Category: Movies
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The American Friend
Before the film even begins, the title of The American Friend is deeply fascinating. Wim Wenders adapted Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley’s Game for the film, and both the book and the billing order suggest Dennis Hopper as Tom Ripley is the protagonist (Yes, that Tom Ripley). Introducing him as a friend predicates his existence on dependence.…
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The Big Sleep
The Big Sleep is a Philip Marlowe film. As a novice film noir fan, I was excited for my first foray into the film output surrounding the hard boiled icon, hoping for the ideal film noir. Closing in on seventy years removed from the genre’s hay day, much of the cream that has risen to…
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Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid arrived at a perfect time. For a film about the Wild West’s inevitable demise and fleeing to escape it to be placed at the tail end of the Western movie’s dominance and the dawn of the New Hollywood era is both prescient and obvious. It is obsessed with the…
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Pulse
CGI is a visual tool like any other in a filmmaker’s repertoire, but it holds a unique position in the current landscape as a signifier of laziness and apathetically commercial tendencies. Still, its existence is evidence of its capability. Computer generated images are most often seen as a shortcut to realism, shunning both the ingenuity…
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Stranger Than Paradise
Stranger Than Paradise was a little difficult to break into, at least in comparison to the two other Jim Jarmusch films I’d seen prior to watching it. It wasn’t drastically different from either of those films, in fact they shared some key traits: Stranger Than Paradise had the melancholic, lost souls of both Mystery Train…
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Blade Runner
The first time I watched Blade Runner, sprawled across my basement couch, I was left in a permanent hypnagogia throughout the runtime, barely opening my eyes to see dirty, neon-lit streets fill and empty with characters. My knowledge of the plot ended at Harrison Ford’s existence, but I slumped towards my bed after the credits with a…
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Jaws
As a self proclaimed film fan, I feel somewhat fraudulent for having gone so long without seeing some of the stone-cold classics. At least with the Godfathers I can claim the time commitment was too extreme, I haven’t found the consecutive three hour slots where the mob epics would fit and wholly absorb my focus. Trying…
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Bringing Out The Dead
Bringing Out The Dead, Scorcese’s fourth collaboration with Paul Schrader, presents the tragedy of a guilt-addled paramedic in a city where suffering is not only cyclical and permanent but patiently brewing barely beneath each person. The streets are flooded with ghosts, Our Lady of Misery, the hospital where each night ends, is overflowing. Frank Pierce is…