The Subjective POV Shot
Maybe no other technique is so crucial to the Hitchcock style as his use of the subjective POV shot. In its simplest form, the technique works like this.
Which leads me to my unsettled question. Has the era of movies and cinema passed?
While aspects of that question upset me because the signs around us often point to yes, some inner voice inside me says no.
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The director of Psycho, Rear Window, Vertigo, The 39 Steps, The Birds, Strangers on a Train, Shadow of a Doubt, North by Northwest, and The Lady Vanishes was well known for his genius at constructing a movie and entertaining an audience. He was equally well known for his commercial genius at marketing himself so a movie could get made on his name alone.
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Hausu is a film that i was introduced to by Secret Movie Club, I think in 2019, and then saw it again in 2021, but I didn’t remember much specific about it except that it was one of the craziest movies I’ve ever seen, and I remembered that spot on. Very crazy!
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Hi all, in our most recent podcast about the Sight & Sound 2022 “The Greatest Films of All Time” poll the four of us – Edwin Gomez, Daniel Ott, Craig Hammill, and, myself, Connor Lloyd Crews – each gave our own “Top Ten” that we would have submitted to the poll! I present them here with minimal comments for your perusal.
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Okay, here is the thing. I have been on vacation all of January, just arriving back home the other day, and had neither the time nor the energy to see a movie for this week, so I thought I’d look back at some films I wrote about in the past, but hadn’t posted anywhere.
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The Martian is, for me, a travel movie. I watched it one time on a plane, and ever since then I have always looked for it while traveling. I am traveling now, and was thrilled to find and rewatch it this week.
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This is how I imagine Babylon came to pass.
(Nobody in the following imagined scene should be assumed to be anybody actually involved in the making of Babylon.)
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When people mention their favorite movies from Alfred Hitchcock, they normally mention some of the greatest and most iconic movies of all time such as Rear Window, Vertigo, North By Northwest, and Psycho. But one of his very best films that often gets overlooked in his expansive body of work is his 1943 thriller Shadow of a Doubt, which turns 80 this month.
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After Bros, the first real big studio gay rom com with sex and everything, we get a second major gay love story in a single year! And neither film is about AIDS, or gay bashing, or being rejected by your family when coming out, which is a nice treat. Gay people die of cancer, too. Wait, am I getting spoilery about Spoiler Alert?
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In the early times of our John Ford, Director of the year, 2022 series, I had a dream about John Ford.
I wanted…
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CHAPTER 11: The Masterpieces Part 1-My Darling Clementine, How Green Was My Valley, The Quiet Man, The Searchers
John Ford’s My Darling Clementine, How Green Was My Valley, The Quiet Man, and The Searchers are routinely included in most Ford-o-files lists of his greatest masterpieces. It’s a testament to the Old Man’s powers that within a roughly 22 year time span (from 1939’s Young Mr. Lincoln through 1961’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance), he made arguably 12 masterpieces. Or put another way: Ford produced an all-time classsic American film every two years.
John Ford is considered the greatest director in the world, or one of the greatest, by among others, Orson Welles, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Akira Kurosawa, Steven Spielberg, and Martin Scorsese. Ford is a director’s director: a filmmaker who
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