Welcome to Pottersville

          Recently my life has been full of Shakespeare. I have started a Shakespeare reading group with some of my New Jersey friends, I saw an excellent production of Measure for Measure at the Globe Theatre in London this week, and I am in the middle of reading King John for my own pleasure. I have ambitions to read through the entire canon before I turn thirty, and at 25 am happy to say that I have read about twenty so far. Part of the fun of reading Shakespeare is then watching film adaptations of his work – from Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier to Ingmar Bergman and Akira Kurosawa, many auteurs have used the bard as inspiration and directed their own versions of his plays. When I was last back in America, I made it a point to watch three of the most epic Shakespeare adaptations on my parents' big screen television, and feel comfortable in saying that each is in the canon of not just the greatest Shakespearean films, but some of the greatest films of al...

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 ...

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 ...