If Other Directors Had Made Lincoln

I finally made my way to the theater to see Lincoln, Steven Spielberg’s latest Oscar-quality drama. There were a lot of shining moments in a very solid film. Daniel Day-Lewis in the title role, a humongous and impressive cast, and a stirring finale all come to mind. But for most of the film’s running time, I couldn’t shake the thought- what would other directors have done with a historical drama about Abraham Lincoln?

Re-Watchterpiece Theater: JFK (1991)

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Re-Watchterpiece Theater is a series that explores the organic way that attitudes about films change after you watch them a second time, a third time, or more, further down the line than the original viewing. This week’s topic is Oliver Stone’s historical drama from 1991, JFK.

The Black Sheep of Director Filmographies

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The majority of film directors have a unique style, an imprint that they place on all of their films. It can be something as significant as David Lynch’s surrealism or something as minor as Quentin Tarantino’s car trunk POV shots. A large part of the fun that I have in watching movies is seeing a director’s style develop, recognizing what they’re doing, and seeing the patterns when they do these things again and again. However, there are occasions where directors have films that break from their own conventions. They create something entirely different. They create a black sheep, as it were. These are films that stand out (sometimes for better, sometimes for worse) in their catalogue. Here are several examples:

Director: Robert Altman
Film: Secret Honor (1984)
First and foremost, Robert Altman is known for drowning his viewers in overlapping dialogue. His characters all speak all at once. It’s quite an immersive feature for the viewer. Some may find it distracting. Personally, I find that it makes me feel like I’m in the room with his characters. You find it all over the place in Altman’s movies. Imagine my surprise when I watched Secret Honor, a movie that featured only one character (a fictionalized Richard Nixon) and his endless monologue. It’s a credit to Altman that the film works so well. It’s also a testament to the film’s sole actor, Philip Baker Hall.

Tricky List: Dick Nixon Goes to the Movies

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President’s Day is just a few weeks off and I prefer to think of it as something more than an opportunity for car and furniture dealers to have President-themed sales spurred by tacky ads with local morons in stovepipe hats. Perhaps the most popular president in Hollywood has been Richard Nixon. You could probably write books about Nixon’s role in cinema, something I glossed over briefly in my review of Serpico. He’s such an enduring symbol of so many things- paranoia, loss of innocence, madness, irony, dishonesty, and corruption. Or perhaps it’s humanity. Like all of us, Dick Nixon was fallible. He made mistakes. In recent years, there’s been something of a movement to paint him as an Eddie Haskell-style lovable scamp. However you paint it, he’s all over the place in the movies- far more than his presidential peers. Here’s where good ol’ Richard M. has appeared in the movies.

100 Things I Love About the Movies

I passed a milestone recently here at TDYLF. Thanks to the help of the editors over at IMDB, I passed the 100,000 Hits milestone on Sunday (with a whopping 80,000+ of those hits coming just since September 30th). To celebrate, I’m beginning a brand new series called “100 Things I Love About the Movies”. To be sure, there a LOT more than 100 things that I love about the movies. As such, this has the potential to become a series- 100 Things I Love About Horror Movies, 100 Things I Love About Foreign Movies, and on and on. I present to you the first edition of “100 Things I Love About the Movies”.