From the early nineties to the early ‘aughts our screens were inundated with stories featuring the manic pixie dream girl. She was weird but in a cool way, and always marched to the beat of her own drum but still fell formulaically in love with whatever boy happened to be the writer’s stand-in for his geek boy angst. And I will admit that a geek boy writer I am as drawn to the manic pixie dream girl fantasy as the next nerd. But I realize that this character is a construct and that people, like life, are far more complicated.…
Category: Film Follies
Character Study- Diana Christensen
There are few films as prophetic as Sidney Lumet’s Network. This 1976 classic foretells the corruption of the once honorable newsroom for ratings and the ever-escalating sensationalism necessary for television to maintain its allure and power over the populace. That we now live in the internet age does not undercut the film’s significance, far from it. The quest for content and the battle for American’s ever-shortening attention spans makes its message more important than ever. But nothing in this academy award-winning satire works without one of the most interesting characters ever depicted on screen, the subject of this month’s…
Character Study- Ellen Ripley
In storytelling, it is often the case that someone does something so well and it is so original and successful, that for the rest of time other storytellers attempt to harness this idea for their own and come up short. But they keep trying and saturating the zeitgeist with these poor imitations until even the original loses its brilliance and becomes nothing but a cliché, a shorthand joke for those in the know. One such example is the “kick-ass female lead”. If you take a woman and make her good at shooting bad guys with guns that must make her…
Character Study- Mrs. Robinson (The Graduate)
It is incredibly rare that a fictional character can transcend their medium and become a part of our everyday lexicon. The Graduate’s Mrs. Robinson has done exactly that. So much so that even now, over fifty years later, the name invokes a universally understood archetype in our society. What is it about this character, played to absolute perfection by Anne Bancroft, that resonates so deeply within the zeitgeist? It’s time to strip away the cougar cliché and take a deep dive into the quiet, bored desperation of suburbia that is The Graduate. The Graduate follows Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman)…
How Have You Not Seen That?-It’s a Wonderful Life
Christmas is a time of traditions; opening presents, decorating the tree, ugly sweaters, every year when the calendar turns to December we embrace the season and give in to the annual rites. And while many of these traditions go back centuries or even millennia every generation adds to what has come before with its own special customs. It is in this fashion that NBC’s annual Christmas Eve airing of It’s a Wonderful Life has made its way into the pantheon of American Christmas traditions. Gathering around the television to watch this amazing and poignant film with my parents each year…
Subtitle Subversive-Aguirre: The Wrath of God
Finally, it is time. So far we have done eleven editions of Subtitle Subversive, but there was absolutely no way I was going to close out the first volume of a series about foreign film without one of the greatest directors in the world. Today we are going to talk about the one and only Werner Herzog and his masterpiece Aguirre: The Wrath of God. Aguirre is one of those films that is almost more famous for its behind the scenes madness than it was for the brilliance of the film itself. But make no mistake the finished product is…
How Have you Not Seen That?-The Sound of Music
A compelling love story. Check. Cute Kids. Check. A catchy musical number (or four). Check. Nazi bad guys. Check. I’m not sure what you look for in a film, but by my measure, any movie that checks off all those boxes has instant classic written all over it. Though it is no surprise that a hit Broadway musical would find cinematic success, the idea that The Sound of Music would become one of the highest grossing films of all time (adjusted for inflation) certainly did not occur to the numerous critics who panned it upon its initial release. But here…
Subtitle Subversives-Solaris
If you looked at a Venn diagram of films I like and films I recognize to be great works of cinema the two circles would largely overlap. Sure there would be quite a few films I like that I recognize are not great cinema but there would only be a tiny sliver of films I recognize as being excellent pieces of filmmaking that I did not particularly enjoy. Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 masterwork Solaris is one of those rare films that falls into the latter category. Which is why I thought it would be perfect for this edition of Subtitle Subversives.…
How Have You Not Seen That?- The Lion King
It’s not often you get an animated adaptation of Hamlet, let alone one that features talking animals on the plains of Africa. But with 1994’s The Lion King, Disney did exactly that and in the process made one of their best films ever. Obviously, The Lion King is not a straight-up adaptation of Shakespeare’s legendary (but not quite family-friendly) tragedy but the film certainly owes most of its characters and its basic plot structure to the Bard’s melancholy prince. When the greatest playwright in the world (posthumously) teams up with the most influential animation studio in history, it is certainly…
How Have You Not Seen That-The Godfather
It is an impossible task to try and rank the greatest films of all time. Films are works of art and entertainment that seek to tell a specific story and elicit a particular set of reactions. Comparing a psychological thriller like Vertigo to the near-perfect action movie Die Hard is not only foolish but completely unfair to both films. Having said that, if you were to put together a list of the greatest films of all time, such a list would be incomplete if it did not include the subject of today’s How Have You Not Seen That? Francis Ford…