Okay, here is the thing. I have been on vacation all of January, just arriving back home the other day, and had neither the time nor the energy to see a movie for this week, so I thought I’d look back at some films I wrote about in the past, but hadn’t posted anywhere.
Read MoreThe Martian is, for me, a travel movie. I watched it one time on a plane, and ever since then I have always looked for it while traveling. I am traveling now, and was thrilled to find and rewatch it this week.
Read MoreThis is how I imagine Babylon came to pass.
(Nobody in the following imagined scene should be assumed to be anybody actually involved in the making of Babylon.)
Read MoreWhen people mention their favorite movies from Alfred Hitchcock, they normally mention some of the greatest and most iconic movies of all time such as Rear Window, Vertigo, North By Northwest, and Psycho. But one of his very best films that often gets overlooked in his expansive body of work is his 1943 thriller Shadow of a Doubt, which turns 80 this month.
Read MoreAfter 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.
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