A Resource for Film Students
Welcome to The Last Detail. This website is designed to be a full-service resource for film students. On it, you will find a variety of sources available to you that will help you understand, appreciate, and evaluate cinema more effectively.
The site takes its name from a 1973 film directed by Hal Ashby, featuring Jack Nicholson as a foul-mouthed sailor charged with escorting a prisoner from his Naval base up the eastern seaboard to the Navy's prison.
The site takes its name from a 1973 film directed by Hal Ashby, featuring Jack Nicholson as a foul-mouthed sailor charged with escorting a prisoner from his Naval base up the eastern seaboard to the Navy's prison.
It comes from one of my favorite periods of cinema, the so-called New Hollywood era that dominated mainstream American filmmaking in the late 1960s and 1970s. Not only is The Last Detail one of my favorite films from the era, its title indicates something about this site's mission.
The goal of the resources you find here is to help you more fully engage with cinema as an art form. It also helps me to do the same. I learn best by writing about films that I find interesting, and this site is designed to be an active, developing resource for me as well as anyone who visits it. On the site, you'll find a number of available options for studying film. I'm an Associate Professor of English at the College of DuPage, and I teach film. You can read more about me below. Many of the resources on the site are directed to my classes, targeted studies of films that I am currently teaching. I write blog entries, add video essays, post audio commentaries, and upload podcast discussions. This site is designed to be a celebration of and discussion of film as an art form. Thanks for visiting. |
ABOUT ME
I am an Associate Professor of English at the College of DuPage, a large two-year institution located in the western suburbs of Chicago. I received a Master's from Northern Illinois University in 2010, where I studied Film & Literature. After several years of adjunct work at various community colleges around the Chicagoland area, I was hired as a full-time professor at C.O.D. for the Fall of 2014 and have been here ever since. I teach film classes in the English department, including Intro to Film Art, Film History, Film as Literature, Film Directors and Authorship, Film Genres, World Cinema, Documentary Cinema, and Longform Television.
Studying film is my life's work. From a young age, I knew that there was something about the magic of cinema that I could not ignore. My early days were spent inside the house, not outside in the neighborhood, wearing out the VHS copy of Jaws (1975, Dir. Steven Spielberg) that we had recorded off of television. As I got older, I graduated to Quentin Tarantino movies before falling entirely in love with the work of Martin Scorsese, whose films remain a guiding light for me. I worked at a video store and a movie theater in high school and during summers off from college, and studied film production early in my academic career before moving on to film studies. I came relatively late to Classic Hollywood, discovering an interest in it during college. Ever since then, I see everything. I want to know about it all.