The Final Take with Parker Mott

Written by guest writer Tom Beaver

Roman Polanski – a shot from the biographical documentary A Film Memoir (2011).

What are your limits?

If you’ve never experienced anything undeniably catastrophic in your life (bad Internet connections, sketchy cellular reception- these do not count)- then how would you know? Until you reach your outer limits or your “breaking point”- how can you possibly see how you’d function there? What you would do? As John Huston’s villain, Noah Cross, says in CHINATOWN (1974)- “Most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and the right place they’re capable of anything.” (continue reading…)

Written by guest writer Tom Beaver

Who would have ever dreamt we’d end up where we are now (aside from George Orwell and a maybe a handful of others)? In a globalized landscape littered with endless technological advancements, non-stop gratification and consumption, limitless possibilities and absolutely no end in sight to the modifications and centralizations, we’re finally – and truly – swollen with self satisfaction and entirely dependent on our darling little shiny gadgets lifelessly beaming back at us. (continue reading…)

The first time: a not-so intimate moment in the many first sexual encounters in the poignant "Just About Love".

Lola Doillon’s visual style in Just About Love (2007) is admirably observational with how it follows the film’s characters and naturally shows them interacting with their environment. This style is predominantly manifested in tracking shots, a technique that fosters an inherent intimacy amongst the characters, because it shows they are spatially close, coming in and out of the frame concurrently. (continue reading…)

The famously garish Trevi Fountain scene in "La Dolce Vita".

There is an important irony that Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (“The Sweet Life” – 1960) signifies a transition for Italian cinema, while its protagonist Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni) is ostensibly in one himself. The first refers to La Dolce Vita as Fellini’s departure from Italian neorealism and themes of salvation and grace within a bleak Italian social reality. The second – ultimately the consequence of the first – indicates Marcello’s fruitless stroll through a new Italian reality of stardom and media consumption. The social reality was just as bleak, but it was adorned by Marcello’s self-gratifying, insatiable, and ostensibly pleasurable search for “the sweet life”. (continue reading…)

Charlotte Rampling.

In “Does a Long-Term Relationship Kill Romantic Love?”, Bianca P. Acevedo and Arthur Aron argue that “romantic love – with intensity, engagement, and sexual interest – can last. Although it does not usually include obsessional qualities of early stage love, it does not inevitably die out or at best turn into companionate love – a warm, less intense love, devoid of attraction and sexual desire” (59). (continue reading…)

Rachel Weisz is the unwavering, intelligent Hypatia in "Agora".

Alejandro Amenabar’s Agora is a fitting way to wrap up this course, because it emulates many of the studied peplum tropes, in order to tell a Roman epic that is convincingly cerebral in nature. As the late critic Roger Ebert wrote: “I went to Agora expecting an epic with swords, sandals, and sex. I found swords and sandals, some unexpected opinions about sex, and a great deal more.” (Ebert) Ebert indicates that Agora challenges the contemporary preconceived notion, as a result of Hollywood action bombast like Clash of the Titans and Immortals, that peplum films automatically involve a robust male hero with a gorgeous woman tucked at his side, and plenty of chariot races to carry us along to the conclusion. (continue reading…)

The unthinkable event: nuclear fallout in an innocent Kansas pastoral town in "The Day After" (1983).

“A nuclear family stands in the archway of an arcade emblazoned with symbols of Western culture, high and low, and watches three missiles arc over an idealised landscape.”
- Susan Boyd-Bowman, on the press poster of The Day After (1983)

Peter Ustinov as Nero in Mervyn LeRoy's "Quo Vadis".

You could not get enough of Peter Ustinov. His full-bodied, full-toned presence often commanded the viewer’s eyes away from the action to solely on him. Ustinov also tended to be elusive in his acted films, particularly the sword-and-sandal ones, intermittently sashaying in and stealing the show. In them, he often played supporting roles, but diversity made it impossible to typecast him. (continue reading…)

Stanley Kubrick directs a sequence of high spectacle in "Spartacus" (1960).

The ambiguous part about Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960), and what makes it fascinating, is the creative gap in the thematic components of the story between the director and leftist screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. There is a tale about the Thracian slave’s divine quest to save his people from an oppressive Roman Empire, and concurrently an undertone that scoffs at the absurdity of that mission in a rigidly right-wing empire. (continue reading…)

Laughter in Dr. Strangelove comes from both fear and joy. The film’s entertainment value is paradoxical – we are amused by humanity’s pathetic, fallible efforts to overcome global destruction. With Dr. Strangelove, harmony and perfectibility in America no longer exists and Kubrick demonstrates this realization through a sort of nightmare comedy, a sub-genre where wit and woe coexist simultaneously in a hopeless struggle against the arrival of our doom. (continue reading…)