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...

           I have now recently seen Spike Lee’s new film, BlacKkKlansman, twice, and I am left with an overflow of thoughts and emotions. Not ignoring some poignant points made by Boots Riley ( Sorry to Bother You) , who convincingly argues that the real Ron Stallworth was not the hero the movie portrays, I think it is an amazing movie. It is the first film that really grapples with America in the age of Trump, despite being set in the Nixon administration. It is not a film that is designed to start a conversation exactly – maybe a riot – but it forces us to to grapple with some dark conclusions. The film begins with shots from Gone With the Wind and Birth of a Nation , two films that transformed the possibilities for what cinema could achieve, and two films that are remembered for their reactionary views of the American Civil War . Until this week, I had never seen DW Griffith’s Birth of a Nation; I knew it for its place within the context o...