Welcome to Pottersville

Ever since I began studying films I have been a Woody Allen fan. He has made some of the best films of his generation and continues to produce quality work every year. Over the past forty years he has made about forty films of varying quality, made on low budgets, have every A list star imaginable, which Allen personally writes, directs, and usually stars in. I have seen over half of them, and at this point have given up on comparing them to other director’s films; instead, I allow them to sit in a vacuum. They are “Woody Allen films”. Sure, films such as Annie Hall and Love and Death are great whether you have seen only one or all of his films, but a lot of his films are a lot better in the context of his larger career. One film stands out in particular to me in the list, and I would go as far as to say it is my favorite Woody Allen film, despite the fact that many would probably disagree. Everyone Says I Love You, to me, is his best movie. It is Allen’s only musical, although I since...

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 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...