USC Cinema and Media Studies MA candidate, UNC Alum, Co-Founder of UNC’s Aspect Journal, Writer
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Yellow Sky 1948
It begins with maybe the most nonchalant robbery in all of classic Hollywood, which sets the tone for an eerily quiet and low-key picture. As the story pushes further into isolation, restricting its characters to the liminal space of the town of Yellow Sky, it becomes a quasi-hangout picture — except one highlighted by the worst vibes imaginable, rather than any kind of pleasant temporal passage. I love Wellman’s black-and-white compositions — between this and The Ox-Bow Incident, he seems…
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Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! 1965
A film that’s so thrillingly cinematic in large part because it exists at the intersection of maximalism and minimalism, of all-out excess and sparse emptiness. Meyer’s characters are all larger than life, functionally becoming caricatures in this exaggerated world. The women are defined by the trademark mix of killer one-liners, sexuality, and violent threat, with the latter two dimensions forming the film’s foundation from the opening voiceover and shaping its political position. The men, alternately, work as either walking Freudian…
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Babylon 2022
Is this getting a five star bump because I got to chat with Justin Hurwitz and had a lovely conversation/walk-and-talk through USC with Damien Chazelle about how much I shared my love for La La Land with friends in high school and my passion for teaching now? Maybe. But also it fucking rules and Chazelle is a modern master so the haters can cry about it. New goal is to stay in academia long enough and gain enough clout to…
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The Northman 2022
Interesting to have seen this film just in time for some Film Twitter “discourse” (for those not in the know: Vikings, white supremacy/neo-Nazis, folks yelling back and forth in bad faith, etc.) to kick in. This film has been a discourse bomb waiting to go off ever since that medieval scholar tweeted about how the poster was a Nazi dogwhistle when the marketing campaign started. Robert Eggers, judging from the post-screening Q&A and every interview I’ve read with him, seems…
