Category Archives: Auteur of the Week
Auteur of the Week: Rian Johnson
Rian Johnson is fairly new to Hollywood – his debut feature Brick was released in 2006 – but he’s definitely one of the great up-and-coming auteurs of his generation. Although I love Brick way more than his sophomore effort 2009’s The Brothers Bloom, it is in no way a sophomore slump. Both films are wildly original and filled with some of the more memorable characters of the last decade. I think he’s got a major talent and we’ve only seen the beginning of what could very well prove to be a brilliant career.
Auteur of the Week: Cameron Crowe
Cameron Crowe has directed 6 movies. I love and own on DVD 5 of those movies. His sixth film I really disliked. What I love so much about Cameron Crowe’s films, more than the great stories and characters he creates, is his use of music. There are few directors who infuse music so deeply into the stories they’re telling the way Crowe does. I’m sure this has to do with his background as a writer/editor with Rolling Stone Magazine. I owe a lot of my taste in music to the soundtracks of Crowe’s films. Crowe introduced me to Peter Gabriel, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, Bob Dylan, Sigur Rós and Spiritualized, just to name a few of the bands that have graced his soundtracks.
Auteur of the Week: Alfonso Cuarón
I really love Alfonso Cuarón. He’s filmed a couple of my all-time favorite movies. I’ve seen all but one of his feature-length films. The one I haven’t seen is his debut feature film, Sólo con tu pareja, so I won’t be talking about that one. What I love so much about Cuarón is that he’s done an interesting variety of films. I think each one of his films is different from the other, but at the same time they all share Cuarón’s distinctive directorial style.
Auteur of the Week: Terrence Malick
The first time I was introduced to Terrence Malick was over ten years ago and I knew nothing about it him. My brother and I were watching AMC and Badlands came on and we thought it was Charlie Sheen, but after we saw young Sissy Spacek we realized it was a young Martin Sheen (young Charlie looks just like young Martin!). I’d never seen anything like this film before and upon viewing it my love of Malick’s work began and has yet to dissipate.
Auteur of the Week: David Lynch
To begin, I’m going to quote from the Wikipedia entry about auteurs, in order to establish what I mean when I call David Lynch an auteur.
The term auteur (French for author) is used to describe film directors (or, more rarely, producers, or writers) who are considered to have a distinctive, recognizable style, because they (a) repeatedly return to the same subject matter, (b) habitually address a particular psychological or moral theme, (c) employ a recurring visual and aesthetic style, or (d) demonstrate any combination of the above. In theory, an auteur’s films are identifiable regardless of their genre. The term was first applied in its cinematic sense in François Truffaut’s 1954 essay “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema.”
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