Tag: cinephile
Top Ten Films: A Mission Impossible
Many film blogs and websites are keen on ‘Top Lists’. They will ask readers to name their ten best, twenty best, even fifty best. This, of course, provokes a lot of debate and discussion, and hopefully increases traffic to their site. On rare occasions, these lists will reveal a Pandora’s Box of diversity. They will…
Narrative Cinema, From the Modernity Thesis to New Digital Technologies: Traffic in Souls, Avatar, and Beyond
How do you feel about 3D cinema? About CGI, and other SFX? Touchy subject, right? But hardly a new one. Opinions about the development of cinema and even the changing technologies of cinema have been up for debate since the very beginning. As new technologies invade how we experience life more rapidly than ever before,…
American Memories: The Great Depression and Cinema
I love My Man Godfrey (1936). How could you not? It has William Powell at his most suave, Carole Lombard at her most adorable. It’s got Eugene Pallette, for crying out loud. But I wouldn’t hold it up as an incisive and accurate depiction of America in the 1930s. Though it actually is one of…
A Plea to the Film Critics of Tomorrow
It is time to stop whining about the death of film journalism and to start considering ways to resurrect it. Let us first make an assessment of where we stand today. The few coveted jobs in print media are inhabited by ambitious scribblers who are determined to keep their jobs, regardless of moral and aesthetic…
Sunset Cinema: 30 superb directorial feature film finales
One of the best things about writing a blog is that it gives my family an excuse to talk to me. And so, when I recently put up a piece about great directorial debuts, I heard from a lot of them. Usually they were telling me, in the politest possible terms, how many titles I…