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Beyoncé knocked the wind out of the Internet when she dropped her nearly hour-long visual album Lemonade on HBO this past Saturday night, April 23rd. The inspired film is a remarkable piece to be sure--even for the Queen Bee herself. And while everything from the sound design to the collective creative direction from the team of filmmakers, editors and art department is exceptional, much of the receptive chatter online has instead circled around the implied infidelity that spurs the narrative of Lemonade ; the idea that hubby Jay Z did Beyoncé wrong with a certain "Becky with the good hair." Which is too bad; that's the kind of fodder for tabloids and it marginalizes how much great film art is packed into this thing. So, as a reactionary cinephile, I thought I'd redirect the public's attention to the striking images that Lemonade presents, the ideas behind them and, more pointedly, where these vignettes drew inspiration from. In contrast to the possi...

Normally, I don’t do voiceovers for my video essays. I tend to let the audio samples and images speak for themselves; I suppose this habit traces back to high school English, where I was taught to use the text itself as the primary source for an argument in an essay. So, it made sense for my visual essays to rely solely on the audio-visual assets—a sort of moving image text, if you will. But for this particular video essay, because of my close connection to the city that birthed me, I felt having my narration, as a guiding narrative force, would be acceptable. Video Essay Transcript : When I was 22 years old I had a loaded gun pressed against the back of my head. It happened during an armed robbery in downtown Chicago. I was born and raised in Chicago and to be honest gun violence here is nothing new. When I was a child my aunt’s husband was shot several times up on the northwest side of the city. I’ve also had close family friends killed by gun shootings on the streets. H...

Alejandro González Iñárritu made history this past weekend by becoming the first filmmaker to win the DGA Award for Best Director two years in a row, for his work in The Revenant . Last year Iñárritu became only the second Hispanic filmmaker to win the coveted Best Director Oscar for his work in Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) , a year after Alfonso Cuarón became the first ever Hispanic Best Director Academy Award winner (for Gravity ). I mention these significant cinephile facts because Iñárritu sometimes gets bombarded by certain hater-film-critics who are quick to harp on the calamity found in most of his films and not celebrate how special and nakedly emotional this filmmaker is. Yes, Iñárritu tells stories of fur-trappers who fight bears in the wilderness or sickly men who accidentally poison a room of immigrant sweatshop workers whilst juggling a plethora of other scandals. But these silver screen narratives have all been Oscar nominees and for the most part, ...

[Scroll to the bottom for the video] Honorable Mentions (in no particular order): Jurassic World, Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens, The Night Before, Tangerine, Amy, The End of the Tour, The Martian, Bridge of Spies, The Wolfpack, The Visit, Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation, Trainwreck, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Time Out of Mind, Danny Collins, El Club, Inside Out, Phoenix, Crimson Peak, Beasts of No Nation, By The Sea, It Follows, Youth, The Walk, The Hateful Eight, The, Nightmare, Ex Machina, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, Creep, The Overnight and While We’re Young. Best Actor: Tom Hardy, Legend Best Actress: Brie Larson, Room Best Supporting Actor: Benicio Del Toro, Sicario Best Supporting Actress: Charlize Theron, Mad Max: Fury Road Best Cinematography: Roger Deakins, Sicario Best Original Screenplay: Damián Szifrón, Wild Tales Best Adapted Screenplay: Kevin Willmott and Spike Lee, Chi-Raq Best Film Editing: Hank Corwin, The Big Short B...

  In an interview discussing his freewheeling and challenging film Goodbye to Language , Jean-Luc Godard made some comments on our current dependency to smartphones and, more specifically, text messaging. He questioned if anyone actually knew what the "SMS" in the phrase 'SMS text messaging' actually stood for. Godard insisted it meant "Save My Soul." It's that very idea, that notion of being alone in the universe, that drives the dramatic weight of Ridley Scott 's latest film The Martian . Much of the film involves the protagonist Mark Watney ( Matt Damon ) sending video selfies to NASA--and in parallel fashion to the audience in the movie auditorium. While watching the film (which is fairly conventional in regards to its plot) I was provoked by its accidental (or maybe intentional) role as a "selfie space opera." Stimulated by this idea, I went ahead and created this video that re-imagines the film (which runs around two and...

Matt Zoller Seitz on Black Mass : "With his dead eyes, ashy skin, slicked-back grey hair, dingy track suits and sagging slacks, Bulger might be a gangster ghoul . The film treats him as a literal monster, often silhouetting him or veiling him in darkness or partial shadow. One shot pictures Bulger from overhead, lying on a couch and staring unblinkingly up at the ceiling while the camera zooms out slowly: it's the way you'd photograph Dracula chilling in his coffin [...] Touches like these make "Black Mass" feel less realistic than expressionistic—like Scorsese's remake of Cape Fear which envisioned ordinary people being terrorized by a diabolical ex-convict who seemed as unstoppable as Michael Myers in Halloween or the Terminator, or the original silent-film bloodsucker Nosferatu, who could paralyze mortals by looking into their eyes ." The allusions to Dracula and F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu in Seitz's review inspired me to ...

Coming on the heels of its majestic, Gothic and subtly supernatural debut season, the sophomore year of HBO 's True Detective was met with eager disdain by many TV critics and quick-to-finger-point viewers. Which is a shame, because this second season, when looked at as a whole, eclipses the first season with its raw power, carnality and searing depiction of inner turmoil. Where the first season miraculously finds its two protagonists surviving horrific hatchet and stab wounds (and only to have them to gaze up at the stars outside of a hospital), this new season follows its lead characters down their individual doomed highways; the passages to their fate. The inspiration behind my latest VIDEO ESSAY Pathways and Pathos: The Internalization of TRUE DETECTIVE Season 2 comes from the second season's successful depiction of the physical streets and highways (i.e. pathways) of the fictional city of Vinci as being living, breathing, pulsating veins of some grand metropolis org...