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Showing posts from February, 2019

The Dilemma of Marta Shubb: Humanity and Humor

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"I came to the realization that I was - and am - a blonde female folk singer trapped in the body of a bald male folk singer and, uh, I had to let me out or I would die ." - Marta Shubb (Harry Shearer), A Mighty Wind If I had to make a list of my top 10 filmmakers, it'd primarily consist of filmmakers not just known for their technical innovations to the craft nor their extreme stylistic sensibilities but in how they personally resonate with me. Similar to how I approach music, I approach film from its personal impact on me - that's why a film like Black Panther , a blockbuster film that I worked one day on as an extra and whose message appears to be "colonialism is bad, but isolationism and total non-intervention merely sets up the stage for further types of colonialism - namely a woke variant of it" alongside being another movie made to sell toys, has the same impact as the very nuanced Lost in America , Albert Brooks' sarcastic-but-comparat

Isn't It Romantic: The Middle Path

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The romantic comedy fascinates me. Mostly because I kept hearing that Annie Hall was a really good movie back in '07-'08, I took a gander at it and fell in love with the idea of watching two people fall in love with some jokes thrown in. Quite a few of the canonized comedies of the past 100 years of cinema have been romantic comedies or have romance elements thrown in - i.e. a good deal of Charlie Chaplin's work tends to have rom-com elements to it, with most historians naming 1931's City Lights  as the first modern rom-com. I think a lot of why Chaplin is so fascinated with cinematic love is not just because he utterly sucked at real-life romantic pursuits - always jumping into a different woman every time he thinks of a movie idea, for example - but because he loved to pile on the schmaltz in all of his films. He used the extremes of drama and comedy to make you relate to his characters - for example, a factory isn't just a factory but instead a haphazard