Welcome to Pottersville

As a resident of New Jersey, New York City has always been within easy distance of me. There was a time two years ago when I would visit the city weekly. Now that I live in Old York, three thousand miles away, I realize how lucky I was to be so close to such an amazing city. As of now my only connection to the city is through the films I watch, and it is amazing what different directors make out of the city. I’m not talking about Marvel Superhero films that blow up the city in every film or hacks like Oliver Stone who film it in an outright pedestrian manner; instead, I’d like to highlight three directors and the diverse ways they shoot the city. As expressed in my last full-length entry, I am a huge fan of Woody Allen. And seriously, when discussing the way directors use New York City in film there’s no better place to start than him. He has continuously lived in New York City his entire life, and with the exception of Love and Death and Sleeper all of his finest films are New York f...

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...

         It is quite common for directors to work with a consistent set of actors over the course of their careers. Looking over a director’s filmography one will often find evidence of these collaborations, and, indeed, using the same acting talent over and over again is one of the signs of an auteur. The actors and actresses often build a relationship with a director; they draw inspiration from one another, and push the other’s limits. There are a few directors who narrow this number, and end up working with one specific actor or actress over and over again, until they begin to be permanently identified with one another in the public consciousness. Think Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski or, if you prefer, Tim Burton and Johnny Depp. These relationships have highs and lows, just as any other relationship, but the more films you watch by these collaborators the richer the experience becomes.             Ta...

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...