Features

With this weekend’s release of I Love You, Man, the recent trend of comedies centered on platonic male relationships—the ‘bromance’—is articulated to its furthest extent thus far, taking the traditional genre formula of the romantic comedy and replacing the traditional male-female love story with two heterosexual males. While this trend of celebrating intimate male friendships is pervasive and seemingly wholly new in mainstream American comedies, the determining predecessors for this trend, and its balance of male and female characters, contains roots in canonical films of 1960s and 70s New Hollywood.

This week, Landon explores the world of long movies. Really long movies.

I’m going to force the interwebs to take a momentary break from continuing to go nuts over Watchmen this weekend and take a look at a couple of documentaries below the radar…

First of all I need to preface this post by saying that I don’t believe the Oscars matter in the least. Sure, they’re fun to vote on, discuss, and are (apparently) a great excuse to party on a boat, but, ultimately, whoever takes home the gold at the end of the night only matters to those who actually attended the ceremony.

Cylons and Big Transforming Robots are being elevated from low camp to serious stories. Only in 2007 could those in their twenties and early thirties want to revisit the 1980s.

For better or for worse, filmic performances are often determined by an unavoidable cultural weight as well as increasingly mediating technological factors that go largely unacknowledged or unrecognized by critics or audiences as an actual part of the performance.

In our brand new feature, our brand new contributor Landon Palmer condenses his PhD-worthy knowledge to tackle the current state of cinema and what it has to say about all of us.

Like many of you, I was excited about The Dark Knight finally coming to Blu-ray and DVD. But as you may know by now, the release’s special features are oddly void of some things that fans might have enjoyed…

1939 is celebrated as one of the greatest single years of cinematic achievement in the history of the art. In honor of that Golden Era, I wanted to spotlight perhaps the least known Best Picture nominee of that year – Ninotchka.