“#Hashtag: Hunger Games Catches Fire, Audience Entertained” Joseph Natoli June 2014 Feature Articles "The risk of a drift toward oligarchy is real and gives little reason for optimism." Thomas Piketty (1) "So what do you think, now that the whole world wants to sleep with you?" Hunger Games: Catching Fire...
Captain Phillips: Colliding with the Real Joseph Natoli December 2013 Feature Articles "One of the most remarkable things about us is also one of the easiest to overlook: each time we collide with the real, we deepen our understanding of the world and become more fully a part of it." (1) There i...
“So Have Things Gone”: A Place Beyond the Pines Joseph Natoli July 2013 Feature Articles "Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experience treacherous, judgment difficult." –Hippocrates Manifold are thy shapings, Providence! Many a hopeless matter gods arrange. What we expected never c...
The Yet Unclaimed Baggage of Robert Zemeckis’ Flight Joseph Natoli December 2012 Feature Articles In a mock recreation of the conditions in the air that pilot William “Whip” Whitaker, played by Denzel Washington in the film Flight (2012), faced, all of the ten tested crashed the plane and killed all aboard,...
The Artist: Mystification Beyond Artistry Joseph Natoli April 2012 Feature Articles Joseph Natoli discusses the incongruous presence of a black and white, silent film evoking Hollywood’s “golden age” in an era of hi-tech culture that has displaced all that age represents.
Cowboys & Aliens: The Exhaustion of History & the Re-Genesis of Illusions Joseph Natoli October 2011 Feature Articles Joseph Natoli digs into this genre-blending hybrid of a film, which inadvertently has much to say about America’s fading sense of history.
True Grit: Digerati Go Western? Millennials Go “Back in the Day”? Joseph Natoli March 2011 Feature Articles Joseph Natoli ponders what history and the past mean in the age of social networking.
The America Endangered in The American: A Dark Allegory Joseph Natoli December 2010 Feature Articles On the surface, Anton Corbijn’s film is a pared down tale of a professional gunsmith-for-hire adrift in Europe, but in Joseph Natoli’s allegorical reading the film also has its finger on the pulse of a conflicted and disorientated nation.
The Perils of Being Up in the Air Joseph Natoli April 2010 Feature Articles Joseph Natoli dissects Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air as an allegory of the post-9/11 world. An allegory fraught with all manner of contradictions and paradoxes.
The Deep Morals of Inglourious Basterds Joseph Natoli September 2009 Feature Articles Is Tarantino’s latest just another pastiche of postmodern cinéphilic references? Perhaps not. Joseph Natoli looks for the moral compass in the director’s blood soaked war saga.
