Film
My Favorite Movies 86: Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 1999)
Claire Denis is a director I discovered only in the last decade or so. A name spoken in hushed tones in certain pretentious film circles, her best work reveals that she has more than earned her formidable reputation (and her lesser work is still worth a watch too). Her films are sometimes called impenetrable, elliptical,…
Read MoreMy Favorite Movies 84 – Angel and the Badman (James Edward Grant, 1947)
Westerns have been featured on My Favorite Movies™ many times, so today’s film making the cut despite being a fairly minor John Wayne western should be no real surprise. The fact that it’s about a bunch of Pennsylvania Quakers convincing Duke to give up his guns and go legit is maybe a bit more surprising.…
Read MoreThe Top 5 Features of Classic Male Movie Actors that Give the Ick
Classic films were a product of a different time. Different fashion, different hair styles, and different attitudes towards casual misogyny. So, when attempting to critique the look of the men vying for our attention in these olden times, we’ll naturally have to grade on a curve. And with all this in mind, today we’re going…
Read MoreMy Favorite Movies 83: Perceval le Gallois (Eric Rohmer, 1978)
Eric Rohmer could easily be my all-time favorite film director. Granted, his movies are mostly just long psuedo-intellectual conversations between hot French twenty-somethings that are filmed without affectation or adornment. But, one could learn just about everything there is to know about humanity by studying the courtship rituals of twenty-somethings–and so Rohmer returns to this…
Read MoreMy Favorite Movies 82: The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (Chia-Liang Liu, 1978)
I am pretty new to Kung Fu movies–only really diving in after a Covid cult movie watching binge last year. Since then, I’ve watched many more “classic” kung fu films, and have really grown to appreciate the genre as more than just bad wigs and constant swishing sound effects. I quickly realized that Hong Kong’s…
Read MoreKVLTing the Silents 1: Dovzhenko’s Earth (1930) paired with Крюкокрест’s Ауфидерзейн
Silent films were never actually played silent–even prior to the 1900s they almost always had some manner of musical accompaniment. From a simple house pianist to a full blown orchestra for larger cities, there was always some type of a live soundtrack. And, while some films (especially in the later silent period) had either musical…
Read MoreMy Favorite Movies 81: The Road Warrior (George Miller, 1981)
This MFM feature is getting dominated more and more by genre fare, but I’ve always been a sucker for the delights of genre, all the way back to reading my first Tarzan book in elementary school. Yes, if you want to get fancy, you can try to build a narrative from the ground up without…
Read MoreKult Movie-watching Kumite
It’s time for another Movie-watchin’ Kumite as 8 more films battle for cinematic supremacy. Once again, I’m sticking with the “all movies must be new to me” rule (though I HAVE seen Golden Voyage of Sinbad before, it has been probably 30 years since I last saw it, so I let it slide) as I…
Read MoreSpaghetti Western Deep Cuts Roundup
Spaghetti Westerns are not my favorite Form of the Western cinematic experience. Which might be surprising since I usually enjoy a fair amount of cynicism in my films, but for me nothing can beat the pure white-meat babyface appeal of classics like My Darling Clementine and Rio Bravo. On the other hand, if you can…
Read MoreMy Favorite Movies 80: Django (Sergio Corbucci, 1966)
Spaghetti Westerns (Italian films from the 1960s and 70s set in the American West) are not my favorite Westerns. Ultraviolent, revisionist, grim affairs with nothing but bad towns and nihilistic worldviews, they are a far cry from the kind of idealized white hat mythmaking that drew me to the genre in the first place. On…
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