As Wes Anderson's fourth film, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou has an interesting spot in Anderson's career. Look backward and you can see within Life Aquatic many of the style choices that Anderson had used before. When looking forward, Life Aquatic is the beginning of Anderson's interest of using miniatures and stop motion animation. … Continue reading #300. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Dir., Wes Anderson
A funny effect of media conglomeration in Hollywood is that many people, including myself, can use corporate names to signal whether we are speaking about Hollywood studios as producers of films, or as parts of giant media conglomerates. When we talk about this or that movie being produced by Warner Bros., Paramount, or Universal, we … Continue reading Contextualizing mergers and acquisitions in Hollywood, Part 1
I cannot comment on the connection that The Wages of Fear has to Le Salaire de la peur, the source novel that I have not read. But I readily draw connections between The Wages of Fear and the novels of B. Traven, of which I am very fond. Clouzot's film and Traven's novels are both … Continue reading #36. The Wages of Fear. Dir., Henri-Georges Clouzot
To most of us, the beating heart of Hollywood film and TV is where we imagine it is supposed to be, in the historical studio lots of Hollywood, California. This must be where movie magic is made. To those working in film and TV production today, there is certainly not one dream factory, and even … Continue reading Leaving California
I will be presenting at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) conference on Friday, April 4 at 6PM. Here is the chart book for the presentation, which contains sources and notes on all of the figures: [ PDF of SCMS2025 Chart Book ] Here is the original abstract I wrote for the presentation: … Continue reading Netflix’s Crisis of Accumulation: chart book for my SCMS2025 presentation
Updated: October 17, 2024. 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
The movie offers two forms of magic, since its conquest of the visible world extends in two opposite directions. The first, on which the realist theory concentrates, gives it the power to 'possess' the real world by capturing its appearance. The second, focus of the traditional aesthetic, permits the presentation of an ideal image, ordered … Continue reading #73. Cléo from 5 to 7, and #74. Vagabond. Dir., Agnes Varda
Bresson's style is not everyone's cup of tea, but a film like Au Hasard Balthazar is a quick path to understanding the depth of cinema's potential as an art form. Typically a film, even a really good one, is an industrial composite, a product from a system that is not always about putting the best … Continue reading #297. Au Hasard Balthazar. Dir., Robert Bresson
Abstract This paper investigates the timing of labour strikes in Hollywood. The occurrence of strikes, such as the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes in 2023, can make sense when we have the hindsight to piece together the historical details of what created rifts between labour and management. But was 2023 a particularly fragile year for contract … Continue reading SCMS Presentation: The Political Economic Roots of Hollywood Strikes, 1950-2023
In the middle of Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing there is a quick cultural reference that is easy to miss, or at least misinterpret as simply a joke. Da Mayor, an elderly drunk in the neighborhood, stops a boy on the street and asks, "What makes Sammy run?" The boy replies, "My name is … Continue reading #97. Do The Right Thing. Dir., Spike Lee
notes on cinema 