“I’ve always tried to present a positive view of the world in my work. It’s so much easier to be negative and cynical and predict doom for the world than it is to try and figure out how to make things better. We have an obligation to do the latter.” — Jim Henson One of… Read more »
Bite-Sized Blogs
Sitting Through the Credits
For me, one of the most difficult things about teaching film is to convince students to not only sit through end credits, but to actually pay attention to them. Marvel seems to have found the trick to this (at least the sitting-through-the-credits part, and probably only in theaters): exploit the franchise’s extended narrative by putting… Read more »
Godard’s Life to Live
A new movie and a special anniversary make May 2018 a fantastic time to revisit the life and work of French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard. A biopic about Godard, Le Redoubtable, recently played at the IU Cinema. It tells the story of his political radicalization during the late 1960s. One section of the film… Read more »
Rosalind Russell’s Remarkable Girl Friday
His Girl Friday (1940) is definitely one of the most iconic classic films today. The lightning-fast dialogue; the searing political commentary; the colorful characters and the excellent cast that brings them to life… This film is probably one of the most well-known old movies out there, in part because of its fall into the public domain,… Read more »
Revolutions of an Art(ist): La Chinoise, Changing Politics, Changing Film, and a Changing Godard
By the time Godard began making La Chinoise in 1967, the radicalism of his previous cinematic experiments, constituting a front-line of the popular thrust of the French New Wave, had begun to lag behind the leftism of the elite French intelligentsia and its growing student army. Godard, fearful of being out of step at the… Read more »
Shifting Perspectives: LISTEN UP PHILIP and the Other Films of Alex Ross Perry
Maybe I have seen Listen Up Philip too many times. It’s not my favorite Alex Ross Perry film. In fact when I first saw it I didn’t even really like it. I saw the characters in its ensemble as unlikable and too disagreeable (excluding Ashley played by Elisabeth Moss and Melanie played by Krysten Ritter)… Read more »