AFI film school
An analysis of every movie from the 2007 American Film Academy list of top 100 movies, and what you can get from them as a creator, writer, or film lover.
A phenomena I’ve encountered while going through the films on the AFI list is encountering some movies I had watched at some earlier point in time, didn’t like, and had decided I would never see again…
One of the coolest things about movies about making movies is that they inevitably become meta. They comment on the world, while also, by necessity, living up to the same message that they’re spreading…
So many movies begin with the word “American,” from American Beauty to American Psycho to American Gun to American Hustle…
Part of Hitchcock’s greatness is that he’s both a artistically gifted filmmaker and a very entertaining one. He creates work with deep messages that also happens to be fun every minute along the way.…
When I had covered Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush, it made me realize the value that silent films have to offer.
They work within a constraint (no spoken dialogue), and with that constraint, filmmakers have to pull off a very pure trick.…
The last film, The Grapes of Wrath, came from a novel that’s fame overshadows the movie, despite the movie still making the AFI list. This one, instead, led to a TV series that also overshadows the movie.…
Many of the movies on this AFI top 100 list are based off of books. Funny enough, some of them are much more remembered for the movie they inspired, like The Godfather and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.…
Sometimes it’s easy to take for granted that certain genres of movies exist. We have seen so many mockumentaries, slasher films, Adam Sandler movies, that it’s easy to forget that they had to start from somewhere.…
I think it’s safe to say that we all have movie blind spots. In the last AFI article, I had talked about how I had watched The Apartment for the first time.…
Of course, for all of us, there’s fairly big movies that we haven’t seen because we had no interest in watching them. This is true for even the biggest movie buffs. Which is more rare.…
When AFI top 100 movies are mentioned, a lot of adjectives could come to mind: great, prestigious, accomplished, old, stuffy. Yet, one adjective.…
It’s amazing when a film is able to so accurately point towards a problem that it becomes even more meaningful and relevant 50 years after it’s made.…
Writing in-depth about the films on this AFI list, I’ve been avoiding one type. It’s not that I don’t like them, although I’ll admit it’s way easier to get bored, but because I’m a bit intimidated by them…
Four years before he made what’s commonly regarded as the best science fiction movie of all time and sixteen years before he made what’s commonly regarded as the best horror film of all time,…
This AFI list I’ve been covering is specifically looking at the greatest American films of all time. And because of that, many of the movies have been about America, either explicitly or at least thematically…
There’s films on the AFI top 100 list, featuring protagonists who commit horrific crimes…
Before there was the Coen Brother’s or even Stanley Kubrick kicking ass and taking names in all sorts of genres, there was Billy Wilder…
There’s a lot of words usually associated with Hitchcock: genius, suspenseful, scary, obsessive, classic, influential…
Up until I hit “watch” on Netflix, I thought I was about to see a biopic on some of the racier moments of Virginia Woolf’s life. Instead…
Eighty years ago a movie came out that affected movies forever. Sure, the same could be said…
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AFI FILM SCHOOL
(An analysis of the 2007 AFI top 100 movies, and what you can learn from them)
Not that long ago I looked at another musical, The Sound of Music. The one I’m looking at this week is from around the same time period…