A film nerd who also gets nerdy about history, religion, and philosophy.
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Lady Bird 2017
“People call each other by names that their parents made up for them, but they won’t believe in God.”
In the “Lady Saints and Mystics” issue of the A24 zine, Greta Gerwig writes in the Editor’s Preface, “I’m interested in what women do in spaces that are primarily male, in structures that are patriarchal. Most religions and religious institutions fall into this category. Priesthood and direct communion with God is generally reserved for men. But then, every so often, a…
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Blow Out 1981
Drawing on the work of political historian Richard Hofstader, film scholar David A. Cook delineates “the ‘paranoid’ conspiracy film” as a “subgenre of 1970s film noir” (David A. Cook, Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, 1970-1979, p. 197). According to Cook, “[Hofstader] argues that an extremist strain runs throughout American political history, whose central preoccupation is ‘the existence of a vast, insidious, preternaturally effective international conspiratorial network designed to perpetrate acts of the most fiendish…
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The Seventh Seal 1957
“When the Lamb broke the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour.” -Revelation 8:1
“What is going to happen to those of us who want to believe but aren’t able to? And what is to become of those who neither want to nor are capable of believing?”
A meditative collection of philosophical and theological vignettes on Death. Bergman gets a reputation as a “boring” filmmaker, but I was engaged the entire time. In a time…
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Jaws 1975
Sure, people watch this movie around the 4th of July because the story is set around 4th of July weekend. But Jaws is also just an exceptional piece of 1970s Americana. The character of Mayor Larry Vaughn perfectly encapsulates the post-Watergate, post-Vietnam politician of the Nixon era: a bureaucrat who doesn’t listen to his advisers and refuses to admit his mistakes without spinning it into positive PR. Sex-crazed beach-bum hippies are the first prey of the titular shark. Then, there’s…
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