Category: Film Studies
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The Pop Culture Lens on Yojimbo (1961)
In the twenty-seventh episode of The Pop Culture Lens podcast, Christopher Olson and I welcome back friend of the podcast Joe Belfeuil to discuss Akira Kurosawa’s samurai classic Yojimbo (1961). In this episode, the conversation focuses on the film’s position as a transnational and transcultural pop culture text that acts as a link in a…
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Pop Culture Lens on Akira
In the twenty-fifth episode of The Pop Culture Lens podcast, Christopher Olson and I welcome friend of the podcast, Charley Reed, to discuss one of the most influential anime feature films of all time, Akira (1988). Charley is a tremendous fan of the anime and manga, as is Chris, and we wanted to talk bout…
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Pop Culture Lens on They Live
In the twenty-third episode of The Pop Culture Lens podcast, Christopher and I welcome back friend of the podcast Joe Belfeuil to discuss John Carpenter’s 1988 cult classic They Live and how the film seems as relevant if not more now. The short story the film is based on can be found on this website.…
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The Pop Culture Lens on Wes Anderson
In the twenty-first episode of The Pop Culture Lens podcast, Christopher and I welcome friend of the podcast Shane Tilton, an assistant professor of multimedia journalism at Ohio Northern University, to discuss filmmaker Wes Anderson by focusing on his films Rushmore and Moonrise Kingdom. In this episode, our conversation focuses on whether or not to…
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Three Approaches to Media Reception and Audience Reception Studies
This paper was part of my 2007 comp exams, or qualification exams, that I needed to complete before being allowed to do my dissertation. This paper basically serves as the backbone for how I understand reception studies and how I do such research. In this paper I will discuss three approaches to understanding audience reception…
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Making Sense of Cinema Anthology
Edited by Christopher Olson (Seems Obvious to Me) and myself, Bloomsbury Academic will release Making Sense of Cinema: Empirical Studies into Film Spectators and Spectatorship on February 25, 2016. Making Sense of Cinema is an anthology collecting empirical studies that display different methods for studying real film spectators engaging with real films. Film studies has…
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The Possession and the Traditional Exorcism Narrative
This analysis presents an example of how we are analyzing the films of the exorcism cinema subgenre for how they reflect the traditional exorcism narrative, which you can read more about here and here. This analysis is based on the notes we took while watching the film, which are given here. The 2012 film The…
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Convergent Wrestling: The Nature of Professional Wrestling
Professional wrestling has been criticized for its emphasis on the fiction of its entertainment rather than the reality of its sport. My partner, Christopher Olson (Seems Obvious to Me), and I argue that professional wrestling functions as a convergent media product, representing a vital text for examining the media landscape of the 21st century. The…
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The Pop Culture Lens Episode 16: The Exorcist (1973)
As I have been writing about for awhile now, Chris and I are working on a book project that explores the tensions depicted in exorcism cinema. That is, we are analyzing films that depict possession and exorcism to understand what is being said about the world through those representations. Part of this analysis has been…
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Cataloging Exorcism Cinema
For the past couple years now, we have been working on this project analyzing the tensions in exorcism cinema. We are currently writing a book on the topic, and part of the research for this book has been to track down and catalog all of the movies that in some way depict possession and exorcism.…
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