My genre viewing on disk over the past couple of months ranges from classics to crap, and I have to admit that I’ve enjoyed it all. The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) From England, I’ve obtained impressive Blu-rays of three key movies from the period when “modern” horror was born: Hammer’s first two colour Gothic features, […]
TCM’s annual tribute to the passing of actors, directors, writers, producers and anyone else connected with the movies is, as always, elegant and moving.
The mid-’60s television series Combat! remains an impressively serious treatment of “men in war”, owing a great deal to such late WW2 features as A Walk in the Sun, They Were Expendable, and Battleground. An excellent cast, supported by notable guest stars, and some major writers and directors made this one of the best shows of its era.
Genre, of course, is not limited to the fantastic — science fiction, fantasy, horror. Contemporary and historical dramas can also fall within genre boundaries. Prisoners (Denis Villeneuve) Denis Villeneuve’s thriller was much-praised by critics and audiences alike, and yet it struck me as a genre movie desperate to convince its viewers that it was actually […]
The Uninvited (1944) was one of the first American movies to treat the ghost story seriously. Until then, ghosts were either played for comedy, or were deceptions cooked up as part of some criminal scheme, or they were used metaphorically or symbolically. But the idea that the actual spirits of the dead might linger on […]
Much of what I’ve seen in a theatre this year qualifies as genre movies. One day I’ll have to sit down and evaluate my viewing in some systematic way to figure out why I spend less and less time on serious drama as I get older (I have a friend who’s just the opposite; he […]
Fifty years ago today (the day after JFK was assassinated), as a nine-year-old boy living in a small village in southeast England, I sat down after what we then called “tea” (our evening meal) and started watching a TV show I knew nothing about. It had several characters in a blue police phone box who […]
A lot of my movie viewing is genre based. My appreciation of familiar forms and variations goes back to childhood, when fantasy, horror and science fiction first appealed to me. Mysteries and thrillers came a bit later, for some reason – maybe because they’re at least to some degree rooted more in reality than imagination. […]
At some time in the process of our transformation into “consumers” – that is, after the fundamental shift in our relationship with the world around us where exchange value superseded all other considerations – a strange confusion arose between artists and the art they created. We somehow came to believe that if we appreciated the […]
For such a type to be successful means that its conventions have imposed themselves upon the general consciousness and become the accepted vehicles of a particular set of attitudes and a particular aesthetic effect. One goes to any individual example of the type with very definite expectations, and originality is to be welcomed only in […]