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The Conversation: Drew Morton and Landon Palmer Discuss ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’

The Conversation is a feature at PopOptiq bringing together Drew Morton and Landon Palmer in a passionate debate about cinema new and old. For their thirteenth piece, they discuss Robert Wise’s sci-fi classic, The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). LANDON’S TAKE Works of Hollywood genre – be they science fiction, westerns, or gangster films – have received serious …

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‘The Set-Up’ stands tall in both Robert Ryan’s and Robert Wise’s oeuvres

Director Wise was, in many ways, the Steven Soderbergh of his day. He could navigate virtually any film genre and produce a terrific final movie, one that understands the nooks and crannies of said genre’s tropes whilst clearly putting incredibly artistic stamps on them. Drama, crime thriller, sport (as in the case of the present film), science fiction, action, he could do it all, and do it with panache, deft and sensitivity.

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The Films of Val Lewton: ‘The Ghost Ship’ and ‘Curse of the Cat People’

After The Seventh Victim‘s disappointing returns, Val Lewton and RKO clashed over their next project. Lewton wanted a comedy, provisionally titled The Amorous Ghost, as a change of pace; studio boss Sid Rogell, Lewton’s bete noir, insisted on a sequel to Cat People, which Lewton resisted. Then RKO suggested a Universal-style monster rally, They Creep By Night, reuniting …

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The Past, Present, and Future of Real-Time Films Part One

What do film directors Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Agnès Varda, Robert Wise, Fred Zinnemann, Luis Buñuel, Alain Resnais, Roman Polanski, Sidney Lumet, Robert Altman, Louis Malle, Richard Linklater, Tom Tykwer, Alexander Sokurov, Paul Greengrass, Song Il-Gon, Alfonso Cuarón, and Alejandro Iñárritu have in common? More specifically, what type of film have they directed, setting them …

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‘Born to Kill’ has a sexually charged an unstoppable force encounter an immovable object

Robert Wise is up to his usual tricks with his 1947 character study Born to Kill. Wise was an incredibly skilled director whose creative talent could be applied to almost any genre. Some of his best efforts in fact were noirs, The Set-Up from 1949 arguably topping that list.

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Alien Invasion Month: ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’ is an excellent blunt instrument

Whether rightly or wrongly, Man has been declared has the superior being on planet Earth. For the scope of their cognitive skills, their ability to emote in countless ways, the complexity of their intellect, such factors have led humans to dominate, so to speak, other forms of life as well as organize itself in vast, regimented societies with hundreds of customs and rules.

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‘Jeremiah Johnson’ Hollywood’s Most Beautiful – and Saddest – Western

Jeremiah Johnson Directed by Sydney Pollack Written by Edward Anhalt and John Milius 1972, The Western, at its creative and commercial peak – the late 1960s-early 1970s – proved itself an astoundingly pliable genre. It could be molded to deal with topical subject matter like racism (Skin Game, 1971), feminism (The Ballad of Josie, 1967), …

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Busting an Old Wives’ Tale: Are odd-numbered Star Trek movies really that bad?

Until the release of the all-new, re-branded, back-to-the-beginning Star Trek in 2009 (dir. J. J. Abrams) commentators all over the world, from hardened Trekkies to critics landed with the job of reviewing the next Trek movie, were unanimously agreed on one thing: even-numbered Trek movies were better than the odd-numbered ones. This could vary from …

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Scores from Outer Space

Undertones: Volume 6 The classic science fiction film emerged during a period of great societal paranoia in the US in the early 1950s. The post-WW2 environment saw an increased concern with nuclear armament and a fear of the infiltration of communism on the American way of life. Essentially, the sci-fi film was Hollywood’s great metaphor …

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