|Matt Clark| During the 1970s peak of kung fu film popularity, films from the Shaw Brothers’ legendary studio were known for lavish sets, period detail, and often outrageous kung fu styles. Rival studio, Golden Harvest, was primarily known for promoting international sensation… Continue reading
|Ben Jarman| Here is a new take from my mom on the film Shaolin vs Lama. The goal here again is to introduce her to genres she is not interested in and gather her thoughts. She is a movie “buff”, but she doesn’t venture much into genre films. Martial arts movies are definitely not her thing. She can handle a horror movie… Continue reading
|Ryan Sanderson| The Last Detail is a film of contrasts. It’s a film about everything, in which almost nothing happens—a beautiful, very funny work of art composed of some of the ugliest, most depressing imagery you’ll ever see in a major studio film. It’s an improvisational-feeling actor’s showcase… Continue reading
|Jackson Stern| We like to imagine that, when faced with prospects of injustice, repression, and hypocrisy from those in the highest of towers, we’d stand tall and together. We’d overthrow our oppressors by bashing them or, better yet, outsmarting them at their own cruel game… Continue reading
|Noah Frazier| The beginnings and ends of movies often function as microcosms of the whole, enclosing the film’s central ideas within a few shots. Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai opens on a silhouette of a pigeon flying across a dark blue sky. After softly mumbling through the background… Continue reading
|Phil Kolas| One of the greatest and most delicious irrefutable gifts of the internet has been the ever utterly overwhelming and bottomless wash of media that is our every waking hour. Beneath every rock there are hidden worms—snacks that will sustain our artistic intellect. Algorithmic Continue reading
|Lucas Hardwick| **Mild spoilers ahead*** My career as a writer is successful only in the sense that I get to do it; my work is published here and there, and maybe a few hundred people read it, chuckle, and manage to get something out of it—some of it right here on this very blog. But… Continue reading
|Ed Dykhuizen| Traditionally, if you’re a character in a Hollywood movie, you have to be rich. You don’t always have to be obscenely wealthy, but you must have enough money to never worry about how you’re going to pay for whatever the plot demands you have. Even if you’re in Los… Continue reading
|Patrick Clifford| In 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected to be the 40th President of these United States. Among other things, Ronny and his wife Nancy were to become the figureheads of the War on Drugs with a PSA campaign that told America to “Just Say No.” Also in 1980, Ken… Continue reading
|Kevin Obsatz| How do you go from Network to Altered States? According to a biography about the screenwriter of both films, Paddy Chayefsky (Mad As Hell by Paddy Considine), it sounds like life in New York in the mid-1970s was about as good as it can possibly get for… Continue reading
