The Art of the Reveal: Godzilla Edition

I love a good reveal. Done right — think Harry Lime being outed by a splash of light on that shadowy, cobblestoned Viennese street in Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949), or Colonel Kurtz’s features slowly emerging from the murk as he cools himself with a splash of water in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), or a 200-foot alien tripod rising from a town square in Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (2005) — they create indelible moments of tension, wonder, surprise and unease.

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Forgotten/Ignored Gems: “The Edge” Edition

In a recent, hugely popular CFS post (∼30 views, 0 comments…and counting!), you might recall that I recycled the well-worn assertion that prose has a distinct advantage over film in how the medium can “get inside people’s heads, which allows for an interior complexity that movies simply can’t hope to match.”

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Kazuo Ishiguro: The Nobel-Prize-Winning Author’s Film Adaptations

While the literary chops of, say, a Robert James Waller (“I am the highway and a peregrine and all the sails that ever went to sea.” — The Bridges of Madison County) or E. L. James (“Vaguely, I’m aware that I’m still in my sweats, unshowered, yucky, and he’s just gloriously yummy, his pants doing that hanging from the hips thing…Finally, my medulla oblongata recalls its purpose. I breathe…” — Fifty Shades of Grey) are much more formidable, the CFS™ grudgingly accepts the news that Nagasaki-born, British-raised writer Kazuo Ishiguro has been awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature.

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Forgotten/Ignored Gems: Bob Hoskins Edition

Such is the immortal nature of images captured on celluloid that even a (self-proclaimed) cineaste occasionally finds himself confusing the dead for the living, an embarrassing scenario that usually plays out thusly: sprawled on the couch, clicker in hand, the CFS stumbles across a film featuring a performance by such-and-such that’s so clever he finds himself activating IMDB’s phone app to see what such-and-such has done lately, only to be reminded that such-and-such now resides in the great proscenium in the sky.

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B-Movie Cult Classics Unearthed Watching Late-Night HBO in College (Pt. 6)

Just when you though this blog couldn’t possibly get any better, we’re back with the long-awaited sixth edition of this continuing series examining the boozy, late-night discovery of cinematic mediocrity and/or hidden treasures back in college. Don’t fret: I’ve got about 20 more of these things in me before I switch the theme to “B-Movie Cult Classics Unearthed Watching Late-Night HBO in Bachelor Pad in Lincoln Park.”

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Greatest War Movie Employing Golf as Key Plot Point

Not to be unkind, but with such mediocrities as Hot Dog…The Movie (1984 teen sex romp with competitive skiing) and Youngblood (1986 Rob Lowe/Patrick Swayze Canadian junior hockey drama) to his credit, one might think that filmmaker Peter Markle couldn’t direct his way out of a popcorn bucket.

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Greatest Chase Scenes, Vol.2 (Bipedal) — Part Two

In Part One, which I’m sure provided you with a drug-like high that’s yet to wear off, we covered foot chases in such varied films as The Last of the Mohicans, Raising Arizona, The Third Man, Point Break and The Bourne Ultimatum. Let’s dig right into six more, including the CFS’s choice as Greatest of All Time.

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Greatest Chase Scenes, Vol.2 (Bipedal) — Part One

This week marks 29 years since the CFS was involved in an exciting foot chase at college, the circumstances of which should elicit sympathetic nods from this blog’s vast readership. Because who among you hasn’t spent a long evening drinking beer before attempting to pilfer a painted bed sheet (“Welcome Dorsey Dolls!”) hanging from a freshman dorm to use as a slipcover?

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From the Hays Code to NC-17: A Look At the MPAA’s Film Rating System

The subject of my last post called for some investigation into how films using the f-bomb are classified by the MPAA, which led to a deeper dive into the history of movie ratings. It’s actually quite fascinating.

We tend to forget that films released in the early days of the motion picture industry were pretty racy, a pushback against Victoria prudery of earlier

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The F-Bomb in Film: Poetry in Profanity

It seems the Conflicted Film Snob is among the smartest people on the planet. How do I know? Because a recent study found that those with “a big vocabulary of curse words [have] higher rhetorical skill, and those that can name the most swear words in one minute tend to have a greater overall vocabulary.” Thus, I’m really fucking smart.

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