Welcome to Pottersville

            In the director’s commentary to The Godfather Francis Ford Coppola argues that the potential for art in film remains largely untapped, saying that filmmakers have only gotten about eight percent of what the medium can achieve. The number seems arbitrary, but I agree with the sentiment – a lot of the movies out there do not push what filmmaking can do in any meaningful ways. I remember watching Metropolis on a train in Spain last year, and feeling like filmmaking was a new invention, and then lamenting how little progress film has made as an art form. This is not the fault of the artist. The film industry works on a for profit basis, making films to entertain us, not enlighten. It is a business, and the final product has to gross more than the overhead. That means audiences have to be catered to – we are given actors we are used to seeing, music that tells us how to feel, camerawork that tells us where to look, and stories that reaffirm what...

When a film is good, we are drawn into the story, despite knowing that the characters are actually actors, that most often the place they are acting is a set, and that the clothes they wear are costumes. Even if we remain aware of all this, in the course of a movie we are likely to not think of all the technical elements that went into making it. Specifically, a regular audience never thinks about how films are lit. Perhaps some of you have read up on this or worked on films, and know something about lighting, maybe you even know that often films are lit from a fake ceiling. Lighting helps to establish a certain mood and feel for a film, and how a film is lit is always carefully considered before production begins. I thought it would be interesting to look at three films from one director that used different methods of lighting. It is no secret that I see Stanley Kubrick as the master of film. People are lucky if they create one masterpiece in life, he made no less than seven. He intr...

I thought it might be interesting to take a break from reviewing and analysing films to let all of you in on how buying DVDs works in Ghana. Needless to say, every aspect of life here is different – eating, drinking, driving, communicating, everything - so naturally, buying films is a different experience as well. However, I didn’t realise the extent of the difference until I actually went out to buy films. I expected that DVDs, like most things, would be cheaper here than in America. I had been told that I would easily find bootlegged films for sale. What I did not realise was that bootlegged films are all there is to buy. From where I am staying, I can walk for about ten minutes, get in a cab for about ten more minutes, and then get out and walk some more. Once all this is done, I will be in a market, and here there are a couple of carts, completely covered with films. Now, it’s not like you can just go up to them and tell them which movies you want – each disc on the stand has ...

Mitch Hedberg used to tell a joke about comedians who were given roles on TV shows, saying that it was unfair that they had spent all their time working on jokes and now they were expected to do something that was related to their job but not the same. He said, “that's like if I worked hard to become a cook, and I'm a really good cook, they'd say, ‘OK, you're a cook. Can you farm?’" It’s common for stand up comedians to make their way into acting – Hedberg was on That 70’s Show , George Carlin was in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and a couple Kevin Smith movies, Lewis Black, John Stewart, Richard Pryor, and several others have made the transition. It is a leap to go from telling jokes to acting, but there is a connection. What is even more interesting, I think, is when a singer transitions to acting. Perhaps the best early example of a singer going from the stage to the screen is Frank Sinatra. By the early 1950’s, Sinatra was in decline. The previous decad...

Everybody loves a happy ending right? Well, not always. In this postmodern age sometimes writers like to throw us a curveball and give an unhappy ending. It’s a risky move – we have spent the past couple hours getting to know these characters, seeing them struggle, and if they fail in the end, we will probably be leaving the theatre feeling miserable. In Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo , Cecilia leaves home believing that she will be out of the Great Depression and living in Hollywood with the star that she loves. Unbeknownst to her, she’s been duped, and will be stuck in New York with her abusive husband. We spend three and a half hours rooting against the Romans in Spartacus , only to watch our hero die on a cross. Many other films – Midnight Cowboy, Chinatown, Brazil, The Empire Strikes Back, to name a few, employ unhappy endings. In most cases, I am a fan of the unhappy ending, but sometimes it just feels tacked on. Any writer can tell you that it’s extremely difficult to ...

        During the Third Reich, several actors and filmmakers moved to Hollywood to escape having to make propaganda films for the Third Reich. Fritz Lang, the director of Metropolis and M , two extremely influential early films, came to the US and made a few westerns; Marlene Dietrich, an early sex symbol, renounced her German citizenship and starred in many Hollywood films. Before the War, Hollywood was competing with Germany to make the best films in the world – before sound it didn’t matter what language movies were in, and the first actor to win the Best Actor Oscar was German. Fast forward to the present day, and we see that Hollywood still has an appetite for German talent. Little known fact, some of our favorite movie stars tried to defect to the Nazis.            In 1981, Wolfgang Peterson wrote and directed Das Boot , a film about forty Nazi soldiers on a submarine. Unusual for a Nazi film, we are not supposed to hat...

 The Bible tells us that men, curious to reach heaven and meet God, began construction on a tower tall enough to reach Him. When God saw this tower He realized that humanity had gotten out of His control, and that men were capable of achieving anything. To counteract this, He broke down their means of communication by abolishing their universal language, thus explaining the diversity in the peoples that populate the world today.         The point of this story of the tower of Babel is that we all think in separate languages, and can only understand each other if we share a common language. Language is a interesting issue in films – should you watch a foreign movie with subtitles, or overdubbed with English voices? Should a director have their characters all speaking in English, possibly with an accent that identifies their country? In the James Bond film From Russia with Love all the characters speak English, despite the fact that the villains are Russian a...

Being the President of the United States has many perks, such as being able to drop nukes or to have buildings named after you, but perhaps one of the greatest rewards for being the leader of the free world is the White House movie theatre. Here the President can schmooze with foreign dignitaries, and he is just about the only person on the planet who nobody will shush if he talks during a movie. We can learn a lot by finding out what movies these men were interested in. We see the narcissistic nature of LBJ by knowing that his favorite movie was a short biopic of himself, and many Americans were able to connect to President Reagan by watching the movies he had starred in. Movies like  Bedtime for Bonzo  . In 1915 Woodrow Wilson became the first President to screen a film in the White House, showing The Birth of a Nation . The film is a piece of revisionist history that was created to romanticize the American South and to portray blacks as menaces to society. Supposed...

I saw Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close a week ago, and while it certainly was not a bad movie, there was something bothering me, something I have been annoyed about in films for a while now. The movie had a lot of shots of September 11, really getting an emotional rise out of the audience by having the protagonist’s father dying in the towers. I understand that it is an adaptation from a book, but using 9/11 felt cheap. The whole audience lived through the event, it was very easy to exploit our emotions to make the movie seem more relevant or deep. You, the reader, probably would have been a lot happier without this picture of September 11. The memory still haunts all of us. It feels like a cop out to add it to films, because instead of making an actual emotional movie, they just cash in on our emotional feelings associated with September 11. Extremely Loud is not the first movie to do this, but seeing as how its been nominated for Best Picture it might be seen as the definitive ...