Yes, Kevin Church Is Blogging.
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Sam Fuller’s “The Naked Kiss” is sordid, weird and revealing. I love it.
This was written as the introduction for the Mesilla Valley Film Society’s screening of The Naked Kiss in April, 2024. I don’t know if there’s an American filmmaker whose work I admire more than Sam Fuller. A high school dropout who became a journalist, then a screenwriter, then a soldier in World War II before…
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“Hell Or High Water” – Western Noir about the Working Class and Capitalism
This is barely rewritten from my notes given before the Mesilla Valley Film Society’s March 2023 screening of Hell and High Water for the noir series I’ve been curating.
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“Lone Star” – Borderlands Noir at its Most Mature
I wrote this introduction for The Mesilla Valley Film Society’s screening of Lone Star in February, 2023.
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My Obligatory Post About ChatGPT (Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Use — Not Love, Never Love — The Plagiarism Machine.)
Oh, boy. This is going to go over like a lead balloon.
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My Big James Bond Idea That They Will Never Do Because I Don’t Work In Hollywood And Nobody Pays Attention To Me, Which Is To Their Credit
This dates back to some posts I made on Twitter back when Twitter was called Twitter and not whatever Elon thinks it is now.
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“On Dangerous Ground” – A Hard-Boiled Trip to the Hinterlands
I wrote this introduction for The Mesilla Valley Film Society’s screening of On Dangerous Ground in December, 2023. Robert Ryan is Jim Wilson, an embittered big city detective who’s exiled to the intentionally ambiguous “Upstate” to track down a killer. Ida Lupino plays Mary Maiden, a blind woman who’s dragged into his quest through circumstance. He…
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“Godzilla Minus One” – A Re-Return to Its Roots
I hope you like someone going on a bit about a giant radioactive dinosaur.
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Noirvember: “Double Indemnity” (1944)
When you get a group of two or more noir nerds together, there are two things that are inevitably going to happen: 1. They will argue about what is film noir. 2. They will agree that Double Indemnity is in the top three films noir, if not the absolute best of the genre.
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Noirvember: Fritz Lang’s “Human Desire” (1954)
Fritz Lang is one of those directors whose name is synonymous with film noir: a German expatriate who brought his expressionistic storytelling technique to Hollywood and quickly began to change how studio films looked and felt. His debut, Fury (which I talk about here) still shocks in spite of its studio-mandated happy ending, and movies like…
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Deeper Into The Shadows: A Dozen Films Noir For The Not-Quite-Neophyte (Part Three)
Part three! It’s over…or is it? (It is, at least for now.)