I don’t care how dead the horse; I’m gonna beat it more. Observe the nominees for Best Picture: The Father: Someone feeds Anthony Hopkins from his gruel bowl for two hours. Feels ensue. Judas and the Black Messiah: Did you Know that the FBI infiltrated groups hostile to the United States Government? I am shocked,… Read More Let Us Now Tap-Dance on the Grave of the Oscars
A while back I made a vow to ignore the pulsating mediocrity of our degenerate film industry and embrace film classicism. This hasn’t exactly panned out how I envisioned it, as there’s only so much scratch you can throw around for Criterion Blu-Rays when you have mouths to feed. However, a flash sale enabled me… Read More Old Favorites: Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood
The best part of doing this podcast is the way the scrum of conversation keeps bringing up new ideas. Episode 5 gave us the General Theory of Creative Bloat (successful franchise = abandonment of editorial control), which gets mentioned again here. But this time we came up with what I call the Pie Theory of… Read More Shallow & Pedantic 7: A Fistful of Samurai Pies
This is going to seem counterintuitive, but it’s true. A “Feature Length” film is one 60 minutes or longer, according to the Screen Actor’s Guild. Most movies are somewhere between 80-120 minutes, although some popular films, such as nearly all the Star Wars movies, are longer (The Last Jedi, the longest one, is 152 minutes,… Read More Movies are Short Stories, TV Shows are Novels
My wife suggested we go see it, when we had a free evening. I was willing, but not enthusiastic. In the end, we ended up not doing that instead. The film had good word of mouth, and I know Nolan to be a competent director, but the excitement to do it wasn’t there. And according… Read More I Almost Saw “Tenet”, But Didn’t. Apparently I’m Not Alone.
It seems that people have been left by their education unable to put values in the correct order. People who consider themselves intelligent and sober are defending twerking 11-year-olds for no better reason than to annoy conservatives, because apparently child exploitation doesn’t count if it’s done on the set of a movie in France. Let’s… Read More I Don’t Care If Cuties is a Good Movie
Initially I had planned to have a Content Blues podcast hosted here on the blog, but because I don’t have a WordPress Business Plan and don’t intend to shell out for one, that won’t be happening. Instead, I switched to Spreaker as a distribution service for both this and the Shallow & Pedantic Podcast. The… Read More Whatever: The Vast Confederate Lighthouse
Back in the 90’s, when concepts such as “youth culture” seemed relevant to me, I was known to lament the chokehold Boomers had over pop culture. Every time the same damn Beatles songs were repackaged into a new format, I got incredibly annoyed, especially when someone my age bought it. Looking back, this exercise seems… Read More The Milennial Nostalgia Machine
Movies are a strange art form. They immerse an audience in a world that looks and sounds real, yet we can only access them through two-dimensional screens. We observe them as though we’re part of them, but the Fourth Wall is absolutely inviolable to us (not to the movie itself, mind). We can’t crash them… Read More Why Movies Need Stars
{The following was first written for my defunct Medium.com account in 2012. In some sense it has been overtaken by events. The success of the indie film Bone Tomahawk, among others, in some sense supports my premise. And the points it has to make about the nature of the Western, especially as against the Noir,… Read More Beyond Cowboys and Indians
Content Blues 