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MacGuffin Spotlight
An Appreciation – Alien
In space no one can hear you scream It continues to amaze me how the first act of Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) is so…quiet. Very little happens in the opening scenes, and yet even now, they induce an unsettling feeling. Maybe because we know what…
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An Analysis – A Closer Look Into Enemy
***Warning: the following contains massive spoilers*** – Chaos is order yet undeciphered – When I first walked out of Denis Villeneuve’s Enemy (2013), I was over come with different emotions: befuddlement, confusion, and most all fascination. I knew I had witnessed something special, a tightly…
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SIFF Double Feature – Burkholder and Another
Burkholder: Teddy (Bob Burkholder) has been renting a room from Barry (Britt Crosley) for the past 15 years, and now that he is approaching 90, he wants to continue living his life to the fullest. He just doesn’t have much time left to mess around.…
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An Appreciation – The Wizard of Oz
Unlike most people, I did not see The Wizard of Oz (1939) as a child. In fact, I didn’t see it in its entirety until I was nearing young adulthood. But even before then, I felt like there was already a familiarity. This benchmark of…
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Netflix Recommendations – Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something True (1)
I have conceded to the fact that Netflix and the other online streaming services are the future. Personally, I grew up going to video stores, and when I grew all the way up I worked at one for over four years. But with the recent…
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2014 Oscar Predictions – Ben’s Picks
It’s Oscar time again and it has been a roller coaster of a year with no clear front-runner for best picture and several of the categories ripe for potential upsets. While not as strong a line up of films as last year, there are still…
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Top 10 2013 – Adelaide’s List
I don’t watch a lot of new films because I am middle-aged and grumpy, and I want to watch things when I want to watch them, not when they are in the theaters. So every year my “best of” list is about what I watched…
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An Appreciation – Beauty and the Beast
One of the best sequences in Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête (Beauty and the Beast, 1946) comes when Belle (Josette Day) first enters the castle of the mysterious Beast (Jean Marais). Done completely in slow motion, we see her come into the main…
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