Tag: culture
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Great TV: Mystery Science Theater 3000
Although this is primarily a movie site, television is also written about here, mostly because the lines between TV and film have become increasingly blurred over the years. Just as the series of articles on Great TV is a section of this site, there have been a fair amount of articles written about the terrible, […]
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Perfect Directors: Spike Lee
Listen: I am not black. In fact, I am one of the most lily-white people on the planet. Nor do I have any particular connection to Black culture besides what I’ve gleaned from media outlets, TV, and movies. What I’m trying to relate in this opening salvo is that the complex racial history of America […]
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Radical 90’s: Introduction
As America pivoted from the 1980’s to the 1990’s, the culture as a whole seemed to undergo a seismic shift: from the staunch conservatism that dominated the previous decade, by 1991 the entirety of the country seemed to shrug off the social and economic mores that centered the country after the chaotic 1960’s and hippie […]
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Perfect Movies: Saving Private Ryan
Many films have been made glorifying war: from Sands of Iwo Jima to American Sniper, American films in particular like to depict soldiers who fight the country’s battles across the globe in a heroic light. And, to be fair, there have been numerous anti-war films made–All Quiet on the Western Front, Platoon, Apocalypse Now, and […]
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Totally 80’s: Blockbusters!
As stated in the introduction to this series, if 1980’s Hollywood perfected anything, it was marketing: demographic research, adherence to the four-quadrant model (males under 25; females under 25; males over 25; females over 25), high concept movies, and chasing the ultimate, the “Blockbuster” movie, were the primary motivators of big-business, big-budget Hollywood. Gone were […]
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Cult Classics: Meet The Hollowheads
How do you even begin to describe a movie like Meet The Hollowheads? Is it a satire or sci-fi? Comedy or demented horror? How can one express what witnessing the truly bizarre is? There’s simply no reference point for the movie or the world it inhabits, and the film doesn’t help shepherd you to any […]
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Cult Classics: Introduction
Often left of center and coming out of left field, for a movie to be regarded as a cult film, genre is not a prerequisite: comedy, drama, camp, horror, and everything else in-between can fall into this vague but ultra-hip classification. The only real pedigree a film needs to be considered cult is in […]
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Perfect Directors: Wes Anderson
Cozy worlds. That’s what Wes Anderson builds in his films: cozy worlds where everything is in its right place, every room and setting has character, and every character is fully realized. And they come to realizations in these cozy worlds, whether floating on a ship, whiling away in an academy, bouncing around the suburbs, cloistered […]
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Perfect Directors: P.T. Anderson
Magical realism is a deceptively simple stylistic label that has often left artists floundering in their attempt to somehow create works that transcend the mundane and represent larger metaphysical concerns on our plain of existence that the human spirit grapple with daily the larger questions on our meaning in life: what is love? Why are […]
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Perfect Directors: Introduction
In our short lives, if we’re looking in the right places and have the want for such a search, we sometimes find perfect directors; that is, people who are still living and are actively working that make films that–for lack of better words or descriptors–have produced a series of perfect films. But that list narrows […]
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Perfect Movies: Monkey Business
There may be no more perfect comedy configuration on film than the Marx Brothers. I have had some dark days in my life–as have us all–and despite any hardship or emotional upset, I can turn on a Marx Brothers movie and it lifts my soul completely. The three main components of this merry band of absurd […]
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Perfect Movies: American Psycho
“You like Huey Lewis & The News?” I sure do, and Patrick Bateman makes a great argument for the strengths of their 1983 commercial breakthrough album, Sports. It would be a great moment in any retro film for the main character to espouse his love of mainstream contemporary music, but becoming a counterpoint to the action […]
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