Let's begin with the ending of Visconti's The Leopard. Having attended a ball that went all night and into the early hours of the next morning, Don Fabrizio Corbera, the Prince of Salina, refuses a carriage ride back to his estate. He decided he would walk home alone. This ending is not the ending of … Continue reading #235. The Leopard. Dir., Luchino Visconti
As a visual medium, cinema has its own pathways for an audience to recognize the tragedy of a society forbidding the love between people. A film's script can make the tragedy explicit through the dialogue of approving or disapproving characters, but the visual nature of a film opens multiple opportunities for the couple to communicate … Continue reading #198. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. Dir., Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Updated: October 29, 2022. First created: November, 14, 2021. I have been fortunate enough to teach university classes on politics and film. I am certain few students in these classes could guess how stressful it was to assemble a list of films for each semester. The films I showed in class or assigned as homework … Continue reading An evolving filmography about power
Rotten Tomatoes (RT) found a way to get every last drop from the well of convenience. Film criticism is already pressured, tacitly by convention, or explicitly by editors and bosses, to give bite-size scores with thumbs (up or down), stars (out of 4 or 5), letter grades (with memories of school report cards) or numbers … Continue reading What does the growing divide on Rotten Tomatoes mean?
Like other streaming services, Netflix does not make its user data public. To date, there are two exceptions to this privacy. Netflix released a large dataset of anonymized user activity when it offered a one million dollar prize for the best AI model that could predict user ratings with data between 1998 and 2005. Netflix … Continue reading The habits of Netflix’s users
A Klee painting named "Angelus Novus" shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive … Continue reading #196. Hiroshima mon amour. Dir., Alain Resnais
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a frenetic 90s film that grew the star power of Johnny Depp and revitalized the myth of a young Hunter S. Thompson, who first became famous in the 60s and 70s for living the philosophy of Gonzo journalism on assignments for Rolling Stone. I believe Fear and Loathing … Continue reading #175. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Dir., Terry Gilliam
On the question of who judges the quality of a film, it is easy to start with a notion that the ultimate judge of a film's quality is the individual moviegoer. As individual moviegoers, this is often what we think we are doing: we have the autonomy "decide for ourselves" if a film is good … Continue reading When Hollywood defines the limits of good cinema
I have recently published a book, titled "The political economy of Hollywood: Capitalist power and cultural production". It is the most comprehensive publication of my political economic research on the Hollywood film business. The book contains new and updated empirical research on the Hollywood film business, both domestically and internationally. Notably, I retrieved a large … Continue reading 2022 – Book – The Political Economy of Hollywood
Barbet Schroeder's documentary is filled with scene after scene of Idi Amin rambling. During one of them he claims that he once ran one hundred meters in 9.8 seconds. If true, Amin would have set the men's sprinting record decades before this time was officially recorded by Maurice Greene in 1999. Compared to Idi Amin's … Continue reading #157. General Idi Amin Dada: A Self-Portrait. Dir., Barbet Schroeder
notes on cinema 