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Dec 23, 2024 | 
filminquiry.com | Crockett Houghton
There is an art to the short film that doesn’t exist in any other medium. You still have to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but do it in less time than most episodes of television. Unlike television, the short film usually doesn’t have the benefit of previous episodes to build story or follow-up episodes to help wrap it up. No, the art here is making everything self-contained and under fifteen minutes.
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Dec 17, 2024 | 
filminquiry.com | Crockett Houghton
Many times I’ve gone into a movie without knowing anything about it beforehand. No trailers, no reviews, nothing, and been completely let down. You would think that no matter what film, going in and not knowing anything about it would be a bonus, to let the story that the filmmakers are trying to tell unfold before you as they intended.
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Nov 11, 2024 | 
filminquiry.com | Crockett Houghton
Road horror is a genre trope that we don’t see very much of these days mostly, I think, because it’s hard to get right. You either have your creepy driver or your creepy passenger (sometimes both) and one or the other of them has a secret that will change the course of their trip together forever. There’s a third type of road horror movie that I have yet to mention and that is the “haunted highway” trope, something that is even harder to get right than the first two featuring dangerous strangers.
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Nov 8, 2024 | 
filminquiry.com | Crockett Houghton
One of my favorite things to do when I find out that an actor is moving into the directors chair is to watch the movie and do nothing but talk complete and udder smack about it the entire runtime. To make fun of every aspect and be sarcastic about every creative choice from the shot selection to the editing style, right down to the music and the actors chosen. This is not going to be that, there is literally nothing bad I can say about Anna Kendrick‘s directorial debut Woman of The Hour.
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Oct 29, 2024 | 
filminquiry.com | A Traveler’s Needs |Crockett Houghton
Most of the time when you watch a film you have a period of world-building. It takes you by the hand and walks you around, introducing you to the characters and the locations, getting you used to the area and the feel before it dives into the story headfirst. Hold Your Breath is not one of those films. As the first scene comes on screen we quickly realize that we are being thrust instantly into the action. It was a tale already in motion and I loved it for that.
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Oct 28, 2024 | 
filminquiry.com | A Traveler’s Needs |Crockett Houghton
Independent movies aren’t on the decline, they’re just getting a little bit harder to find if you aren’t looking for them. Greedy People was a very sneaky film that I had heard a rumbling about, checked out the trailer for, and then kind of forgot existed (that part is on me). I think if this movie taught me anything it’s that if it grabbed my attention in the trailer I need to jot it down. Thirty-nine is apparently the age when I start forgetting about things that I’m excited to see.
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Oct 14, 2024 | 
filminquiry.com | Crockett Houghton
There have been over ninety adaptations for television and the big screen of Stephen King’s material. Some great, some okay, and some just bad. He was once asked what he thought about his books being turned into films and if they came out badly would hurt him, he answered, “Once I give it over it’s out of my hands, if it turns out badly, well, the books will always exist.” That’s a healthy way to look at it and a good starting point for what happened here, in the latest adaptation of Salem’s Lot.
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Oct 8, 2024 | 
filminquiry.com | Crockett Houghton
When it comes to movies, I’ll watch just about anything you put in front of me. If you tell me it has a story and people acted in front of a camera, I’ll give it a look just to see what they were up to. Night of the Harvest was a film that came to me out of the blue, directed by Christopher M. Carter and Jessica Morgan (from a screenplay written by the pair), that I was completely unaware of.
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Sep 20, 2024 | 
filminquiry.com | Crockett Houghton
What the world has been lacking for quite some time now are original films. Films that aren’t like anything else, that don’t adhere to the strict checklist of what Hollywood deems the recipe to success. Films that don’t just break the rules, they completely ignore them and instead write some of their own. Films like, Tuesday. The film, directed by Daina Oniunas-Pusić was an original film when I hungered for nothing more than to be moved by a story I hadn’t already been told over and over.
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Sep 19, 2024 | 
filminquiry.com | Crockett Houghton
When you sit down to watch a film from writer/director Yorgos Lanthimos (Poor Things, The Lobster) there are a few things you can expect. The first thing you’ll notice (and possibly my favorite thing) is a very specific and slightly off-putting way each of the characters speak. The dialogue in his films is written in such a way that everything is a little under-cooked but no feeling or meaning is lost.
