Yup, Novotny did his dissertation on blaxploitation and taught a whole class on the subject, so I'm not surprised his lecture was great, because the class was amazing. Sweet Sweetback was the cornerstone, much to the chagrin of several of my classmates (it was a 400-level course - did people really expect to not be…

Boy, that cast is a murderer's row of people who deserve better than Crappy YA Franchise Non-Starter #472.

Kevin Willmott was my favorite professor at KU, and Novotny was my favorite professor and one of my mentors when I was at SIU - he was the one who pushed me to go to KU. And I work in the Bolling building on 12th, so we're probably just a few blocks from each other. Small fucking world indeed!

I took both! I think we were among the last classes to use 8mm and 16mm. We probably knew each other, if only in passing.

People rightly shit all over AVATAR for being so huge while having no staying power in our collective cultural memory, but I'd submit the HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL franchise as an even bigger example of that phenomena. It was HUGE among the 5-to-18-year-old demographic (the third installment even got a theatrical release!),…

Yup, I was there getting my useless film and journalism undergrad degrees from '06-'10. Haven't been back since I graduated, and by all accounts from the friends who are still there, you're dead on about things getting worse. Go Salukis!

I dislike more of his films than I like. I think my main problem is that I don't have any idea what drives him as a filmmaker. He seems to just want to keep pumping out movies and working, which would be fine if he was turning out quality work. But so many of his movies feel like first drafts, recycling the kind of…

"The only idea more overused than serial killers is multiple personality. On top of that, you explore the notion that cop and criminal are really two aspects of the same person. See every cop movie ever made for other examples of this."

This is why, even though I despise them and think just about every creative choice he made with the material was wrong, I admire Rob Zombie's HALLOWEEN remakes, because it felt like someone whose interest in a remake went beyond "let's just slap some more gore and tits and slick professionalism on this and call it…

"The movie is an invaluable experiment in the theory of cinema, because it demonstrates that a shot-by-shot remake is pointless; genius apparently resides between or beneath the shots, or in chemistry that cannot be timed or counted."

The problem is that his main point (properly planned shots and diligent editing can result in an energetic and quickly paced film that tells a coherent story) isn't anything new or insightful. Low ASL and shaky cam are just another tool in the filmmaker's handbook, and some people use it shittily, and some don't.

When the cast was on Graham Norton, Boyega mentioned that he shot a few scenes early on with the British accent, and he and JJ agreed that it didn't work. But of course, this being STAR WARS, it could mean so many things. Or nothing.

Yup, great movie, one of the more underrated ones of the current decade.

Also today, Indiewire was acquired by Penske Media, so it's been a banner day of possibly ominous journalism announcements.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who had a breakup that was directly inspired by the HOLY SHIT THIS IS US recognition of ETERNAL SUNSHINE.

I just looked it up and indeed it was! The biggest names in that one are Sigourney Weaver and George Carlin, who, to be fair, are Pixar-level names, since they both did Pixar movies. But then the rest of the main cast is Sarah Michelle Gellar, Freddie Prinze Jr., Andy Dick and Wallace Shawn. Not exactly the A squad.

ANGRY BIRDS is just weird. Not the idea that someone would try to make a movie out of it, because obviously there's money there, but that they so completely missed the window on the peak popularity of that franchise, and I guess the rights were just burning a hole in their pockets, so they said, "eh, fuck it, make it…

You can always tell how invested a studio was in an animated movie by the voice talent. There's one in the Redbox right now where the biggest names on the cover are Jon Heder and Jason Mewes, and it advertises that it "contains both the English and Spanish versions!"

I can't get too upset, because of course any actor is going to be most remembered for their iconic roles. But thumbing through IMDB this morning, I was reminded of what a high level of quality control he had. In a 40-year career, he had maybe a dozen movies that were mediocre or worse, and worked with such a wide…

This is correct. As a contrast, I loved KICKING AND SCREAMING and THE SQUID AND THE WHALE. Those also come from a certain upper-middle-class-urban mindset, and of course they do, because that's the background Baumbach was raised in. But in both those movies, it felt like a writer writing what he knew, and the…