The Best of Pictures: The Godfather
31 Dec
27 Dec
While viewing Tarantino’s eagerly awaited 8th feature film, The Hateful Eight, two conflicting opinions were passionately arguing within my brain. The first was telling me, “This film is absolutely beautiful; a real cinematic treat!” Indeed, as one might expect from Tarantino, The Hateful Eight is a gorgeously crisp film. Shot on celluloid, and set within a blizzard-ridden Wyoming, the film presents the typical mountain range landscapes associated with classics of the Western genre, yet the film is able to subvert these geographical tropes somewhat by flattening and smoothing out the frame of the film with deep glistening snow. To effect, this flattening of the landscape highlights the individual features of the characters within the film, allowing them as personalities to stand out from the scope of their environment. As a cinematic technique, this creates wonderfully dramatic images of faces, figures, costumes and human expressions. The film is able to maintain this grand scope of beauty throughout, making great use of its grainy-yet-classic filmic style.
23 Dec
In this episode, Tyler and Reed discuss Michael Dougherty’s Krampus and Clive Donner’s A Christmas Carol.
EPISODE BREAKDOWN
00:00:44- Intro, Reed’s website
00:05:40- Krampus
00:53:17- A Christmas Carol (1984)
01:32:08- Episode wrap-up
21 Dec
I took a poll recently among my friends to discover what was their favorite adaptation of Charles Dickens’s immortal classic short novel A Christmas Carol. The polling group was no more than twenty people, but the votes yielded a nearly unanimous result. The landslide winner was Brian Henson’s The Muppet Christmas Carol.
17 Dec
Film franchises are far from rare, but what is rare is for a film franchise to still have something relevant and noteworthy to say once it crosses the second or third installment. What is even rarer about Creed is that it is part of a franchise which is original to film, is not set within a typically franchised genre, and manages to somehow retell the first story in a fresh way while also elevating the stories which followed at the same time.
17 Dec
In this episode, Robert shares his ten favorite movies of all time.
EPISODE BREAKDOWN
00:00:45- Intro, Top Ten lists
00:16:00- Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
00:36:30- The Naked Spur
00:45:25- Only Angels Have Wings
00:50:32- King Kong (1933)
01:04:00- Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
01:11:17- The 400 Blows
01:23:20- Bottle Rocket
01:44:15- Annie Hall
01:55:50- Playtime
02:06:25- E.T.
02:27:30- Episode wrap-up