My son keeps asking me about the differences between a hurricane, a tornado, and a whirlpool. And he seems to think they’re basically the same thing.
So in the nature of this week-long interrogation, I’m offering a (mild? benign?) hurricane, tornado, and/or whirlpool of thoughts about movies with special lights from the catwalks on their relationship to the Academy Awards.
Read MoreSome movies get recognized for being important and visionary but never seem to completely break into the mass consciousness like other movies.
Such a movie is Claudia Weill’s 1978 Girlfriends. A movie that maybe was twenty to thirty years ahead of its time. A movie that predates and predicts filmmakers like Greta Gerwig, Richard Linklater, Andrew Bujalski.
Read MoreLast week, we did a 35mm double bill of Orson Welles’ 1947 The Lady From Shanghai and Nicholas Ray’s 1950 In A Lonely Place. Both are stone cold classics.
What struck this programmer was how In A Lonely Place was the more disturbing of the two, even though Lady From Shanghai traffics in many more murders in much more byzantine ways.
Read MoreThe Subjective POV Shot
Maybe no other technique is so crucial to the Hitchcock style as his use of the subjective POV shot. In its simplest form, the technique works like this.
Which leads me to my unsettled question. Has the era of movies and cinema passed?
While aspects of that question upset me because the signs around us often point to yes, some inner voice inside me says no.
Read MoreThe director of Psycho, Rear Window, Vertigo, The 39 Steps, The Birds, Strangers on a Train, Shadow of a Doubt, North by Northwest, and The Lady Vanishes was well known for his genius at constructing a movie and entertaining an audience. He was equally well known for his commercial genius at marketing himself so a movie could get made on his name alone.
Read MoreHausu is a film that i was introduced to by Secret Movie Club, I think in 2019, and then saw it again in 2021, but I didn’t remember much specific about it except that it was one of the craziest movies I’ve ever seen, and I remembered that spot on. Very crazy!
Read MoreHi all, in our most recent podcast about the Sight & Sound 2022 “The Greatest Films of All Time” poll the four of us – Edwin Gomez, Daniel Ott, Craig Hammill, and, myself, Connor Lloyd Crews – each gave our own “Top Ten” that we would have submitted to the poll! I present them here with minimal comments for your perusal.
Read MoreOkay, 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.
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