The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009)

Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009) is a difficult film to evaluate. Like Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999) or Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), the film contains more than the usual quota of stunning images and inspired sequences. However, like the films by Kubrick and Welles, Gilliam’s is a film that cannot escape the shadow of its production history. As most readers are no doubt aware, Parnassus stands as the last film featuring the talents of the late Heath Ledger. Yet, Ledger’s death occurred before the film was finished shooting and Gilliam was forced to shut down production to contemplate a means of constructing a film without one of his key personnel. Eventually, Gilliam settled on re-casting the part with Ledger’s friends (Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell) in his role over expensive CGI solutions. Unfortunately, while it was the most cost effective and arguably the most tasteful creative choice Gilliam could have made, the solution costs the film dearly.

Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (1996)

A week and a half ago, after serving nearly twenty years behind bars, Jessie Misskelley Jr., Jason Baldwin, and Damien Echols – also known as the West Memphis Three (WM3) - were released from prison after entering Alford pleas (a plea which allows the defendants to assert their innocence while acknowledging  the existence of substantial evidence that could be used for a conviction) with the Arkansas court system.  The release of the trio was bittersweet.  On one hand, three men who appear to be innocent are free to walk to the street.  On the other hand, three innocent men were convicted because their interest in Stephen King and Metallica made them different from the bulk of the West Memphis population and they lost almost twenty years of their lives.  Most significantly, the killer or killers behind the murders of three, eight year old boys (Stevie Branch, Michael Moore, and Christopher Byers) have yet to be found. 

Wet Hot American Summer (2001)

The always likable Paul Rudd hits theaters this weekend in Our Idiot Brother (2011) and, in homage, I decided to pop in one of my favorite Rudd comedies:  State member David Wain’s directorial debut Wet Hot American Summer (2001). The film, one of my favorite comedies, was what introduced me to the those cloudy bootlegs and cued my anticipation and interest in Reno 911! (2003-2009), Stella (2005), and the recent series Michael & Michael Have Issues (2009), the latter two series were short lived.  

The Iron Giant (1999)

It has been twelve years since of the release of Brad Bird’s animated feature The Iron Giant (1999). The film, as some of you may know, opened to rave critical reviews and won nine Annie Awards (the animation equivalent of the Academy Awards) yet floundered at the box office, earning only half of its $48 million dollar production budget. The poor box office performance of The Iron Giant, along with the failure of Osmosis Jones (2001) and Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003), resulted in a scaling back and re-structuring of Warner Brothers Animation. Yet, one company’s loss was another’s gain as one admirer of the film, Bird’s former classmate and computer animation guru John Lasseter, hired Bird to work for Pixar.

The Way of the Gun (2000)

“There is a natural order. The way things are meant to be. An order that says that the good guys always win. That you die when it’s your time, or you have it coming. That the ending is always happy, if only for someone else. Now at some point it became clear to us that our path had been chosen and we had nothing to offer the world … So, we stepped off the path, and went looking for the fortune that we knew was looking for us. Once off the path you do what you can to eat and to keep moving.” — Mr. Parker in The Way of the Gun (2000)

Strange Days (1995)

Before The Hurt Locker (2009) won Best Director, it won my award for the most overrated film of the year. Don’t misunderstand, The Hurt Locker is far from a bad film, it’s actually quite suspenseful and well-crafted for an action film but it is not a groundbreaking or earth shattering piece of art. The characterization is weak (war is a drug…got it!), the dialogue has its share of bumps (just look at that exchange regarding the wedding ring, filed under devices that almost killed the protagonist), and the action is shot in wash-out, hand-held, 16mm with nearly as many cuts as a Michael Bay film. In other words, the action sequences, which have traditionally been one of director Kathryn Bigelow’s strong suits, are rather cliché with the noted exception of the grueling sniper duel.

Why have critics and the film community in general been so compelled to oversell a rather standard combat film? First, there seems to be a desire to finally be able to hold up a film dealing with the Iraq war as being relevant. Secondly and perhaps more significantly, Bigelow is one of the most prominent female directors working in Hollywood and perhaps there is a desire to shake up the status quo.  The issue of female presence behind the camera has become an area of increased attention during the past two years. In 2007, the American Film Institute updated their Top 100 Films and the absence of a film by a female director (one of my favorites, the oft-cited Meshes of the Afternoon by avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren was disqualified because it is not feature length) stirred much debate. This debate was further aggravated with the 2008 Academy Award nominations when Danny Boyle’s credited co-director Loveleen Tandan did not share the Best Director nomination with him (this also occurred in 2004 with City of God) for Slumdog Millionaire.

I’m not denying that both awards organizations and film canonization have left women by the wayside, which is a incredibly sad truth. Nor am I debating Bigelow’s talent, which she obviously possesses in spades. What I am attempting to argue is that if you want to find an example of Bigelow at her best, don’t look at The Hurt Locker … look at her extremely underappreciated film Strange Days (1995).

The PCA and Critical Reaction to The Big Combo (1955)

Joseph H. Lewis's The Big Combo (1955), one of my favorite film noirs, is now on Netflix Watch Instantly.  Between John Alton's cinematography, the homoerotic subtext, the graphic and creative depiction of torture (with a hearing aid!), and hardboiled dialogue, I cannot recommend it highly enough.  Here are some notes I took during a research trip at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Margaret Herrick Library from the Production Code Administration (PCA) file and the news clipping files for the film.  Note:  I was unable to import my footnotes.  For those interested, I can either e-mail the below text with footnotes or I can comment on the exact sources below.  

Tag, You're It: Going Ape on Tag, Mid, and Post Credit Scenes

Spoilers ahead. 

Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)

It wasn’t difficult to initially underestimate Rupert Wyatt’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011).  Tim Burton’s reboot of the series (2001), now a decade old, left a bad taste in a lot of mouths.  Between the goofy ending and the wooden performances of Mark Wahlberg and Estella Warren, the only redeeming qualities to the film were Helena Bonham Carter and Danny Elfman’s percussive score.  Although Burton’s film was a financial success - it grossed $362 million against a production budget of $100 million - Fox decided against further exploration of one of their many tentpole franchises for years because of the critical backlash against it.  When Rise of the Planet of the Apes was announced for 2011 and a lackluster trailer (The medicine the characters are working on is called “THE CURE!”) hit a mere few weeks before the film’s release, it felt as if Fox was going back to a well of poison for a second time.  Thankfully, however, Rise of the Planet of the Apes benefits from generic manipulation.  A trait which, unlike the prescription enhanced ape of the film, goes unpronounced in Fox’s marketing campaign.   

Senna (2010)

Aside from the Milwaukee Brewers and the Green Bay Packers, my knowledge of sports is often bested by my wife’s.  I’ve never really been drawn to sports and, if I was, my commitment to my graduate education has taken away most of my free time to learn about them.  I watch maybe five football games a year, a handful of baseball games, and I’m taking part in Fantasy Football for the first time since the date of my birth this year.  I mention this for two reasons.  First, prior to watching Asif Kapadia’s Senna (2010), I only knew of the existence of Formula 1 racing and I was ignorant to Ayrton Senna’s existence, let alone his racing career.  Secondly, despite this personal ignorance, I found the film to be one of the best of the year. 

The Killing (1956): Criterion Collection

Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956) is not my favorite work by the visionary director. In fact, the film probably wouldn’t even make it onto a list of my top five Kubrick films. Yet, with a career that included such amazing films as Paths of Glory (1957), Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Barry Lyndon (1975), and The Shining (1980), that’s not an indication that The Killing is a film of poor quality but an indication that Kubrick’s body of work comes the closest to cinematic perfection than any director I can think of. Thus, while The Killing may not by Kubrick’s strongest, that doesn’t keep it from earning a ranking of my top five noirs.

John Huston Triple-Feature: Beat the Devil (1953), Wise Blood (1979), and Under the Volcano (1984)

Introduction 

“[John] Huston is still coasting on his reputation as a wronged individualist with an alibi for every bad movie … Huston has confused indifference with integrity for such a long time that he is no longer the competent craftsman of The Asphalt Jungle, The Maltese Falcon, and The African Queen, films that owe more to casting coups than to directorial acumen.” — Andrew Sarris, “John Huston: Less than Meets the Eye” in The American Cinema (1968).

“People often ask if I have any regrets over my rankings of directors in The American Cinema. Actually, there have been shifts and slides, rises and falls, all along the line. Film history is always in the process of revision, and some of our earliest masters are still alive. The American Cinema was a very tentative probe designed mainly to establish the existence of a subject worthy of study. The rest is refinement and elaboration.”— Andrew Sarris, “Billy Wilder Reconsidered” in You Ain’t Heard Nothing Yet (1998).

Women Comic Book Reader's Day: Reader Submission #1

Hey all!  Just a reminder that September 21st is Women Comic Book Reader's Day.  In order to trumpet the movement, I've put out a call for women readers to share their experiences with the form.  Here is the first profile to run.  Thanks for sharing, Meg!  I am still accepting submissions at damorton@ucla.edu.  Tweet it up at #womenlovecomix2!  

Rosemary's Baby (1968)

For the bulk of my college career, I tended to avoid the films of Roman Polanski. I always tried to validate my blind spot as morally motivated by Polanski pleading guilty to unlawful intercourse with a minor and subsequently fleeing to France. Yet, I came to the realization that this would ultimately write off a work of art, crafted by many people, to the poor decisions of one. Also, I was employed as a teaching assistant for a film noir class at UCLA and we had to show Chinatown (1974) and I could no longer avoid the absence of Polanski in my knowledge about film.

The Most Dangerous Game (1932)

Richard Connell’s short story, “The Most Dangerous Game,” has always held a special place in my heart. Having read the story in one of my high school English classes, I was determined to adapt it into a screenplay about a crazed Scottish hunter who breaks a man out of prison, only to hunt him down for sport. While writing the screenplay, I came to realization that even with madness serving as a motivation, this recreational sport can be hard to characterize as it either bleeds into serial killer territory or becomes the Van Pelt (Jonathan Hyde) character from Jumanji (1995). Needless to say, I gave up screenwriting and threw The Fox Hunt (Second Draft, 2002) in a filing cabinet somewhere. Watching Irving Pichel and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s 1932 adaptation only crystallized my rationale behind my abandonment of the project.

Memorable Screening Experiences

Last week, I was fortunate enough to attend a screening of Miranda July's The Future (2011), followed by a Q&A with the director. Coming out of the screening, my wife and I began discussing what film going experiences have marked our lives (through the film, format, or venue) and was curious to see what screenings my friends felt similarly about. So, in the interest in starting a bit more personal dialogue, I’d like to offer up five of my memorable movie going experiences.

Watchmen (2009)

"No. Not even in the face of Armageddon. Never compromise."-Rorschach While Rorschach's (Jackie Earle Haley) proclamation may be possible to uphold as a superhero, the refusal to compromise on behalf of the filmmaker in the process of literary adaptation is impossible. As film theorist André Bazin wrote, "Faithfulness to form, literary or otherwise, is illusory: what matters is the equivalence in meaning of the forms." In other words, Bazin is arguing that each medium has its own modes of representation, thus the struggle for formal fidelity is a lost cause and that the main objective is that the adaptation should capture the original work's essence. Bazin continues, stating, "All it takes is for the filmmakers to have enough visual imagination to create the cinematic equivalent of the style of the original."

The Immortal Story (1968)

Orson Welles’s The Immortal Story (1968) is one of the films from his second bargain basement period as an outcast Hollywood director living in Europe.  The first period occurred after the domestic box office and critical failures of his plagued production of The Lady from Shanghai (1948) and the low budget Macbeth (1948 as well).   During the first period, he appeared in Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949) and other films and directed Othello (1952) and the ultra-low budget Mr. Arkadin (1955).  Arkadin, for me, shares a primary quality with The Immortal Story, filmed for French television after Welles was once again unable to work in Hollywood after Touch of Evil (1958).  Essentially, both are about rich men, both played by Welles, who have grown obsessed with narrative, perception, and historical legacy. 

Is Donkey Kong Fun? Because I'm Feeling More Like a Donkey and Less Like King Kong.

"You know, he's gonna have to play it perfectly, he's at the hardest part of Donkey Kong, and it's not gonna get any easier. So we may have an exciting moment here, or you know, the pressure may get to him, one of those random elements might happen. Sounds like he just cleared another board, but we could have a wild barrel, or some aggressive fireballs. I thought I was gonna be the first FunSpot kill screen, and then I had three fireballs trap me, I had the hammer in my hand, they still got me. So anything can happen in Donkey Kong. So for someone else to be mean to the kill screen would be a letdown, but lets see what happens, maybe he'll crack under the pressure and maybe I'll get my chance to do it first."-Avid Donkey Kong player Brian Kuh in The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (2007). 

His Kind of Woman (1951)

In his book Hollywood Genres, film scholar Thomas Schatz mobilizes an evolutionary model to describe film genres.  For simplicity sake, Schatz posits that a genre essentially moves from classical to baroque in its style and conventions as it ages. If we place the film noir genre (whose status as a genre has led to much dispute, but let’s table that as I don’t feel like taking an aspirin while writing this review) within this model, we would find Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944) on the classical side of the scale and Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958) on the baroque. Yet there is a major problem with concept of linear development as it supposes that all films in a genre progress towards the end goal of the baroque and are in formal and thematic unison. The main reason I love John Farrow’s film noir His Kind of Woman (1951) is that it was self-reflexive and parodic roughly five years before the “baroque” stage in film noir’s development is often thought to of occurred with the release of Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955).

Debating Roger Ebert on Video Games

Film critic Roger Ebert has been notorious amongst video gamers for writing off the form as being incapable of being art.  Last year, he elaborated on his position and I responded with the following article (which is reprinted here).   Now, I should note as a hopeful cinema studies scholar that Roger’s work pushed me to study film and I constantly find myself reflecting on his Great Movies books. However, I am also a hopeful media studies scholar, a field which includes video games, a form which I enjoy as both a player and a Ph.D. student (you can find a visual essay a produced on the Wii with two classmates here). That said, I disagree with Roger’s assessment of the medium and here are a few reasons why.

The Future (2011)

For the past five years, I had avoided the work of Miranda July, including her debut film Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005).  July rose to prominence as my interest in quirk in all forms of art both bottomed out and became my oft-cited reason for ignoring that mode of art.  To be more specific, I still have yet to see Napoleon Dynamite (2004) and I have largely avoided the work of writer Dave Eggers after A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000) made me want to punch a wall.*  I both realize and realized (at the time) that this was not necessarily a just or fair avoidance and not a beneficial trait for a critic to have.  Yet, criticism always involves some layer of subjectivity and personal taste (ex. Roger Ebert’s distaste of violence directed at children).  After all, that is one reason why we, as readers, are drawn to the work of particular critics.  It is counter-productive to try to hide these tastes behind objective statements.  But to bring us back to the issue at hand, after reading one too many Chuck Palahniuk novels, I needed a long vacation from excessive eccentricity. 

Introducing... Film School Fess Ups

I'll be introducing a new feature after the jump and it requires your input. 

The Hunger (1983)

In Tony Scott’s Domino (2005), Mena Suvari plays an entertainment executive who describes her boss’s (Christopher Walken) attention span as being one of “a ferret on crystal meth.” Ironically, this throwaway line of dialogue effectively describes the editing style of its director. Commonly employing two editors on each of his films, Tony Scott’s films are essentially case studies of an ongoing series I would like to title “When MTV Editing Goes Wrong.” Keep in mind that I am not criticizing film style or shorter shot lengths here. Rather, I am criticizing film style when it is used as a crutch to overcompensate for the deficiencies of a film. The depressing realization I came to while watching the opening of his debut film The Hunger (1983) was that, for a brief moment, Tony Scott actually knew how to use editing for engaging purposes rather than visceral ones.

Why I Care About the Ethics of Film Criticism

Watching movies for twenty years - not to mention being a cinema and media studies academic for almost a decade now - has impacted my life in several ways.  Most of these symptoms have been beneficial to me (socially, my gratuitous popular culture references don't always fly).  My love of movies resulted in a life in academia that requires historical research and critical analysis of film form, ideology, and the industry.  This, when I look back to the early reviews I wrote for my high school newspaper The Pirate, has made my writing on the arts more refined and thoughtful.  I am careful to avoid sweeping generalizations or hyperbolic value judgments that plagued my early material.  More importantly, these critical thinking and research skills extend beyond film.  This is not intended to be a rallying cry for a humanities education;  I fundamentally feel, as both a product of America's higher educational system and as an occasional instructor, that these skills have made me a more informed citizen, a more thoughtful and empathetic person, and I feel like I've made better life decisions - that better fit my lifestyle and personality at least - than I would have if I had stopped at high school or even with a Bachelor's Degree. 

The Death of Gestural Play?

A few years back, David O'Grady, Jen Porst, and I completed a visual essay on the video game phenomenon of gestural play:  games that involve an interface that requires players to mimic "real life" bodily gestures (swinging a tennis racket, playing a guitar, etc.) in order to master the game.  The essay can be found at Mediascape.  

Scream 4 (2011)

The problem with the first Scream film in over a decade, Scream 4 (AKA Scre4m, 2011), is that it is too much of a Scary Movie (2000-2009) and not enough of a scary movie.  The first film, directed by Craven off of a script by Kevin Williamson, was released in 1996 (when the target demographic for the fourth installment was still in diapers) and provided viewers with a refreshing bridge between comedic, self-reflexive cinephilia and genuine horror.  At the time, it was groundbreaking formula and it re-vamped the horror genre in the same way Quentin Tarantino de and re-constructed the crime thriller.  Over the span of three films and four years however, the “Scream” franchise slowly lost its way.  When the parodies of a parody arrived in the form of the “Scary Movie” films, the final nail seemed to have been placed into the Scream coffin.  Yet, unfortunately for those nostalgic for the magic of the first film, the killer in Scream 4 is Wes Craven.  He took a beautiful, young genre in the form of self-reflexive horror and gutted it for all eyes to see. 

The Outrageous Origins of the Motion Comic and Women Comic Book Readers Day

In Media Res ran my short piece on the history of the motion comic today.  I'm curious to see what fans and readers have to say about this formal phenomenon.  Do you purchase them?  Do you know about them?  Do you like them?  Essentially, my initial impressions have been that the American comic book industry sees a bright future ahead for motion comics while readers downright loathe them.  I'll let you weigh in by following the link here.  

For more on Women Comic Book Readers Day, my grassroots campaign to make the industry notice the female consumer demographic, proceed after the jump.  

September 21st 2011: Women Comic Book Readers Day!

Comic book fans have displayed mixed emotions at the announcement that DC would be essentially "rebooting" their entire universe come September.  The move by DC is undoubtedly an attempt to gain new readers, considering the stagnation comic book sales (complex continuities can be intimidating to newbies, as are the glut of titles being offered).  Concurrently, women comic book fans have been taking DC to task for a lack of gender diversity behind the page.  This gave me an idea:  I want more gender diversity in the bullpens (racial diversity is hopefully on the way with the new Spider-Man) and I want more people to fall in love with comics, a form that means a lot to me.  My idea is to bring the two together and to make September 21st 2011 (the launch date of Wonder Woman #1) Women Comic Book Readers Day.  Essentially, if we want more people to read comics and greater diversity, let's show the industry that women matter.  

My argument is that writing editorials and grilling personnel about the lack of gender diversity simply isn't enough.  In order to get a profit industry to adopt radical change, they need to be affected where it really matters:  their finances.  

Machete (2010)

At the press conference for Machete (2010), co-director Robert Rodriguez was asked the inevitable question about the film’s political subtext.  For those of you unfamiliar with the film, it tells the story of a Mexican illegal immigrant (Danny Trejo) turned assassin who avenges the wrongs visited upon his race via violent acts that eventually spiral into a social revolution.  Given the subject matter, the journalist inquired if Rodriguez had specifically intended to make a statement regarding the controversial steps Arizona had taken in dealing with illegal immigration.  Rodriguez responded that “There are real issues going on in any movie…[Immigration is a] real issue and people want real answers….It’s just a backdrop.”   Rodriguez’s answer, both in the form of the press conference and in the form of the film, is disappointing.  As an homage to exploitation filmmaking, Rodriguez and co-director Ethan Maniquis’s film takes the form of a scratchy, blood soaked negative and attempts to critique the anti-immigration sentiment that has grown to define much of America which has a great deal of potential in theory.  Unfortunately for the film, the filmmakers, and the audience, the film does not nail the landing as its critique and ability to provide visceral thrills quickly dissipate by the end of its first hour.    

Spider-Man: Turn On the Dark

Forgive the headline, but I cannot contain my enthusiasm for the news of the most recent challenge to the racial boundaries of comics.  Sure, Marvel has had Nick Fury and DC has had Steel.  However, if there was going to a Mt. Rushmore constructed out of Superheroes, it would white as the actual granite cliff face (Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, and Wolverine?).  In June, that hypothetical sculpture will drastically change:  Peter Parker is dead, Miles Morales is now Spider-Man.  

Maps, I Don’t Love You Like They Love You

Those players who have purchased Call of Duty:  Black Ops (2010) for Playstation 3 (this guy) and/or X-Box 360 have essentially signed up to be victims of a Ponzi Scheme.  Essentially, upon release, publisher Activision sells consumers an incomplete game for $60 and then continues to bleed the same victims for $15, three times (for an additional $45, a total of $105) for downloadable content (DLC) in the form of “map packs.”   Now, Activision does provide a decent bang for the buck:  each map pack includes four newly designed multiplayer maps and one additional zombie mode map.  It’s not so much the quality of the additional content that I find frustrating.  Rather, it’s the method in which they are sold and the quality of the original content. 

The Guard (2011)

The shadow of the prolific Irish playwright, filmmaker, and screenwriter Martin McDonagh looms large over his brother’s film The Guard (2011).  Martin, whose work for the stage has earned him four Tony Award nominations and his film career launched with the Academy Award winning short Six Shooter (2005) before he transitioned into features with the phenomenal In Bruges (2008), serves as producer on John Michael McDonagh’s debut film.  Yet, his influence reaches beyond the financial.  The casting Brendan Gleeson as the lead, an alcoholic cop that would give Nic Cage’s Bad Lieutenant a run for his money, and the nimble transitions from black comedy to shocking violence are both constant variables in Martin’s work (Gleeson was a lead in both Six Shooter and In Bruges).  The question is:  Does it succeed on its own terms? 

Cully Hamner on the Shades of RED and My Comic Book Syllabus

Cully Hamner carried this week's In Media Res topic of film and comic books into its second day (after Greg Smith's perfect opener on introducing comics to new readers).  His column looks at how his comic book collaboration with writer Warren Ellis became re-interpreted once it transitioned into the hands of director Robert Schwentke and became a film adaptation.  


I don't want to spoil his article, so I'll just direct you to the link above and leave you with two quotes before dropping into a digression on a comic book syllabus I prepared:  


"Faithfulness to form, literary or otherwise, is illusory: what matters is the equivalence in meaning of the forms."-Film theorist André Bazin


"No.  Not even in the face of Armageddon.  Never compromise."-Rorschach in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen (1986-1987).  


More after the jump!  

The Best Media of 2011 (Version .05)

Throughout the year, I like to track the titles that have ranked amongst my favorites in film and music (sometimes television, comics, and video games, but my selection sample normally isn't broad enough to inspire more than two or three titles).  Much can be said about first impressions and how they can actually hold film criticism back - imagine if Andrew Sarris would not have re-evaluated the work of Billy Wilder after initially writing him off - and how criticism can, in fact, be extremely subjective.  Dan Carlson at Pajiba posted a guide on the topic (my contribution was my hate/love relationship with David Lynch's Mulholland Dr.) that readers may find enlightening.  In the meantime, let's cut to the chase... 

Comics to Film (and Halfway Back Again) Redux

This week, I will be contributing a curated video entitled "The Outrageous Origins of the Motion Comic!" to In Media Res.  It is an incredibly short piece (350 words), based around the largely untold history of the motion comic, which is often (and ahistorically) considered to be a "new media" form.  The piece includes some gems of research I uncovered while writing a dissertation chapter on the form, including some key thoughts from one of the Comics Studies founding fathers, Scott McCloud.


In celebration of the weekly theme and my forthcoming contribution to it, I am reprinting an early video essay entitled "Comics to Film (and Halfway Back Again)" that served as the springboard to my dissertation topic:  the formal interchange between comics and film.  While I have since moved away from looking solely at film adaptations - the sole focus of this video essay - this video provides a sketch of what sparked my research.  While some of the theoretical arguments involving these forms has become antiquated by the growth that Comics Studies has experienced over the past couple years, I'm still incredibly proud of it.


Originally published in 2007 by Flow.  Unfortunately, I cannot embed the video here due to copyright claims.


Part One
Part Two

Welcome: A Declaration of Principles

Bernstein: You don't want to make any promises, Mr. Kane, that you don't want to keep.

Kane: These will be kept. 'I'll provide the people of this city with a daily paper that will tell all the news honestly. I will also provide them...'

Jedediah: That's the second sentence you've started with 'I'.

Kane: People are gonna know who's responsible. Now they're gonna get the truth in the Inquirer, quickly and simply and entertainingly and no special interests are gonna be allowed to interfere with that truth. (Continuing with the Declaration.) 'I will also provide them with a fighting and tireless champion of their rights as citizens and as human beings. Signed, Charles Foster Kane.'