: A Straight Prep’s Gay Breakthrough

  published March 13, 2013

  Sometimes a play’s very datedness becomes reason enough to revisit it—and to be heartened to live in world where that play’s... More >>

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  Top of the Lake: Peggy Olson Goes to Hell

  published March 13, 2013

  Elisabeth Moss’s face is far from the only reason to savor Top of the Lake, Jane Campion’s smart, bracing, hugely enjoyable... More >>

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  Other Ozzes, Great and Terrible (But Mostly Terrible)

  published March 6, 2013

  Twenty minutes into the first full-length movie based on L. Frank Baum's most beloved novel, a duck pukes into the face of Larry Semon, the... More >>

• Horny Holy Men! The Monk Crosses Godly Rites and Vile Sin

  published March 6, 2013

  Here’s proof of the continuity of the human imagination: If you were an HBO exec cooking up an adults-only show about the perverse doings... More >>

• Old Hats Doesn't Make Clowning New--But Does Make It Excellent.

  published March 6, 2013

  It can't be a coincidence that “one-upmanship” has that “man” right in the middle of it, can it? Guys' hopeless need to... More >>

• The Other Side of the Ice Straddles the Line Between Magnificence and Mundanity

  published March 6, 2013

  Part home movie, part reality TV-style confess-to-the-camera bitchfest, and part low-key adventure doc, Sprague Thobald's The Other Side of... More >>

• Citizen Hearst: More Context Needed

  published March 6, 2013

  Hearst the man dies a half hour into Citizen Hearst the film, a biographic doc true to the letter of its title if not the spirit: The... More >>

• Reading Around: Mary Shelley Meets Grave Robbers, Movie Stars, and Other Monsters

  published February 27, 2013

  Chief among the dark oddities of life in 18th- and 19th-century London is that the city, which produced so many dead, was itself forever in... More >>

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  The Fascinating Everyday Lives of the Flying Wallendas Explored in The Show Must Go On

  published February 20, 2013

  The worst happens some ten minutes in to The Show Must Go On, an engaging, low-key doc on The Flying Wallendas, the wire-walking circus... More >>

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  Dark Skies: Why Do Aliens Dick Around in Our Bedrooms for Weeks Before Finally Abducting Us?

  published February 20, 2013

  Neither execrable enough to warrant being so unceremoniously dumped into theaters, nor so thoroughly un-excerable that we should be outraged by... More >>

• Beautiful Creatures, the Ravishing Chastity Fantasy

  published February 13, 2013

  Here's a question you can spit back next time someone complains that our popular culture is top-to-bottom depraved: "Then why are our... More >>

• Daniel Day-Lewis Looms Over Museum Re-enactment Acting of Saving Lincoln

  published February 13, 2013

  Here's one bit of luck enjoyed by Salvador Litvak's Saving Lincoln, the offest off-brand version of a story recently told by the... More >>