Author: Jonathan Eig
A History of the Found Footage Film: The Good, the Bad, and the Box Art
It has been fifteen years since The Blair Witch Project, and the found footage genre has settled into a bit of a rut. It is a very restrictive form, best suited to horror and suspense, and most filmmakers discover eventually that it would be nice to break away from the central conceit that everything the…
Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash: The Darkness of Artistic Ambition
2014 still has a couple more months to go and some big, well-regarded movies are soon to be released. They will have to go a long way to surpass Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash, which is head and shoulders above anything that has been widely released thus far. Of all its outstanding qualities, this is what makes…
Showing Good Judgment: The Judge, The Mute and Awaara
Want to hear a really bad idea? Take an example of something from two different cultures and then develop broad conclusions about those two cultures based on the examples. This, in terms of logic, leads to an inductive fallacy, sometimes referred to as the fallacy of the lonely fact. Trust me on this. I am…
Four Great Boxing Movies You Haven’t Seen
Sports movies present a challenge. Especially American sports movies. For even though we Yanks talk a lot about democracy and the people, we really, at heart, reserve our highest accolades for exhibitions of individualism. Our art reflects that. The Western is our greatest film creation and no other genre elevates the value of the individual…
The Three Quarter Mark: The Best (And Worst) Films and Performances of 2014 Thus Far
I tried. No one can say I didn’t try. In the waning days of September, I travelled across Australia. I visited the strange, mythical Cheesebridge, England. I pretty much toured the whole damn world with Simon Pegg. No one can say I didn’t go out looking for movies that would let me conclude the first…