Features

Brian Gibson takes a week off of buying DVDs and Rob Hunter steps in to lend his advice on what you should be buying at your local retailer this week.

This week, Landon looks at Hunger and asks why we watch movies that are hard to watch.

For better or for worse, Hollywood works differently now, and a pretty face just doesn’t sell tickets anymore.

With this weekend’s release of I Love You, Man, the recent trend of comedies centered on platonic male relationships—the ‘bromance’—is articulated to its furthest extent thus far, taking the traditional genre formula of the romantic comedy and replacing the traditional male-female love story with two heterosexual males. While this trend of celebrating intimate male friendships is pervasive and seemingly wholly new in mainstream American comedies, the determining predecessors for this trend, and its balance of male and female characters, contains roots in canonical films of 1960s and 70s New Hollywood.

This week, Landon explores the world of long movies. Really long movies.

I’m going to force the interwebs to take a momentary break from continuing to go nuts over Watchmen this weekend and take a look at a couple of documentaries below the radar…

First of all I need to preface this post by saying that I don’t believe the Oscars matter in the least. Sure, they’re fun to vote on, discuss, and are (apparently) a great excuse to party on a boat, but, ultimately, whoever takes home the gold at the end of the night only matters to those who actually attended the ceremony.

Cylons and Big Transforming Robots are being elevated from low camp to serious stories. Only in 2007 could those in their twenties and early thirties want to revisit the 1980s.

For better or for worse, filmic performances are often determined by an unavoidable cultural weight as well as increasingly mediating technological factors that go largely unacknowledged or unrecognized by critics or audiences as an actual part of the performance.