Way back in my film school days, I had an interaction with a favorite cousin whom I had not seen in some time. This opportunity to reconnect saw our first interaction since I had been accepted as a film student, and so he asked me what basically everyone asks me right after I tell them I’m studying film, “So, like what’s your favorite movie, then?” When approached with this question, at least by associates who are not necessarily film buffs, my default response is usually something I know has been on Netflix in the last year. (Though if I had to pick an answer ... maybe Silver Linings Playbook .) I think this time I said James Cameron’s Titanic . He then had a sort of illuminated reaction and followed up with, “I see, so you like … old movies.” My response to this was something in the vein of, “Well, yes , but NOOOO …” Steven Spielberg being a 29-year-old on the set of Jaws In academic circles, t he demarcation between “c...
I spent two-thirds of Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey thinking I was watching Ridley Scott's Gladiator only to realize I was watching John Ford's The Searchers all the time. And it was largely this thirteenth-hour realization that secured the film's favorable rating from me. My slowness in catching onto this may have been partially caused by me also looking beyond the mark in other ways. Even if it had been fairly telegraphed in the promotional material, I was kind of hoping that Nolan's vision for the mythological epic would unleash a proper monster parade. But Nolan doesn't appear to want to emulate Demond Davis' Clash of the Titans any more than he did with Tim Burton's Batman in his "Dark Knight" trilogy. Witches like Circe and Calypso would never be mistaken for anything adjacent to Michelle Pfieffer in Stardust . Even something like "Pirates of the Caribbean" or "Lord of the Rings" is further on the oper...