The Fourth Genre (Just in Case You’re from Space and Haven’t Seen The Avengers) Before I watched a bunch of DC animated movies, I watched A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies. In that doc, Scorsese says there are three American genres, genres which sprung up in their fullest forms in American movies:… Read More The Fourth American Genre: The Superhero Movie
Dir. Clint Eastwood. Starring Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman If you give an actor the director’s chair, he’ll want his star persona to go with it. This is how we end up with Unforgiven, which looks like it’s rattling along as an interesting movie until it works itself out, unsurprisingly, as Eastwood machismo killporn… Read More Unforgiven (1992)
Dir. John Ford. Starring John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter, Henry Brandon The diagetic portions of this movie begin with a surprisingly striking image: a woman stands in a doorway, black in the way Pierre-Auguste Renoir said a painting should never use black, her silhouette blocking the majestic view of the ostensibly Texan skyline. (It’s Monument Valley,… Read More The Searchers (1956)
Seeing Things Secondhand 