Today’s Post by Joe Farace
Cinephile: noun, a person who is very interested in and enthusiastic about cinema as an art form, and knows a lot about movies:
According to the Cambridge Dictionary, there are movie fans; there are film lovers; and then there are cinephiles. I consider myself to be a “movie lover.” You see I grew up in a time when television was not readily affordable to the masses, and like most Americans of that time, we went to the movies every week. My Uncle Harry, always a cutting edge dude, had a TV and on Sundays he would let us kids watch Super Circus. But that’s a story for another time.
Growing up, our house was literally a half a block away from the Palace theater where every Saturday my Mom would give me a quarter and I got to watch a Western and two (count’em) serials. Later, when my family moved to East Baltimore, I lived within walking distance of the Patterson theater where I saw Hitchcock’s Vertigo on the big screen and The Grand theater, where I got to see Hammer horror films and the latest Kaiju movies from Japan, although I didn’t know that term at the time. When I was in high school, after school I would take a bus downtown and catch a movie at the first-run houses and then used my (expired) bus transfer to catch another bus home. I was and remain a movie lover.
About Those Videos
The recent nerve damage to my left leg, has challenged my mobility and I haven’t posted a movie review video on my YouTube channel in some time. Apologies. Prior to my injury, I have been working on a review of all thee versions of The Maltese Falcon, starting with the 1931 film and wrapping up wit the new 4K version of the John Huston’s 1941 classic. You can see my review of the first film now on my YouTube channel by clicking here.
What Have I Been Watching Lately?
Because of my wife’s job and her recent “Girls Trip” vacation, I’ve had some extra time on my hands and have been watching a lot more movies since my injury. The first was the Criterion Collection’s edition of Heaven’s Gate. While watching it I was struck by the similarities in story between this often-dismissed film with Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, a film I could not quite make through it’s 3 hours, 26 minutes. Heaven’s Gate is similarly a long film (3 hours 39 minutes but more interesting to watch) so I wrote an essay on this subject that you can read here.
As a fan of Westerns I also noticed a similarity in story between Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight (2015) and Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo* (1959) and set about writing another essay comparing the two of them as well. I had seen both films multiple times and hold some strong opinions about each of them, much as I had about Killers of the Flower Moon and Heave’s Gate. Writing this essay turned out to be a bigger project than I had anticipated so after I finished the video reviewing the last two Maltese Falcon films, I plan on doing a video comparing Rio Bravo with The Hateful Eight. I promise, real soon now…
PS: In an upcoming book review of Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties that will appear in the next Joe’s Book Club, the author has this (and more) to say about Rio Bravo: “Casual and meandering, and flecked throughout with comic digressions, Rio Bravo deliberately has none of the urgency of High Noon. I suspect it is not possible to embrace both films with equal fervor. No Surprise: I revere High Noon, I find Rio Bravo insufferable.” Look for more about this book in my upcoming review but let me offer this thought: I find my feelings about the two films to be the exact opposite of the book’s author.