Hitchcock truly was a master of his craft. You'd think regurgitating tropes and motifs from previously in his career would make lesser products after the fact, but Hitch somehow improved. Many of his archetypes and ideas bleed into one another, for example, the spy thriller plugged into the every day person fighting an ominous elite (which coincides with "the wrong man", MacGuffins, and his fascination with periphery). There are two major things going on in the wrongly misaligned Topaz that stretch…

mathematical logic and romantic inconsistency...

This is not Vertigo or Rear Window but it may very well be Hitch’s best cat and mouse thriller, an espionage tale with intense themes. Torn Curtain has a rather terrible reputation. One that gets more dislike than it should because what makes it great are attributes that directly clash with typical filmmaking techniques (feeling disjointed, stagnant sequences, how the leads feel inconsistent, etc). 

What makes Torn Curtain work on a cinematic level is how Hitch…

It feels absolutely wrong to give something so filled with artistic vision, creative heartache, and endless amounts of time anything less than the near perfect or perfect score. Yet as much as I love stop-motion, this does not allow me to give this feature full praise. For something that has now taken 30 years to come to fruition, it makes sense that there is so little in way of narrative and we are instead gifted with a world so full…

Ya know what makes me happy?

Chris Farley.

Ya know what makes me sad?

He was so disappointed in Beverly Hills Ninja (1997) that he cried on his agent's shoulder after the first screening. He told his agent that he never wanted to do such a film again. Farley's stance was justified as it arguably attributed to the exploitation of his manic, physical humor by dumbing it down and playing it out to an almost tiring and foolish degree.

What's…