Titus Techera is the executive director of the American Cinema Foundation.
Posts by Titus Techera
June 30, 2022
This month the Tribeca Film Festival celebrated the 50th anniversary of the premiere of
The Godfather, an important movie, a movie we at some point got in the habit of calling iconic, and we might remember it made stars of a number of actors, starting with Al Pacino.
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June 23, 2022
There’s a new
Jurassic World movie out in theaters, to round up the post-Spielberg trilogy that began in 2015 and continued in 2018, a long time for a trilogy these days—the
Star Wars sequel trilogy came out in four years, as do many of these blockbusters (for example, three Kong & Godzilla movies 2017–2021).
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June 15, 2022
Norm Macdonald was the funniest comedian in his time among those who stayed out of political controversies. His specialty was pointing out how uncomfortable we are facing the reality of our human limits, moral and intellectual, as opposed to the fantasies we embrace eagerly in our flight from mortality.
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June 01, 2022
I want to put before you three facts of importance for storytelling today, and for our self-understanding, which is what we want out of it. First, fantasy stories now dominate entertainment in Hollywood and beyond.
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May 19, 2022
My previous essays reviewed two Progressive visions of manliness. Michael Mann’s HBO series
Tokyo Vice reduces contemporary Japan to racism, sexism, and homophobia. Michael Bay’s
Ambulance relatedly gives us a contemporary America where ethnic minorities, strong, independent women, and gay protagonists vanquish an evil white man.
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May 12, 2022
Film critics recently have been trying to encourage their audiences to return to theaters—cinema, after all, is a lot more impressive on a big screen and in the company of people who share our emotions.
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May 05, 2022
One of the most stylish of American directors, Michael Mann, who made
Heat and
The Insider (earning three Oscar nominations), is now producing the HBO series
Tokyo Vice and has directed its disappointing first episode.
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April 28, 2022
I will close this series on film noir with
Laura, because it’s altogether more beautiful and it has something of a happy ending. In being the most beautiful noir, it also involves the most sophisticated reflection on beauty in its relation to American society and to tragedy.
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April 21, 2022
Classic film noir wanted to reveal to America the depth of the problem of ambitious men in a democracy through crime stories—detectives, criminals, and victims caught in the quest for justice after the quest for happiness leads to catastrophe.
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April 06, 2022
My first film noir essay was on
The Maltese Falcon, whose ambitious protagonist, private detective Sam Spade, chooses justice over an uncertain promise of happiness, the love of a dangerous woman.
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