Bug's Budding Film Blog

    Image Source  I'm going to take a wild guess and say you've seen the Pixar film Cars (2006) by now. It's not exactly an unknown movie. It has several bad sequels and spin offs and there is truly an insane amount of merchandise and toys based off the film. For a film so successful though, there seems to be very little examination being done into it. My reading of the film is pretty surface level but I do think it is a good place to start. To put it simply, Cars is about poverty and class in America as well as classism. Our protagonist, Lightning McQueen, is a young hot shot rookie race car sponsored by a company that sells medicated rust ointment. One of our first scenes with McQueen is him meeting some of his fans, older cars covered in rust. A convenient visual metaphor for poverty. McQueen is clearly made uncomfortable by this, not wanting to be seen with those he views as dirty.    McQueen views the poor as dirty, not worthy of his attention or respect...

      Image Source        Over the Halloween season I treated myself to a little film called Frankenhooker (1990). I'm a sucker for the horror-comedy genre and it had been on my too-watch list for far too long. The plot of the film is relatively simple, an amateur scientist accidentally kills his wife via remote control lawnmower and rebuilds her piece by piece using the body parts of New York prostitutes that explode from smoking his "super crack". Simple. As odd as the film is, I think there's a really interesting literary motif in there of the beloved corpse.       This idea goes back far. You can find tales of people trying to resurrect dead loved ones all over mythology and the idea that Frankenstein created his monster out of a level of homoerotic desire is also long standing. I think the film Swiss Army Man (2016) really plays with this motif too. Throughout the film our two leads, Hank played by Paul Dano and Manny a...

Poster from IMDB      Hey y'all, Bug here. Today I'm going to talk about my actual absolute favorite type of film. Known by many names, the B movie or a cult classic, the so-bad-it's-good film is a staple of the medium of film. Movies that are near impossible to make on purpose. These films take advantage of the shared viewing experience in ways that other types of film kind of cannot. That's what I want to talk about today, along with some recommendations.     All of my favorite movie watching experiences come from watching bad movies with people I care about. There is almost something cathartic to all watching something just fall apart in front of your eyes and falling apart a little with it. It's hard to feel awkward or scared in even an unfamiliar group when everyone is watching something truly horrible. Bad movies act as a kind of social lubricant that, to me, provide a near unrivaled sense of collective joy. The group aspect is far from the only part...

    Saying that Akira Kurosawa was a master at filmmaking is like saying salt is good on french fries. It's a given at this point. That won't stop me from writing about one of my favorite aspects of his films though, how he ends them. The final shot of a Kurosawa film is often heartbreaking and powerful. They somehow manage to perfectly encapsulate how these films end and all the emotions that comes with that. To demonstrate this, I want to talk about the ending shots of Seven Samurai  and Ran .     Beginning with Seven Samurai , the film focuses on a village beset by bandits. Knowing they will not be able to survive another attack, two men from the village go to plead for the help of some wandering samurai. They eventually find them and the rest of the film takes place over the multiple days of these samurai defending the village. I am cutting out a lot because this whole film is over three hours long but throughout the battle, four of the seven end up falling....