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Establishing Shot Indiana University
Chris Forrester is a Chicago-based writer and occasional film programmer who's still chasing the high of seeing a Claire Denis movie for the first time (it's been five years and still nothing compares). A genre film-lover and Terence Davies devotee, he's interested in world cinema, canon building and the reclaiming of formerly-maligned films in the digital age.

Entries by Chris Forrester

“One Day You’ll Wake Up and You’ll Discover It Never Happened:” Collateral and Michael Mann’s Digital Existentialism

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A cab barrels through the amber Los Angeles night

A cab barrels through the amber Los Angeles night In honor of its 20th anniversary this month, Chris Forrester dives into the Michael Mann thriller Collateral, the first film to really foreground the digital style that has defined the filmmaker’s career since. While for the majority of filmgoers, the transition from film to digital might… Read more »

Howard Hawks, Rio Bravo, and the Hangout Film

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Ricky Nelson, John Wayne, and Walter Brennan hang out outside a brick building

Still from Rio Bravo Chris Forrester details how Rio Bravo exemplifies the term of “the hangout film” with its affable characters, softened masculinity, atypical genre tropes, and more. The films of Howard Hawks offer a sampling of many of the cinema’s great genre pleasures — film noirs, musicals, westerns, dramas, comedies, romances, war films. Were… Read more »

The Seductive Pleasures of Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula

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A female vampire screams at a cross

Still from Bram Stoker’s Dracula Chris Forrester bites into the cinematic history of the world’s most famous vampire and how filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola transformed the story into an operatic, dazzling epic like none other. When I wrote last month about remakes, one film that consistently crossed my mind was Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Coppola, 1992),… Read more »

re:Re:Made

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A woman in a bloody shower reaches her hand out

A new Marion Crane for a new Psycho Using examples from such luminaries as William Friedkin and Steven Soderbergh, Chris Forrester discusses three different kinds of remakes and what their filmmaking approaches bring to the table. IU Cinema’s series Re:Made parses the nature of the remake by screening pairs of films — inspiring originals and… Read more »

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