And there’s the problem with a “Best Artistic” category: what gets considered “art” or “artistic” is subjective. I don’t think of Phantom Thread or mother! as “arthouse” films, though both are “artistic”—and so is Black Panther.

At the same time, far more people have likely actually watched Sunrise than Wings. For reference, imdb lists 40,000 votes for Sunrise vs. 9,000 for Wings; Letterboxd: 16k watches vs. 3.6k.

Counterpoint: There are many, many films initially rejected by audiences that go on the become cult and even mainstream favorites. Often these are films that break narrative, aesthetic, or social conventions in provocative or forward-thinking ways. And often in these cases, people get the point, they just hate it.

It’s basically a subplot in Lukas Moodysson’s Together, which is as heartwarming and life-affirming as Sweden gets.

Male glance is not the same as gaze. It’s a much more recent term (see the article) about how people tend not to take female-centered work seriously (just at a glance) and view its subtext and depth as incidental rather than intentional. It’s blogosphere rather than academic (the lattet being a realm that does…

Awards campaign really isn’t that unlikely. After a killer 2017 (Lady Bird, Disaster Artist, Florida Project), A24 doesn’t seem to have many big awards contenders on the docket. They might be able to pick up some acting nods for Hawke in First Reformed, Collette in Hereditary, and Burt Reynolds in Last Movie Star, but…

Given that the film’s mostly poking at the Fonda character’s parochial world view, it’s not much of a problem scene. I don’t think the film’s endorsing his reaction to the news, more teaching him the whole theme of “The best ones aren’t as good as you probably think they are, and the bad ones aren’t as bad. Not nearly…

But Santa Fe is the oldest capital in the US. It being the most popular tourist city would be like Voyage to the Moon being 2017's most popular download!

No, it’s sworn to protect humans from Russian vampires.

Yeah, people tend to interpret ‘objectify’ as solely ‘treat as inhuman object’ when philosophically it more often means ‘treat as subject’s object of gaze.’ That still can have problematic implications, but it’s easier to understand as something just part of the human condition. We all want the attention of other…

Gen Y, Millennial, and Baby Boomlets (my mother’s—and thankfully no one else’s—preference) were all thrown in the 90s/00s, but yeah, the 2008 financial crisis suddenly caused Millennial to stick, as the media needed a unified phrase to refer to the generation that suddenly faced huge student debt and little work…

Ball of Fire is fantastic but unfortunately overshadowed by Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday (and maybe also because its title is more likely to evoke Jerry Lee Lewis than Stanwyck these days). It’s also one of more effectively “romantic” screwball comedies.

See also Diana Lynn as the younger sister in Miracle of Morgan’s Creek. It was definitely a strong comedic type (and probably a healthier outlet for anxieties over the growing power of women than the femme fatale).

I honestly prefer What’s Up Doc? It might go even zanier than Bringing Up Baby in many ways (like a car chase), but I think it understands Hawks’s warning not to make everyone nuts. Thus, Streisand plays off like Bugs Bunny/Groucho Marx plowing through a world of ever so slightly off center straight men, and that…

Holiday

It can be two things.

The remake is even worse because it has made the original completely unavailable on streaming or home video. Through some twist of capitalism, pharmaceutical company Bristol-Myers-Squibb came to own the rights to the Palomar film library. They received some fair amount of money in the 00's for remake rights to…

I’m still hella pissed Return of King took screenplay from American Splendor in 2003.

He hangs out a lot with William Blake.

I assume this going to jump back and forth between “modern film people have seen” click-drivers and “better older film that never streams on Netflix and thus does not exist” click-funerals. But I’ll be there for Bringing Up Baby, and hopefully you can get a Lubitsch film in there, even if it’s just a You’ve Got Mail/Sh…