8 years ago
Features (10 posts found)
Top 10 Chicago Movies
Despite being the nation's third most populous city, Chicago remains oddly underrepresented on film. Loving natives like John Hughes, David Mamet, and Michael Mann really latched onto it and made it an integral aspect of the cinematic expression, but it remain...
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Looking Back: “The Hanging Tree”
How rich was the Western during the 1950s? So rich that even masterpieces like John Ford’s The Searchers and Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo barely scratch the surface, so rich that more than half a century later we’re still mining for beauty. There’s the terse parabl...
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Challenging the Canon: “Blue Velvet”
If one wanted a definitive list of the greatest films of all time—or at least, a definitive list of what are perceived, at this moment in time to be the greatest films of all time—you could not do much better than the list on They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? T...
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Songs in the Key of Cinema: “Boom Boom” and Bond’s Masculinity in “Skyfall”
Songs in the Key of Cinema is a bi-weekly look at the use of songs in film and how that music fits within the context of the film as a whole and a place where we'll cover the moments in cinema that were music to our eyes and ears.
With that butter slathere...
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Top 10 Films of 1932
The limited release of The Grand Budapest Hotel this past weekend was catnip for those of us who are fans of either a) Wes Anderson, b) classic Hollywood cinema, or especially c) all of the above. With the film being set predominantly in 1932 (or at least an a...
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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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Challenging The Canon: “Fight Club”
To begin, I'll let on that I'm a huge fan of David Fincher; I dig The Game, I enjoy Alien 3 and I even think that the one about Brad Pitt aging in reverse is a glorious example of adult fairytale-telling. I don't consider it hyperbolic but more realistic to sa...
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Top 10 Science Fiction Films of This World
Science fiction, that genre so perfectly suited to speculate on the future, re-imagine the past, and conjure entire worlds that seem impossible by any logical standard, is sometimes at its most compelling by casting new light on the present, the precise time a...
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Looking Back: “Le Silence de la Mer”
Irritated at how often the term "Bressonian" was used by critics to describe his films, French director Jean-Pierre Melville once declared that "it’s Bresson who’s always been Melvillian." While not technically true (Les Anges du Péché, released five years bef...
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Top 10 Stuck on Transportation Movies
All movies aim to transport us, but only a few do so by such literal means. In honor of the upcoming Liam Neeson thriller Non-Stop, here are, as far as I'm concerned, the top ten films that take place, at least mostly, within the confines of a single mode of t...
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