1. Burden of Dreams
2. Wild Strawberries
3. Poetry
4. Unforgiven
5. Dogtooth

Enjoy!

Craig can’t sleep because he is anxious about a phone call he MUST make.

Click here to view the embedded video.

On The Tree of Life:

Here is how I know that The Tree of Life is a masterpiece: it does all of these things, and touches me so much that I can barely stand it, and there is basically not one single element in the film that speaks to me personally. I have no siblings, and cannot begin to speak to the veracity of the brotherly relationships that lend the film its most poignant and magical moments; I’ve didn’t grow up in the kind of neighborhood where you could run around and stumble across wonderful things every which where; I have never had an acrimonious relationship with my father; I find the very idea of spotting Infinite Motherhood to be uncomfortably “othering” of women. And most crucially of all, I’m enough of a doctrinaire atheist that the questions, “Who is God? What is God thinking? How do we become closer to God?” are inherently as useful and compelling as wondering why we can’t taste our own tongue. And despite all of these handicaps, the movie still feels like it’s holding up a mirror: and it presents its intently specific story with such universal artistry and beauty and, yes, grace, that I cannot help but be swept up by it: twice I have seen the movie, and twice the moment that it ended felt like being violently shaken awake. I have now, twice, greeted the end of the movie with deep exhalation of feeling that reaches down into my toes, not sure if I should dance or cry from the unutterable glory of it.

The [awesome] prompt:

Genre films — like westerns, melodramas, horror films, etc. – draw on implicit conventions specific to genres in order to leave viewers emotionally and/or artistically satisfied while watching the film and when it ends. There are implicit conventions about what sorts of closure is appropriate to a genre, about motivations of the characters, about the kinds of emotions it is appropriate for viewers to feel, etc. Think of a standard western or a standard thriller. There are also visual conventions : think of the noir images or of the realist visual conventions of The Bicycle Thief or Chop Shop.

Although these conventions are important to identifying a film as belonging to a particular genre, they can also be violated for artistic and emotional effect. A good example of the violation of a thriller convention is Psycho. But it seems like they can’t be violated too much or they will no longer belong to the genre and/or be unsatisfying!

Using The Host (monster movie)…as an example, construct a thesis with two parts.

1. What are the important identifying elements of the genre of the film you’ve chosen? Emotions? Visual elements? Auditory elements? Character motivations? The ending? A combination of these elements or something else? Why is this/are these the most important identifying element(s) of the genre?

2. If you had the power to change the film, is there an element that you could change just a little bit that would result in it no longer being identifiable as a film in that genre? Justify this with reference to part 1) of your answer. Does this provide an argument for why the elements you identified in 1) are essential to the genre to which the film belongs?

Think philosophically and creatively!

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1. The Host
2. Being Elmo
3. Network
4. Taris (short)
5. Godzilla (1954)
6. John Carter
7. Game Change
8. Eastern Promises
9. Friends with Kids
10. A Separation
11. Ivan’s Childhood
12. The Color of Pomegranates
13. Young Adult
14. The Hunger Games
15. 21 Jump Street
16. The Son

The Tree of Life should have won cinematography. Seriously; who predicted Hugo?

That Harvard freshman must be feeling pretty smug about predicting the Streep win by .7% while using statistics.  I smell another Moneyball in the making…

As an added bonus, here’s a link to an awesome game to play during the awards.

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Here’s a running list:

1. A History of Violence (14)
2. Logan’s Run
3. Rudy (15)
4. The Muppets
5. X-Men: First Class
6. Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (17)
7. Yojimbo (18)
8. Limitless (20)
9. Horrible Bosses
10. Shane (22)
11. The Descendants (25)
12. Robin Hood: Men in Tights
13. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (26)
14. The Gold Rush (27)
15. This is Spinal Tap (28)
16. Kung Fu Panda 2
17. Creature from the Black Lagoon (29)
18. The Help
19. Fast Five (30)
20. The Adventures of Tintin 3D

Movies I saw again:

1. Rashomon
2. Black Dynamite — “dyno-MITE!”