Weekly Triple Feature

Weekly Triple Feature

Happy Birthday, William Castle

Posted on

THE FILMS: Macabre (1958, William Castle), Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968), Matinee (1993, Joe Dante)

THE CONNECTION: These films all mark important moments in William Castle’s career and how he left a lasting impact on film and pop culture.

THE THINKING: Today is William Castle’s birthday, so this week’s triple feature is a celebration of the man and his contributions to Hollywood. If you ask critics, most of his films were B-level at best. But if you ask the audiences that lined up around the block to see them when they were released, they would have said that nobody created a better moviegoing experience. In-theater gimmicks like “Percepto” and “Emergo” were the tools Castle used to turn okay stories into immersive theme park rides which had young people everywhere talking about them. And today, nearly fifty years after his death, an entirely new audience is making his work as relevant as ever through revivals and retrospectives—oftentimes complete with the marketing stunts that made him so beloved.

Read more

Weekly Triple Feature

Single Shot Films (More or Less)

Posted on

THE FILMS: Rope (1948, Alfred Hitchcock), Russian Ark (2002, Aleksandr Sokurov), Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2013, Alejandro G. Iñárritu)

THE CONNECTION: Films that are—or appear to be—a single long take.

THE THINKING: The single-take film is an ambitious undertaking that not many have attempted. A few have succeeded and others faked it through clever edits and software. This week’s triple feature takes a look at three films from the 1950s through today that use whatever means were available at the time to give audiences a one-shot experience. Of particular interest is how Birdman uses technology not to create that one long take, but instead to modernize some of the tricks Hitchcock used in making Rope way back in 1948. These three films don’t have much in common thematically, but they all share a thread of ambitious filmmaking that is as fun to learn about as the final products are to watch.

Read more

Weekly Triple Feature

Films Which Predicted the Future (Sort Of)

Posted on

THE FILMS: Network (1976, Sidney Lumet), A Face in the Crowd (1957, Elia Kazan), Contagion (2011, Steven Soderbergh)

THE CONNECTION: Films which now seem to have predicted the future.

THE THINKING: Quite a few films are looked at today as having predicted some aspect of the future. Whether it’s HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey foreseeing the AI we use today, or the online data theft Sandra Bullock’s The Net so unfortunately envisioned, creative filmmakers have always had an eye toward what was to come—either knowingly or unknowingly. A lot of these films are considered science fiction, but the three films in this week’s triple feature aren’t fantastic; they’re cautionary tales of culture gone wrong, and in one case an all-too-real world response to a global virus.

Read more