For the 100th episode of the podcast, I finally put myself in the hot seat and got to choose the film for once! And after long deliberation,* I went with John Ford's solemn military school classic, a truly incoherent and paradoxical text if one ever existed ("That's an experimental film!!" proclaimed Straub). As Keith Uhlich and I talk on this, you see the ways this film slowly transforms to a mournful look at the way belief in an institution can…

For years, Hollywood and the surrounding Culture Wars have asked a question: Do Critics Matter? It's a frankly boring question, but the main anxiety has developed out of a growing disconnect between Rotten Tomatoes Favorites and the American Box Office. But Disney and their expanding intellectual properties have put a new spin on this story: critics don't matter, but studios deliberately position / design films to harness their words in order to enter The Cultural Conversation. Their movies are no…

A green Sprite bottle, given almost a mythical introduction in a frenetic monologue, slips out of the hand of a character and roles into a puddle of water. The camera, finally imparted from its intense close-ups to a God's eye long shot, lingers just for a second as it rolls into a puddle where it could be misconceived as trash. An object of everyday life that has been signified with narrative agency (A MacGuffin up there with the Arc of…