To say marriage is difficult and imperfect would be an understatement, especially in the case of Mabel and Nick Longhetti. John Cassavetes’ film that centers around the married couple illustrates the toxicity of unhealthy relationships, and in doing so, reveals the surfacing of mental illness that may very well be an inevitable result of such…
Category: Fall 2018
The Breakdown: A Woman Under the Influence
The film “A Woman Under the Influence” is an unconventional art house film. And it is also one of the first fifty films to be preserved in the U.S. National Film Registry. Showing real people and real issues may be difficult to watch, but is culturally significant. The main character is Mabel, a loving housewife…
A Woman Under the Influence
The 1974 film A Woman Under the Influence directed by John Cassavetes is about a unhappy housewife who is struggling with a mental illness in a society where mental illnesses are not often talked about. She is married to Nick, a construction worker who doesn’t understand the way she behaves. While most of the audience…
Five Easy Pieces: The Counterculture Bible
There are few films in motion picture history that define a generation. There are fewer films that have inspired a generation. And then there are films like Five Easy Pieces, which are inexplicably able to accomplish both with masterful technique. Often hailed as one the essential films to create the New Wave Era of Hollywood films, Five…
The Conversation: Are they listening?
The film “The Conversation”, directed by Francis For Coppola that brings out the concerns that many people had around the time it was filmed and about the government spying on people for “security” reasons. Everyone felt that their privacy was gone and that nothing was sacred anymore. The film is about a man named Henry…
Head
Head reveals the manner in which society impacted the making and inception of the film. The film critic Roger Ebert in his 1971 review simply titled “Head” made the statement: “I suppose it flopped in 1968 because Monkees fans were offended by it, and non-Monkees fans (i.e., anyone over 14, in either age or IQ)…
The Conversation
The movie, “The Conversation,” directed by Francis Ford Coppola is a film that I recommend everyone to see. This movie is focused on Harry Caul, a private “spy” of sorts who is hired to listens in and records peoples conversations to sell them to his employer for large sums of money. In the film, Caul…
Bonnie and Clyde
Bonnie and Clyde film was released in 1967, is an American biographical crime film directed by Arthur Penn and starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway as the title characters Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. The film tells a modify story of the real Bonnie and Clyde. In the middle of the Great Depression,…
Head
The historical question of how the film relates to and reflects the popular culture of the time immediately comes to mind while considering the movie Head. In an article by Dorian Lynskey in 2011, titled, ‘The Monkees’ Head: Our Fans Couldn’t Even see it’, it is argued that the Monkees did not have any control…
A Bout de Souffle
There’s a common theme amongst the reviews for the pioneer French New Wave film Breathless (“A Bout de Souffle”); it’s erratic nature and immoral characters. On February 8th of 1961, The New York Times published Bosley Crowther’s review of the (then) new film, in which he wrote “…sordid is really a mild word for its…
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