After Bros, the first real big studio gay rom com with sex and everything, we get a second major gay love story in a single year! And neither film is about AIDS, or gay bashing, or being rejected by your family when coming out, which is a nice treat. Gay people die of cancer, too. Wait, am I getting spoilery about Spoiler Alert?
Read MoreIn the early times of our John Ford, Director of the year, 2022 series, I had a dream about John Ford.
I wanted…
Read MoreCHAPTER 11: The Masterpieces Part 1-My Darling Clementine, How Green Was My Valley, The Quiet Man, The Searchers
John Ford’s My Darling Clementine, How Green Was My Valley, The Quiet Man, and The Searchers are routinely included in most Ford-o-files lists of his greatest masterpieces. It’s a testament to the Old Man’s powers that within a roughly 22 year time span (from 1939’s Young Mr. Lincoln through 1961’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance), he made arguably 12 masterpieces. Or put another way: Ford produced an all-time classsic American film every two years.
John Ford is considered the greatest director in the world, or one of the greatest, by among others, Orson Welles, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Akira Kurosawa, Steven Spielberg, and Martin Scorsese. Ford is a director’s director: a filmmaker who
Read MoreThe second big Christmas Carol remake of the season, this one being modernized, musicalized, and Will Ferrell/Ryan Reynolds-ized.
Read MoreCHAPTER 9: Ford’s Fractured Families
The decade from 1940 through 1950 found John Ford often returning to the theme of the family under pressure, torn apart, reconciled, or even completely fabricated (yet ultimately cohering into something real). Three of these pictures-The Long Voyage Home (1940), Three Godfathers (1948), and Rio Grande (1950)-serve as fascinating sketchbooks for themes Ford would fully develop in masterpieces that shortly followed. And Rio Grande is itself a masterpiece that sets up an even bigger masterpiece (The Quiet Man).
John Ford was always coming back to questions of…
Read MoreWe appreciate three John Ford silent movies of the 1920’s-The Iron Horse, Three Bad Men, and Upstream which point to the poetic mastery Ford will achieve in the late 1930’s and beyond. We also look with jealousy on an era where a movie director could hone their craft across 80+ movies before really grabbing the spotlight.
It’s instructive (and somewhat sobering) to realize that John Ford was already considered a veteran director of 12+ years before the sound era arrived. And while his 1924 epic of the construction of the transcontinental railroad The Iron Horse was a huge blockbuster that catapulted Ford to top of the director pack, he still was 11 years away from…
Read MoreAfter watching all of those versions of A Christmas Carol last December, you’d think I wouldn’t be able to bear watching this old saw again this year, but you’d be wrong! I love this story, and it can be done so many ways, there is no reason for me not to be thrilled about a new version. And this year, we have two!
Read MoreAfter watching all of those versions of A Christmas Carol last December, you’d think I wouldn’t be able to bear watching this old saw one more time, but you’d be wrong! I love this story, and it can be done so many ways, there is no reason for me not to be thrilled about a new version. And this year, we have two! But they will have to wait for next week, because this week we have one of the classics that I meant to get to last year, but ran out of time: the Patrick Stewart version.
Read MoreI saw the trailer for Violent Night a couple of months ago, and it looked so funny and so tight that it really seemed like a fake trailer, and that it probably wouldn’t be improved by being two hours longer, but I was willing to give it a shot.
Read MoreHi all, Connor Lloyd Crews here. On our pod this week – SMC Pod #128: Movie Posters – we mention a heckuva lotta posters. I present them here with minimal comments for your perusal. Enjoy!
Read MoreThere is not a lot more pleasurable than an all-star mystery movie. They used to do these a lot in the 1970s and ‘80s, like Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, The Mirror Crack’d, and Evil Under the Sun, or comedically with The Cheap Detective, Clue, and Murder by Death.
Read MoreThis film was another situation where I saw the trailer and thought, Ralph Fiennes? Anya Taylor-Joy? High end restaurant? Tasting menu? Did they make this film for me?
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