Welcome to Pottersville

Updates will be few and far between for a while. It isn’t that I have stopped watching films on a daily basis, it is that now they are of a decidedly homogeneous variety. I have been approved to write an honors thesis, something I am very excited about. It is about America’s cultural memory of Vietnam, which includes historical events, campaigns, memorials, books, comic books, music, and, of course, film. Therefore, since I was approved for this thesis about a week ago, I have only been watching Vietnam films – a genre I was already familiar with, one I will soon be very knowledgeable about. So, in an effort to keep this blog alive, I have decided to use my recent fixation as an entry. The first widely viewed Vietnam film was John Wayne’s 1968 The Green Berets . Filmed during the war, it has the feeling of a World War II movie more than a Vietnam movie – the Vietnamese are portrayed very similar to the Japanese in The Bridge Over the River Kwai , and John Wayne’s patriarchal figure

Although summer does not technically end for another three weeks, I am back at college and working like a dog, so, as far as I am concerned, it is over. The summertime is typically when the biggest films of the year are released – not the award winning films, but definitely the films that justify Hollywood’s bloated budgets. This was a summer of sequels – another Harry Potter, Planet of the Apes, Cars, Pirates of the Caribbean, Scream, Hangover, Fast and the Furious… not really my thing but definitely movies that you probably heard much about. My favorite two films of the summer were not sequels, they were the rarity in the summer film scene – original, highbrow auteur pieces that still managed to bring in profits. As in, the kind only Woody Allen or Terrence Malick can create. It was a tough decade for Woody Allen. After a frighteningly prolific career, it seems as if he ran out of steam in the 00’s. I for one enjoyed most of the movies he directed in the decade, but admit they do n