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.