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Being a huge fan of auteur work, I am always on the look out for new directors that distinguish themselves against the backdrop of Hollywood. I enjoyed watching as Christopher Nolan and Darren Aronofsky became accepted by the mainstream, and I am looking forward to seeing what the future holds for Miranda July, Jamin Winans, and Rian Johnson. Directing is an extremely hard field to break into, and most filmmakers have to give up all their artistic integrity in order to break into the Hollywood system. Being the son of David Bowie certainly helps though, and that’s whom I want to talk about in this entry, Duncan Jones, aka Zowie Bowie. Being the son of a rockstar certainly has its advantages, such as being able to pool funding for your film projects, but Jones still has to be able to convince people that he has personal artistic merit. His first film, Moon, was very successful in convincing people of that, myself included. An independent science fiction film, Moon tells the story of S

I did a guest entry over at First Signs of Trouble, on my disapproval for Steven Spielberg. Go check that out and his other entries. Blog: http://firstsignsoftrouble.blogspot.com/ Entry link: http://firstsignsoftrouble.blogspot.com/2011/05/guest-blog-spielberg-giving-audiences.html

Star Wars fans tend to think of their films in a bubble, separated from the narrative of film history. That’s fine really, they know more about these films and the story than any other. It’s a fun and fleshed out universe, and if your willing to suspend your disbelief to the fullest extent, it can give you unlimited pleasure debating plot points, motives, back stories, or revision (Han Shot First! see above) What I want to do though is different from a regular fanboy blog, and contextualize A New Hope in film history, and underline its importance there.         I, unlike most fans, prefer A New Hope to The Empire Strikes Back . I love meeting the characters, the quotable dialogue, Luke’s realizations, the rescue of Princess Leia, and the explosion of the death star. I have always maintained that if the film had failed and no sequels had been made, the first film is self contained enough to stand on its own. However, in 1977, it did not fail. In fact, the opposite; it became the

There is a lot of symbolism in film that people tend to overlook, the most obvious example being rain. Rain scenes are a pain in the ass to film; it doesn’t show up unless properly colored or backlit, it can be costly depending on the severity, it requires extra resources, can be noisy, and, obviously, makes the actors wet. Yet, several famous and beloved films go through the hassle of creating rain scenes. Spiderman, Forrest Gump, The Shawshank Redemption, Seven Samurai, Minority Report, Blade Runner, The Matrix, Raising Arizona, Millers Crossing, Platoon, Inception, and, most famously, Singing in the Rain, all have well known rain scenes in them. Hell, David Fincher even uses rain as a supporting character in most of his films. So, what’s the point, you might ask, if it is such a problem creating rain sequences? Why should directors bother? Well, different films use weather differently, so here are a few examples and how the effect works in each. So far in this blog I have been over

How many times have you walked out of a movie, or talked about a movie you’ve recently seen or heard about, and heard someone say - “The book was much better.” Fair enough statement usually, except it is often followed with a phrase like “The books are always better.” I can’t stand that. Why should filmmakers bother adapting literature for the big screen if, in fact, the book will always be superior? Besides the fact that popular book adaptations such as the Harry Potter or Twilight films will gross nine figures regardless of whether or not they are any good, why should anyone bother with anything else? The truth is that the film is often better than the book. Now I am not arguing which is a superior art. Literature is much more important to intellectual thought than films are, and I would not ever open that statement up to argument. Part of it has to do with the work that’s placed on the reader with books; another part is the rich history of literature, compared to films which are on

        Being in England during the NBA playoffs is hard for me. I was okay with not being able to watch the regular season, but as the Lakers and the Celtics are both being driven out I find myself desperate to watch these games. I’ve been a big basketball fan for a couple of years now, so to hold me over in these difficult times I watched two films about the sport. The first was Spike Lee’s He Got Game , starring Denzel Washington and, one of my favourite players, Ray Allen. The film is centers around a father son relationship between the two; Denzel’s character is imprisoned and is allowed out for a week to convince his estranged son to play for Big State University. Although the plot sounds a little iffy, the film is in regular Spike Lee top form. However, it was the second film I watched that I want to talk about now.         In 1988 PBS sponsored a couple of filmmakers to make a half hour television special about two kids from Chicago who were being recruited by a private

As I have mentioned before, I am a History major at Drew University doing six months abroad in England, and it is History, above film, which is my true passion. As a lover of both, it is often difficult to reconcile the two together. Films can be a great teacher of history, as they have explored Rome, Vietnam, both World Wars and the lives of several leaders and events in depth and from multiple angles. On the other hand, history is often inconvenient for filmmakers, so they take great liberties with rewriting it for their benefit. Directors like Oliver Stone and Steven Spielberg are notorious for this. JFK, while undoubtedly a well-constructed film, is an appalling dishonor to American history. Shindler’s List, which the American Film Institute put in its top ten American films of all time list, packages the Holocaust, one of the greatest failures in human history, as a success story, choosing to focus on 6,000 people who are saved rather than the 6,000,000+ people who died. I simpl

During the entire decade of the 1980’s Martin Scorsese chased after the success of his earlier years. He released Raging Bull in 1980, generally agreed upon to be one of the best films ever made, but failed to achieve another success on the same level until Goodfellas in 1990. The King of Comedy bombed hard at the box office, After Hours also failed to live up to commercial expectations, The Color of Money saw him jump into mainstream film making, and The Last Temptation of Christ barely succeeded in making back its budget, but very successfully pissed a lot of people off. It’s arguable that the most successful thing Scorsese created during the 80’s was the Michael Jackson Bad music video, although I won’t be the one making that argument. What I find most influential of this decade of work is the film After Hours. Starring Griffin Dune, the film marks the first time in over ten years a Scorsese film was not headlined by Robert De Niro. Dune, for his part, plays the part in way similar