Five Movies: The Cap'n Presents His Favorite Pieces of 2010

Originally, I had planned to close out the year end recap on Saturday, but ended up bouncing around from town to town in order to take care of financial business. While I could *technically* "sneak" that piece in the weekend spot before yesterdays Roger Corman trailer Sunday, I think instead we'll treat it as a "day off" from the Blogorium. The Cap'n and the Cranpire did close out Saturday night by watching the Corman produced Forbidden World (also known as Mutant), hence the Trailer Sunday. We'll get to Forbidden World later this week...

Today, I'm going to provide links to my favorite articles / reviews / columns / posts of 2010. Technically it's not a "Five Movies" but all five deal specifically with film, and in many cases deal specifically one film or type of film.


1. Horror Fest: A People's History (Part One, Part Two) - I had possibly the most fun I've ever had compiling these stories and then editing them together into an overlapping oral history of Horror and Summer Fests. This version of Part Two finally fixes the glitch and allows readers to see Barrett's advice, correcting a text color issue I missed in the first go-round.

2. Re-Adapting and the Tainted Discourse of "Remakes" - a piece dealing with the curious case of True Grit, a film which appears to be a remake on the surface but is being classified otherwise, and the ramifications of shifting that argument.

3. Winnebago Man vs. Best Worst Movie - What appears, at first, to be a comparison piece of two films is also a study of the "YouTube" generation, "secondary fame" for films, and the way audiences relate to films in a post-MST3k world.

4. My "Mixed Tape" Manifesto - A (sort of) open letter to the creators of Greensboro's Mixed Tape Film Series, a sound concept which continually underwhelms me in its execution, but could easily be improved if the creative minds behind it would follow their own advice.

5. Coen Brothers Final Day One: Auteur Theory - This post is visited more than any other that doesn't have the words "Thankskilling" or "Leprechaun 3" in it, largely by students who are (hopefully) citing it for their papers. If you aren't, I will find out somehow - eventually your professors are going to check online, and I hope they find blog, where it came from. I appreciate all of the traffic, and I'm glad to know people find the research I did useful, but don't steal it. It's going to be painfully obvious when your teacher sees a quote from Harlan Ellison's Watching, a book they know you haven't read.


Bonus favorites:

Hamlet Week - Where I nearly drove myself crazy watching five major adaptations of Shakespeare's play and comparing and contrasting them with each other and the original text. Days One (Laurence Olivier), Two (Mel Gibson), Three (Kenneth Branagh), Four (Ethan Hawke), Five (David Tennant), and Six (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead).

The "Twitter" Experiment - and why you'll never see the Cap'n open a Twitter account.