About Me

Me. Get over it.

I am an alumni of and currently an English professor for the University of Alaska Southeast, on the Juneau campus. I continue to reside in that great city, having returned to it after two years of travel. This website has been on hiatus since by departure in 2008; on August 25, 2011, I revived it after overwhelming encouragement to do so by those who asked me to start it in the first place. My academic history: In 2006, I earned by B.A. in Literary Studies; currently, I am working on my master's degree at Alaska Pacific University in the same field. Film as Art is among my many handles at UAS, and it is most certainly my favorite of my various tasks. When I'm not writing about films, you'll usually find me teaching English literature for the Humanities Department, in a library tinkering away at a work of fiction, or in the same building researching for my master's thesis. In 2010, my first novel was published, and I hope that it is the beginning of a promising writing career that will include both fiction and analysis (you can help perpetuate that career, of course, by buying my book). Other than film related stuff, if you have any other questions about me, please email!

Favorites:

Roger Ebert has so often stated that he’s not a fan of lists. I say that you have to start somewhere, and lists are a good way of organizing your thoughts. Though to be fair, lists such as “favorite actors” or “best films” are certainly subject to change, and I don’t think I could reasonably create one is not going to be altered somewhat on most occassions that you visit this page (case in point: I've gone through at least five major revisions of the below lists in the past few years of Film as Art). All that said, if I was stranded on an uninhabited island with a long extension cord, and I could only have ten movies with me, these are the ten today. They are by no means the greatest films on the planet (at least not all of them), but they are very influential to me in my love for cinema, and/or represent what I feel are grand cinematic moments, and as a result, I remain forever in their debt.

Here’s “the list.”

1.   Dawn of the Dead
2.   Ikiru
3 . Apocalypse Now
4 . Fitzcarraldo
5 . Scenes From a Marriage
6.   Magnolia
7 . Once Upon a Time in America
8 . Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid
9 . Paris, Texas
10 Keoma

I tend to pick my favorites from living artists, as they have yet to pass on and still can be fairly judged as ever-changing, growing performers. Favorite living actors include Max von Sydow (perhaps the greatest living actor since Olivier. He remains overlooked for his raw talent of never appearing to be acting at all), Christopher Lambert (whose subtle movements and quiet demeanor make for characterizations that are among the most overlooked and underrated in the movies), William Hurt (for similar reasons as Lambert; his method of only revealing "the tip of the iceburg" of his characters and letting their actions do the rest makes him one of the very best of film actors), Ed Harris (who has yet to give a performance that has not been engaging), Robert Duvall (who, frankly, needs no explanation), and Billy Bob Thorton (possibly the greatest living American actor from the past ten years). Actresses include Jodie Foster, Miranda Richardson, Anna Paquin, Jessica Lange, and Sissy Spacek. Deceased favorites include actors Peter Cushing, Toshirô Mifune, David Niven, Lon Chaney, Sr., Boris Karloff, the Marx Brothers, James Cossins, Bob Peck, and Charles Laughton; actresses Bette Davis, Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, and Elsa Lanchester.

Director-wise, I find myself partial to the works of Werner Herzog, Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood, George A. Romero, Paul Thomas Anderson, Larry Fessenden, and Julie Taymor. Favorites who have passed include Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Robert Altman, Alfred Hitchcock, Sergio Leone, Frank Capra, Stanley Kubrick, David Lean, Orson Welles, Roberto Rossellini, Lucio Fulci, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Kenji Mizoguchi, and Michael Cimino (with all due respect to his fans, of course). I really don’t have a list of non-favorites, but the only way I’ll ever see films by Michael Bay or James H. Barden again is if my arms and legs are severed and I am dragged into the theater, unable to kick and scream.