8 years ago
All posts by Christopher Runyon
A Tale of Two Cities: Rebuilding a Metropolis
"Every epoch dreams its successor"
Jules Michelet
In the grand pantheon of sci-fi cinema, no other film is as boldly revolutionary or influential as Fritz Lang's 1927 masterpiece, Metropolis. Watching it today, the silent epic has lost none of its invention,...
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“Enemy”: Organized Chaos
There's a very good chance that Denis Villeneuve is just fucking with all of us.
His newest film Enemy opens with the cryptic quote "Chaos is order yet undeciphered," from the José Saramago novel which its based on, The Double, and then gives us an erotic y...
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The Studio Ghibli Retrospective: “Howl’s Moving Castle”
Throughout this retrospective, I've talked at length about Miyazaki's visual and thematic fascination with flight. But I haven't talked as much of another somewhat consistent image in the famed animators' work: castles. We certainly have obvious choices like t...
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“Bethlehem” Betrays Its Own Intelligence
Bethlehem feels like it would make an excellent show on HBO, and I mean that as a high compliment. The themes and ideas director Yuval Adler and co-writer Ali Wakad are playing with are all fascinating, relevant and thought-provoking on their own, but together...
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“The Rocket” Wins Your Heart Even When It Doesn’t Soar
The "crowd pleaser" is a strange kind of film. They are simultaneously able to garner both the most praise and the most backlash all at once. Take for instance The Shawshank Redemption, which still holds the #1 film slot on iMDB's Top 250 list. A great film, I...
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The Studio Ghibli Retrospective: “The Cat Returns”
Hiroyuki Morita's The Cat Returns is the second film from Studio Ghibli to not be directed by company co-founders Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata. It is also, for my money, the weakest film to come out of Studio Ghibli that I've seen (though keep in mind that...
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The Studio Ghibli Retrospective: ‘Spirited Away’
Nothing sad happens in the opening fifteen minutes of Hayao Miyazaki's eighth feature film Spirited Away. Nothing really even happens until the very end of the opening, where a traumatic event occurs to our protagonist that will change her life forever, but it...
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The Studio Ghibli Retrospective: ‘My Neighbors the Yamadas’
A family distilled
In ink and paper
We all rise to the clouds
Joined in laughter
Forever
~Dumb Haiku by Christopher Runyon
A haiku, as most readers hopefully know, is a Japanese poem meant to lyrically juxtapose two images or ideas with just a few lines ...
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Philip Seymour Hoffman Dies at Age 46
Today, actor Philip Seymour Hoffman was found dead in his fourth floor apartment in Greenwich Village of a heroin overdose. He was only 46 years old.
Hoffman is one of those actors who's managed to turn in great performance after great performance with cons...
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The Studio Ghibli Retrospective: ‘Princess Mononoke’
Studio Ghibli was constantly proving what animation could be capable of, but it took 12 years for them to produce their first real "epic". If other works of Japanese anime like Akira and Ghost in the Shell showed how animation could bring stunning sci-fi visio...
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