Our modern era of moviemaking is unsettling in that it is no longer defined by acting talent (as it was during the Golden Age of Hollywood) or directorial and auteurial interests. Instead it is increasingly driven by mega-corporations who seek to build consumer brand-loyalty by creating and curating intellectual properties that can go on in …
As is now my tradition (after failing to get under the wire last year) the first post of 2021 will be something that was meant to be posted in the last calendar year. Several things caused me to fall behind. Obviously the pandemic and its anxiety-producing effects on this author contributed. The fact that I …
Continue reading 40(ish)Years Later: The Best Movies of 1980
While Black Friday may have been the true birthplace of the modern slasher, it is undoubtedly defined, for better or worse, by the contributions of Messrs Krueger, Myers and Voorhees. In the 1980s alone seventeen of these movies graced the cineplexes, dominating the teenage market-share in a way that the MCU could only dream of. Long before comic-book movie …
Perhaps it is because this was the first year I consciously remember going to the movies, and perhaps it is because I miss going to the movies so much this year but I felt incredibly wistful and nostalgic about the year 1990 in movies. Right now I am back in grad school, which as the …
One of the biggest barriers in getting into movies beyond our typical blockbuster fare is the sheer enormity of film history available to us; it is sometimes impossible to know where to start. Early on in my own filmic journeys I remember finding myself initially turned off by the filmographies of directors, genres, and even …
Right now it is hard to remember but there was a certain glorious optimism that surrounded the year 2000. We were living in that pocket between surviving the overhyped threat of Y2K and the tragic events of 9/11 a year later that would irreparably shatter our collective global. Coming off the relatively prosperous 90s, I …
Porco Rosso opens with a dogfight in the skies that is at once evocative of old war movies and yet seemingly from a completely different world altogether. This dogfight involves air pirates, a group of kidnapped kids, air fortresses, and a cacophony of slapstick action making the fact that our titular hero in this air rescue, …
A few weeks ago I watched two hours of ultimate frisbee out of sheer desperation to get something close to a sports fix. Among the many things that COVID-19 has robbed from us this year, competitive sports occupies that dubious spot of being simultaneously the most trivial and yet one of the most noticeable losses. …
As I write this right now the reality is that for the first time in my lifetime there will not be a summer blockbuster season. With most movie theaters only hoping to open their doors in July at the earliest and almost every major studio summer release being delayed (some until 2021) I am currently …
Continue reading The “Stay-at-Home” Summer Blockbuster Film Festival
2010 represents an incredibly important milestone in my film-watching journey. I was in the thick of graduate school in Pasadena where I found myself in walking distance from the newly opened ArcLight Pasadena and the arthouse Laemmle Playhouse 7, meaning that many a weekend that year was spent diving into double-features (since a movie ticket was still …
Homebody Movies 