Dec 17, 2020 Web Exclusive By Stephen Danay
One of the pleasures of digging into older films is discovering movies that you’re not familiar with that are clear influences on films you love.
Girlfriends, Claudia Weill’s 1978 indie about a twenty-something Jewish woman navigating professional, personal and romantic hurdles in New York City, is a clear antecedent to so much of the slice-of-life mumblecore that has dominated the indie scene of the last decade and a half. The film most indebted to it though, is the Noah Baumbach/Greta Gerwig 2012 collaboration
Frances Ha, which borrows the preoccupations and structure of
Girlfriends and updates it for a millennial audience.
Dec 10, 2020 Web Exclusive By Stephen Danay
By the time he directed his first Western in 1973, Clint Eastwood had already starred in nine of them, becoming an international superstar in the mid-1960s with the
Man With No Name Trilogy. This made him something of an expert in a changing genre, one that was forsaking the optimism and myth-making of the Hollywood Golden Age and embracing the violence and moral degradation that came with the Hollywood New Wave, the collapse of the Production Code and the ongoing charnel pit that was the war in Vietnam.
High Plains Drifter isn’t an allegory for any of these sweeping historical movements; it’s a grubby, nasty revenge tale, one that would likely qualify as an exploitation film if it didn’t star a white guy. But Eastwood himself, already a fixture of the genre, knew enough about it to make it his own and twist the genre’s propensity for myth-making in a hellish new direction.