Arsenic and Old Lace (Review for FilmFisher)

“What’s your favorite film?” It’s the question every cinephile delights to hear, yet also dreads. Delights, because finally someone made this social function less awkward — and besides, who doesn’t want to extol their loves before others? Dreads, because who can pick just one movie? Asking a film-lover to choose only one favorite out of dozens is like a landlord telling the lady in Apartment 108 she can only keep one of her 36 cats — and must decide in seconds.

When I am asked this question, I may haggle with my interrogator to expand the field the five films. But this evasion only works half the time, because most people aren’t asking for an article, just one recommendation for their watchlist. (They may also be trying to size up your taste and sort you into a group. You aren’t one of those people that liked Green Book, are you?) So sometime in middle or high school, realizing I’d be dogged by the question (and awkward social functions) for the rest of my life, I decided on a standby: Frank Capra’s 1944 adaptation of the Joseph Kesselring play, Arsenic and Old Lace, starring Cary Grant.

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Peace In Our Time: A Conversation on Marvel and Star Wars (Article for FilmFisher, Co-Written with Timothy Lawrence)

The premise of this conversation is that there are a number of intriguing similarities between the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU for short) and what I’ll call the Star Wars Revival. Hollywood is obsessed with creating cinematic universes right now, and the obsession began with the success of Marvel’s multi-film set-up of the 2012 blockbuster hit, The Avengers. However, so far the only other attempted cinematic universe that has been able to imitate Marvel’s financial and critical success has been the return of Star Wars to the big screen, beginning with 2015’s The Force Awakens.

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Avengers: Infinity War (Review for FilmFisher)

I’m going to hazard a generalization. Whenever a new Marvel movie hits theaters—or for that matter any film based on an Intellectual Property™ with a zealous fanbase—the critical responses congregate overwhelmingly in two opposing camps. The first group is the professional critics, the serious auteurs, and the intellectual viewers who decry Marvel as a prime suspect in the corporatization of filmmaking and the infantilization of audiences. The second group is the aforementioned zealous fans, a number of whom grew up reading the comics and are ecstatic that their beloved heroes are no longer only two-dimensional drawings on panels but also (real or CGI) flesh-and-blood giants on IMAX screens. I’m sure there are some fans who don’t like the homogenizing cost of Marvel’s entry into the cultural mainstream, but overall it seems fans are grateful that the rest of the world has finally caught up with them and now embraces what was once niche and only for nerds. Whereas the first group prophesies the death of cinema, the second longs with eschatological fervor for every new chapter and sees a bright future. The first dismisses the second as shallow. The second dismisses the first as snobbish.

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