Tag Archives: film

Lina Wermuller’s All Screwed Up

Antonella and I watch a lot of movies. We try and watch one every night, although that doesn’t always work out, we tend to get five or six in a week, sometimes more. This week we have been exploring the … Continue reading

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Hannah Arendt

While I am writing about movies I haven’t been able to stop thinking about, I recommend Margarethe von Trotta’s 2012 film Hannah Arendt—you can find it on Netflix in the U.S. at the moment. The film centers around Hannah Arendt’s coverage … Continue reading

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Former Ventura County Sheriff Claude Mulvihill

I read Robert Towne’s script and watched Roman Polanski’s classic neo-noir Chinatown (1974) this week for noir106. This class is becoming an excuse for all kinds of fun things. We’re focusing on writing out of the gate this time around, and Paul Bond … Continue reading

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Moral Endings in Cain’s Postman Always Rings Twice

Picking up on my last post about the broader crisis of existential meaning in Hemingway’s “The Killers” for noir 106, it might be be interesting to look  at James M. Cain’s 1934 novella The Postman Always Rings Twice. I this reading I was struck by the deeply perverse … Continue reading

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Is there an idea to “The Killers”?

Noir is often characterized by pithy dialogue, rainswept city streets, the femme fatale, shadowy characters, tortuous plots, etc. These tropes certainly help one identify a style of noir, and you can find the tropes in all the literary examples of noir … Continue reading

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“I Confess” and “Torn Curtain”

Antonella and I watched Alfred Hitchcock’s  I Confess (1953) the other night, and I was a bit disappointed. That’s rarely the case with a Hitchcock film, but I couldn’t help feeling the story was stilted and Montgomery Clift couldn’t get into anything … Continue reading

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The Academic GIF

I wrote several months ago about the experience of working alongside UMW’s Chinese History scholar Sue Fernsebner to start imagining how she might integrate animated GIFs into a curriculum centered around film analysis. I tongue-and-cheek referred to it as GIFiculum, or GIF … Continue reading

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Filmfax ode to the legendary Ray Harryhausen

  Just got the latest issue of Filmfax, and look what greeted me on the cover: the late, great Ray Harryhausen painting a miniature of Medusa from Clash of the Titans (1981). The article features an excellent interview by Mike … Continue reading

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bavatuesdays Episode 2: Hercules in the Haunted World

Paul Bond and I got together for another awesome talk about Mario Bava’s second feature Hercules in the Haunted World (1961). The discussion ranges from points about Bava’s brilliant use of color in this film, the Sword and Sandal genre, … Continue reading

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The Digital Legacy of the 1980s: Super Mario Bros.

My kids and I explore movies and series on Netflix to watch on a somewhat regular basis. And while I’ve been underwhelmed by their live streaming library as of late like everyone else,  we recently stumbled upon The Super Mario Bros. … Continue reading

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