What makes an action scene good? We are in the midst of the summer movie season, the time of year when theaters are swamped in Dionysian revels of car chases, fistfights, and explosions, the kind of stuff that often draws the ire and disdain of snobby, self-serious critics. I, for one, seem to find myself less…Read On
I’m going to cheat a little and write about two scenes. When Timothy asked if I could write an article for FilmFisher’s “Inside a Scene” series, I automatically thought of the Moscow apartment scene at the end of Paul Greengrass’ 2004 espionage-thriller sequel, The Bourne Supremacy. I’ve always been intrigued and moved by this scene, and it continues to…Read On
Right now, Marvel and Star Wars are the two biggest franchises in Hollywood, producing a seemingly endless stream of movies and revenue. The past half-year alone has seen the release of two Star Wars films and two Marvel films – or three, if you stretch a little to include November’s Thor: Ragnarok. For several months…Read On
One of my favorite memories from college was watching the series finale of Mad Men with a few friends on the big screen in my university’s Cinema and Media Arts building. When everything faded, we sat there in the glow of the projector trying to find words for what had just ended. I don’t know…Read On
More than any director, David Lynch has figured out how to capture the disorienting logic and nightmarish sensibility of a dream on celluloid. His entire career has been defined by puzzle box narratives, ones that seem fragmented upon an initial viewing but come together quite nicely through introspection and thematic implication. Perhaps the apex of…Read On
Spider-Man 3 has shouldered quite a bit of abuse over the years. Widely mocked for its tonal shifts and surplus of plot threads, it is often regarded as an unsatisfying failure to conclude Sam Raimi’s trilogy about the titular wall-crawler. Coming off the heels of Spider-Man 2, easily the greatest superhero movie of all time…Read On
“You can’t say anything anymore without someone jumping down your throat,” so claim both social conservatives tired of political correctness and everyone in A Quiet Place, John Krasinski’s new sci-fi horror film. And what happens if you do try to say something anymore? So far as conservatives are concerned, a social media mob comes to harang…Read On
After twelve years off the air, Samurai Jack returned earlier this year to finally conclude its long-unresolved storyline. Airing in 2017, a year dominated by reboots and revivals of favorite properties – Twin Peaks: The Return, Blade Runner 2049, Alien: Covenant, and Logan, just to name a few – Tartakovsky’s show, like its hero, was entering a…Read On
Earlier this year, Genndy Tartakovsky’s Cartoon Network animated series Samurai Jack concluded with a fifth and final season after a twelve-year hiatus. I never saw the series during its original run, although I was dimly aware of it by reputation, and experienced flickers of vague recognition whenever I saw the titular samurai or his demonic…Read On
Since the release of Ridley Scott's Alien: Covenant at the beginning of this summer, FilmFisher editor Joshua Gibbs and contributing writer Timothy Lawrence have been trading thoughts on the science fiction horror franchise. What follows is their conversation…Read On
As an amateur film critic, I have panned many blockbusters and watched rote responses roll in which offer no greater defense of the panned film than, “This film was just plain fun. Why don’t you snobby film critics get it?” Self-defense is usually ugly, even when it is necessary, though I often want to swing…Read On
In these essays, and even in other writings on the franchise, I have often made special note of Star Wars’ backward-looking quality. These are films that push the medium forward into an exciting new future with groundbreaking special effects, and yet both textually and meta-textually, they are always concerned with the past. With Episode I, over two months ago, we started at the beginning and looked ahead to the story’s ending. Episode VI – as the third film released, as the sixth film in the saga, and as the final installment in this series of essays – is profoundly concerned with looking backwards. Its title is apt; Return of the Jedi is, in so many ways, about the action of returning…Read On
It has become conventionally accepted wisdom that The Empire Strikes Back is the greatest blockbuster sequel of all time, and one of the best cinematic sequels generally speaking; the only competition that springs to mind is Coppola’s The Godfather: Part II. It should come as little surprise that I’m not inclined to disagree with this assessment. The original Star Wars is one of the greatest American films of all time and a milestone in blockbuster history, but I’ve long maintained that The Empire Strikes Back is even better, and without it, I suspect the saga’s cultural impact would not have been quite so profoundly enduring. The stakes are higher and the world is expanded, but this sequel does not simply go “bigger,” trying to top its predecessor in terms of spectacle. The key to its success is that it also goes deeper, doubling down on characters and relationships that continue to grow and develop…Read On
On May 25, 1977, those words marked the American public’s first entrance into George Lucas’ galaxy far, far away. Much ink has been spilled trying to account for the film’s success – its innocence was a welcome alternative to the predominantly cynical cinema that surrounded it, American audiences were particularly hungry for escapism – but no single explanation can quite justify Star Wars’ staying power, or how exponentially Lucas’ saga has grown since that first film…Read On
Revenge of the Sith opens with one of the longest, most elaborate and ambitious shots George Lucas has ever attempted. The camera pans down from the opening crawl, past a blinding sun, to reveal a Star Destroyer flying over Coruscant, one last twist on the iconic opening image of the original 1977 film. There we saw an evil Star Destroyer from behind; here we see a good one from above. The scene is almost comforting in its familiarity and stillness, though the warlike drums of Williams’ score hint at a building energy…Read On
If Star Wars is about finding balance between the appetites and the intellect, and the best Star Wars films are those that find this ideal balance between spectacle and theme, allow me to open this review boldly, by suggesting that Attack of the Clones – the franchise’s most underrated entry – finds that balance nearly perfectly. While The Phantom Menace had perhaps too much of a tendency to convey concepts through dialogue, its sequel communicates ideas through images, sounds, and actions, fusing emotion with abstraction…Read On
I love Star Wars – perhaps too much. This is no secret, as my previous writings on the subject would attest, and I can make no pretensions to being an objective observer here. The Phantom Menace, George Lucas’ first prequel to his classic trilogy, was met with a decidedly mixed response when it premiered in 1999, but it is a source of fond memories for me…Read On
Over the next six weeks, Filmfisher will roll out a series of essays on all six of George Lucas’s Star Wars films. Each piece will be written by Timothy Lawrence as part of a senior film project he is completing at Biola University. We are kicking off this exciting series of essays with a brief…Read On
We live in a post-Star Wars world. No, we don’t spend our days scavenging through the debris of Star Destroyers and X-Wings like the protagonist of the seventh and newest installment, J.J. Abrams’ The Force Awakens. But is it really that different? If you were to try and visualize our cultural landscape, it might not look too different than Abrams’ vision of a crashed Star Destroyer looming over the desert of Jakku…Read On
In an informal poll I conducted among my students late last year, every high school junior I teach claimed to have had a crush on a fictional person. The question both was and was not a trick. In truth, a crush is always a fictional person. While crush is a neologism and not a philosophically…Read On
