Reaction Shots

Every so often a film comes along that is so immense in scope and deep in layers that the idea of doing justice to it in two or three thousand words is ludicrous. To be sure, I've been that much of an ass that I've tried to do just that on this platform and also to be sure, I'm about to do it again. Like many people, I could blather ridiculously about Christopher Nolan's genius and command of the medium. Unlike many people, I more often than not admire his work than love it. I used to hear that from people about Kubrick; he was too cerebral, too analytical, and so on. I don't necessarily believe that about Nolan. Yes, he is cerebral, and yes, you can see the analytical elements come together in his work, but there is a genuine humanity in each of his films, as well. He is a humanist before aught else.  I think my issue - and believe me, it is only my issue - is that his films are often so refined and well-crafted that I get lost in the magic of his mastery. It take...

This failure unquestionably affected Hitchcock. There is something paradoxical about the fact that this popular film director  never managed to get his most daring, his most candid, works  accepted. The failure of Rich and Strange, like the later failure of Under Capricorn, undoubtedly prevented him from continuing along a path that he nevertheless knew was promising. If we consider Hitchcock's overall career until now [1957], it immediately becomes apparent that all his films tend to blaze or consolidate a new trail, and that just when things are about to take off, a commercial failure checks his élan and forces him to look elsewhere. His most sincere works, such "pure films" as The Manxman, Rich and Strange, Under Capricorn, and most recently The WrongMan, were culminating efforts, whereas to Hitchcock's way of thinking, they should have been points of departure.  Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol, Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films(1) The Skin Game , Hitchcock'...

It's a given that labor relations in the United States are often atrocious and that unions have struggled to succeed in representing their members and maintain some kind of resilience against the very often unified class of executives and upper management in any given industry. As a former union member (the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers ), I can submit that on the one hand, I am grateful for what the union provided to workers for fourteen years, but I can also add that it's not as strong as it was. The biggest concession was the no-strike clause and reduced pay increase percentages. I won't go into anything more because it's not germane to what I'm about to discuss and plus, I left Harvard six years ago. It's just that having direct experience with having been a union member, you are far more acutely aware of how few protections there are against exploitation of workers than when you're not. Sure, in a right-to-work state, you might have so...

"You don't have to do nothin' in this here house; you stay still and things happen." - Ben, in Number Seventeen Another adaptation from a stage play, another dismissed work, Number Seventeen is a challenging little (literally; it's only a few minutes over an hour long) film. As Charles Barr points out, Hitchcock himself deployed a little disingenuous revisionism about the genesis of the work. I'll get to that momentarily but for now, I'm struck by the film for a constellation of completely different reasons. Out of the gate, if I approach the film as a narrative, it's borderline incomprehensible and as a work of Hitchcock's, it comes across as perversely sloppy and even idiotic. However, as an experimental work seen as something less linear, it becomes far richer.  The plot, such as it is, involves a necklace, a detective, jewel thieves, all of whom come together in an " old, dark house ". I'm not being (well, completely) coy in that ...

I don't know if it comes through in this writing, but I'm not the most nostalgic of movie goers. I mean, I did get misty eyed at various points in the Star Wars sequels, though mostly, I really feel those movies are whiffs ( The Last Jedi excepted, but even there, hooooo-eeee, there was some filler). Indiana Jones, of course, is a touchstone for many people who have been with the character since Raiders of the Lost Ark , an all around summit of achievement for all involved and to which none of the sequels measured up. Some people will say that The Last Crusade did, and I really did like it a lot, but I didn't care for The Temple of Doom (parts of which are just outright dreadful and with all due respect to Kate Capshaw, did your future husband realizes he turned your character into the anti-Marion? The most unrelenting, screaming-mimi in cinema in the last forty years, coupled with, well, why yes thank you for noticing, some of the most racist portrayals of a culture see...