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coensfan
I use IMDB to rate ongoing TV series, short films, video games, music videos and other content unavailable on Letterboxd.
https://letterboxd.com/coensfanman/
If I have rated an episode of television on this account, it is usually the final episode of a season/arc of a series and correlates to my opinion of that season/arc.
Exceptions include:
"Signal 30" (Madmen S5E5)
"The Puppetmaster" (Avatar: The Last Airbender S3E8)
"Binks no Sake: Kako to Genzai o Tsunagu Uta" (One Piece E380)
"The Hitch-Hiker" (The Twilight Zone S1E16)
"Part 8" (Twin Peaks: The Return E8)
"Five-O" (Better Call Saul S1E6)
"Fassbinder, Berlin Alexanderplatz, 14 - Mein Traum vom Traum des Franz Biberkopf von Alfred Döblin: Ein Epilog" (Berlin Alexanderplatz E14)
"Days Gone By" (The Walking Dead S1E1)
"The Time Element" (Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse S1E6)
"Once Upon a Time" (The Twilight Zone S3E13)
"The Justice Ducks: Parts 1&2" (Darkwing Duck S1E20&21)
"And Then Ther Were Fewer" (Family Guy S9E1)
"Amazon Women in the Mood" (Futurama S3E5)
"The Mighty Casey" (The Twilight Zone S1E35)
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Fête de Paris 1899: Concours d'automobiles fleuries (1899)
It's so meta!!!!!
Could this be meta-filmmaking's first steps? With the cameraman being aware of another technician, filming the same parade directly in front of him, with what seems like the same type of camera and what later was determined to be for the same company (Lumiere), it would seem so. Self reference has never been a moniker of the Lumiere Brothers as this time period mostly consisted of documentary experiments for the duo. However, the evolution that follows is clear with enough extrapolation. Can anyone else see Dziga Vertov watching this short in shortpants?
Tearing Down the Spanish Flag (1898)
Oooooold Glory
One of J. Stuart Blackton's (considered by many to be a forefather in early camera technique) earliest surviving films. "Tearing Down the Spanish Flag" tells us about the nature of war-propagandist cinema through one of the medium's first lenses. The film, depicting a Spanish flag being torn from it's pole and subsequently replaced by an American one, was released at the break of the Spanish-American War and was sold to the public as being shot in combat. Unsurprisingly, this statement was false. In actuality, the film was shot in an office in Brooklyn for Vitagraph (later to be absorbed by Warner Brothers in 1925) with forced perspective being used as a means to make the flag look bigger than it actually is. In addition, the short uses what may be cinema's most unrealistic matt painting as it's background. But did the masses notice?, maybe?, if the majority of people did see through the movie magic it didn't stop them from buying more than enough copies to make it financially viable for Vitograph. It would seem that filmmakers have always taken advantage of the average patriot's inability to think of what is outside the borders of the screen since the beginning of the craft's infancy.
The Kiss in the Tunnel (1899)
Naughty Naughty...
And the insertion edit was born. This Phantom Ride (as the subgenre is titled) slows down with it's second of three scenes but that doesn't stop it from cooling. With the first and third shots being composed of a train entering and exiting a tunnel, the heart of the picture is the extraordinary forty seconds that make up the film's second scene; in which a married couple flirt and exchange kisses within one of the vehicle's wagons. Though the clear artificiality of the train cart does clash with the film's otherwise pseudo-documentary approach to early filmmaking. What makes this forgivable is the believability of the actors performances, played by the director himself (George Albert Smith) and his wife (Laura Bayley) respectively. While "The Kiss in the Tunnel" can't hold the title of having film's oldest surviving sexual implication, (1896's "Coucher de la mariée" would have the honor of providing the medium's first innuendo in case anyone was wondering) it did give something of, in my opinion, much greater value to cinema. Genuine onscreen chemistry.