Culture Warrior
Column.
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Culture Warrior: The Oscars Still Matter and Why That’s A Good Thing
For the first time in recent memory, I’m going into Oscar Sunday having no idea who is likely to take home many of the major…
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Culture Warrior: The Importance of Honoring Motion Capture Performances
The performance was so compelling, and the digital handiwork so real, that critics believed it would be a huge oversight if the Academy didn’t find…
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Culture Warrior: The First Oscar-Worthy Same Sex Kiss and The Academy’s Blurry Vision of History
The Oscar montage reel is a genre on its own. It’s transparently demonstrative of the overall function of the Academy Awards. These montage reels summarize…
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Culture Warrior: George Lucas’s Problem of Mass Appeal
A week and a half ago, Anthony Hemingway’s Red Tails was released. On the surface, the film breathes Hollywood oxygen through-and-through. It’s a WWII era…
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Culture Warrior: How the 70s Proved Mass-Marketing Wasn’t the Only Way to Make Movies
As much as I admire the incomparable films made during the era, New Hollywood (the term referring to innovative, risk-taking films made funded by studios…
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Culture Warrior: Scorsese’s ‘Hugo’ and the Death of Celluloid
The self-reflexive practices of the meta-film take various forms. On the one hand, there’s the legacy of cinephilic directors from Brian De Palma to P.…
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Culture Warrior: Surviving the Bizarre Fandom and Blood Slurpees of a ‘Breaking Dawn’ Midnight…
Culture Warrior: Surviving the Bizarre Fandom and Blood Slurpees of a ‘Breaking Dawn’ Midnight Showing When I purchased my ticket for the Thursday night midnight show…
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Culture Warrior: ‘J. Edgar,’ the Limitations of Biopics, and Eastwood’s Politics
Warning: This post contains spoilers about J. Edgar. For the past few years, I haven’t been much of a fan of Clint Eastwood’s work. While he…
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Culture Warrior: Occupy Hollywood
One of the great misconceptions about Hollywood is that it is a liberal institution. Several false assumptions inform this misconception: thinking of “Hollywood” as a…