Academia: For the Love of the Romantic Tragedy
For this essay, I picked a movie that was still in theaters and analyzed it in terms of genre. Specifically, I determined how I would classify the film, and why exactly I came to that conclusion. I chose to write about Michael Haneke’s Amour. A week before going into Amour, I had the opportunity to speak … Read more
Academia: The Big Sleep And Genre: Neither Here Noir There
Howard Hawks’ seminal classic The Big Sleep is difficult to categorize. The first instinct for many film writers and scholars has been to categorize it immediately as a so-called “film noir,” lumping the movie together with other classic films like John Houston’s The Maltese Falcon and Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity. However, it is difficult to … Read more
Op-Ed: On Abrams, Star Wars, and Episode VII
After rumors started really picking up about the next director of the Star Wars franchise, Disney released a statement officially confirming that JJ Abrams, director of the 2009 reboot of Star Trek and the more recent Super 8, will head up Episode VII. So the guy who successfully resurrected an old science fiction show has been assigned to another … Read more
Op-Ed: A New Hope for Genre Designation
Since 1977, there has been an epic battle raging between two of the biggest franchises in popular culture. Fans of Star Trek fans and Star Wars have been at each other’s throats for years, periodically culminating in films like Kyle Newman’s farcical road trip flick Fanboys, but I have never understood why; from what I can tell, the only thing the … Read more
