#33 — Clash by Night (Fritz Lang, 1952) By the time Fritz Lang sat in the director’s chair for Clash by Night, he’d been a filmmaker for some thirty-five years. In his early sixties, he was also going through something of … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Thirty-Three
Gordon Willis was nominated for the Best Cinematography Academy Award twice. Only twice. It’s unbelievable, and it stands as one of the greatest injustices in the overstuffed annals of egregious omissions of the august award-giving body. Let’s illustrate the extent of the oversight further: from 1972 to 1974, Willis was the cinematographer on four different Best Picture nominees, three of which actually claimed the top prize, and though his category often went in rough lockstep with Best Picture Willis wasn’t among the competitors once during this span. To make it even more clear, practically ever obituary and remembrance cites his … Continue reading Gordon Willis, 1931-2014
So…modern remakes of giant monster movie classics seem to be on my mind for some reason. This review was written for my former digital space This is when I was still deeply enamored with the idea of building hyperlinks into the reviews, an inclination that, I’ll admit, I haven’t fully shaken. Or maybe haven’t shaken at all. As it turns out, I and my partner in all things saw this movie on a trip to New York City, where we walked within view of the Empire State Building on the way to our next stop. It added some resonance to … Continue reading From the Archive: King Kong
#34 — The Asphalt Jungle (John Huston, 1950) It’s all right there in the name of the film: the promise of soot and grit and anger, the heat of savagery played out on pavement, the hardness of untamed wild disguised … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Thirty-Four
I marvel at the things we needed to watch. The little burg where I started as a film critic at my beloved college radio station rarely played art house fare and was even late in the run of higher profile prestige material. When we started our movie review show in the fall of 1990, the screens always had plenty of room for cheapo horror flicks, though. Popcorn is almost entirely forgotten now, but I stand by my laudatory evaluation of the early scene found at the front end of this review. I actually still think of that passage from time … Continue reading From the Archive: Popcorn
#35 — Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, 1959) The default tendency when looking back at films from a few generations back, especially those presided over by those filmmakers who’ve been anointed auteurs by all the right authorities, is to find all … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Thirty-Five
#36 — Rififi (Jules Dassin, 1955) Though I’m aware enough of the facile nature of this statement that I prefer not to default to it, I have been known to deflect questions about what “kind” of movie I like by … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Thirty-Six
This review comes from The Pointer, the student newspaper at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. While hardly an epic, I’m a little surprised at the length of this piece. Certainly I was trying to make the case for a film I though was excellent and all too likely to be ignored by my fellow twentysomethings, but it still looks to me like it would have wound up being an awful lot of column inches devoted to my opinions. I remember endlessly championing cinematographer Philippe Rousselot by name when Oscar season came around, but I clearly hadn’t gotten his French moniker … Continue reading From the Archive: A River Runs Through It
#37 — Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman, 1957) Ingmar Bergman wasn’t yet forty years old when he directed Wild Strawberries. He’d be toiling at the hard art of making movies for about twenty years at this point, but surely that professional … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 50s — Number Thirty-Seven
Frozen (Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee, 2013). The most successful animated feature in the traditional Disney mold (fairy tale structure, a bevy of Broadway-esque songs) since the studio’s nineteen-nineties heyday, Frozen is charming enough if a little flat. Like a lot of modern Disney fables, it’s more interesting for the ways it compulsively upends the legacy tropes–the “true love” with a man, the oversimplified villainy–than for the actual merits of what winds up onscreen freed from meta examinations. The songbook provided by Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez may have launched a thousand (or more) YouTube videos on the strength of … Continue reading Black, Buck and Lee, Emmerich, Frankel, Wells
