The Filmic 5: Courage, Bob Edition
Your Weekly Film Superlatives By Critic and Film Scholar Jack Hanley
I. Film I Am Loving This Week
ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER is ESSENTIAL VIEWING for every American.
PTA (in his most ambitious outing) reminds us though a comically sedated DiCaprio that the REAL danger of the Revolution is not the incarceration- but rather our self-inflicted domestication that renders us de-fanged, soft, and anesthetized to inaction in the face of tyranny. As such, Leo’s Bob is a stand-in for us ALL right now- less a Dad-core hero and more a desperate warning.The acting is superb (Regina Hall is a standout in a sea of great performances), the filmmaking is epic, and frenetic narrative is energetically propelled by Jonny Greenwood's propulsive score. Oh, and did I mention a car chase sequence that turns absolutely Hitchcockian?
Epic in scope and unabashedly shaggy in execution, the film often swings wildly—demonstrating real artistic swagger beyond the safety of its creator’s more usually contained tropes—blending satire, geopolitics, and the legacy of generational trauma into a cohesive mandate that needle-drops at EXACTLY the right moment in history. It reminds us not only of a time when American filmmaking felt vital and monumental...but also of a time when our nation was unafraid to be "young, scrappy, and hungry" in response to authoritarianism.
Go see the fourth-best PTA immediately.See it on IMAX for the Vistavision.Take your daughters. Take your friends.Then see it again for good measure.
Viva la revolución!
II. Historical Factoid I'm Loving This Week
How Thomas Edison Accidentally Invented Hollywood. (Via our friends at HistoryFacts)
"Hollywood most likely wouldn’t be the movie mecca it is today if not for filmmakers traveling west to escape Thomas Edison’s stranglehold on movie production. In 1891, Edison positioned himself at the forefront of the budding film industry after patenting an early camera known as the Kinetograph and a viewer called the Kinetoscope. Two years later, he opened the very first movie studio, Black Maria, in West Orange, New Jersey. He went on to produce nearly 1,200 films over the ensuing decades (including the first Frankenstein movie). To ensure the success of his films, Edison formed an alliance with other industry patent holders to quash competition. Called the Motion Picture Patents Company, the group inundated independent filmmakers with copyright infringement lawsuits to ensure Edison’s iron grip over the industry.
Because Edison’s operations were based on the East Coast, however, his sphere of influence was weaker in Western states such as California. This led independent filmmakers to seek refuge out West, and many settled in a newly incorporated neighborhood of Los Angeles called Hollywood. (The area was initially founded as a religious community before the migration of filmmakers.) Edison’s legal team, however, continued to hound West Coast producers until the 1915 Supreme Court case United States v. Motion Picture Patents Co. ruled that Edison could no longer use his patents to impede or disable rival moviemakers. With Edison’s monopoly finally busted, the film industry began to thrive in its new Hollywood home."
III. Essay I'm Telling Everyone About This Week
I've always loved "nunsploitation" as a sub-genre...it lays bare the contradictions of Western religiosity, refracting centuries of patriarchal repression through a prism of sensationalism, erotic excess, and iconoclastic fury. What many critics dismiss as lurid exploitation is, in fact, an archive of cultural anxiety—where the cloister becomes both prison and stage for female subjectivity, desire, and revolt.
I've therefore been LOVING this new essay on the sub-genre by Brooklyn-based writer and editor Beatrice Loayza for Criterion: "Sisters of Sacrilege". Enjoy.
IV. New Filmic Trend I Am Excited Is BACK!
It's been a while- but VISTAVISION is BACK. (THE BRUTALIST, ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER, and the upcoming BUGONIA all employ the higher resolution, widescreen variant of the 35mm motion picture film format that was created and designed by engineers at Paramount Pictures in 1954.) PTA explains why YOU need to experience it.
V. Film Recommendations I Am Standing Behind This Week
Jack Hanley is a film scholar, podcaster, and critic based in Boulder, CO. He is a programmer with the Chicago Underground Film Festival, Slamdance's Indies Awards, and the Boulder International Film Festival. He is one-half of Blindspotting: A Film Discovery Podcast and the founder of the Reel Horrors Short Film Festival. Find him at Kinophilia on Medium and at HanleyOnFilm.com