There’s always a slight strangeness to watching a film made by people you know. It’s never an entirely objective experience, but there’s always a real sense of relief when you like the movie. Last week, I caught one of the premiere screenings of Sean Garrity’s Blood Pressure at the Cinematheque here in Winnipeg. I’ve known […]
When Stanley Kubrick’s movies were released on Blu-ray back in 2011, I decided it was time to watch them all again in chronological order. In part to remind myself of just why he’d been important to my sense of film for over forty years, and in part to see what patterns I could discern in […]
A few days ago, a co-worker asked me whether, “as a film buff”, I watch the Oscars, and had I seen all the nominated movies? The answer to both questions is no. Way back in the ’70s I used to watch the Academy Awards shows with a degree of excitement, hoping that something or someone […]
A friend who I often disagree with about movies recently surprised me with a recommendation. His opinions are often very stringent, yet here he was telling me that Roy Del Ruth’s The Alligator People was worth seeing. Del Ruth had a long and prolific career, but his filmography seems fairly undistinguished – just one more […]
Being an old fogey, I haven’t really taken to social media … I still try to communicate through email, though that means I’ve actually lost touch with several people over the past few years as they’ve switched to other methods. But I guess I’ll have to start moving with the times. Since starting this blog, […]
I’ve been a fan of Don Coscarelli’s work since the first time I saw Phantasm in 1979. Made when he was just 24, that film followed two “family” features – Jim, The World’s Greatest (1976, co-directed with Craig Mitchell), about a boy dealing with his alcoholic father; and Kenny & Company (1976), about a week […]
Death Race 3: Inferno, director Roel Reine’s follow-up to his Death Race 2, itself a prequel to Paul W.S. Anderson’s Death Race (2008), picks up where the previous movie ended and ends where the original begins. Carl Lucas (Luke Goss) has been “rebuilt” after his apparent death in a fiery crash, transformed into the masked […]
Beasts of the Southern Wild (Benh Zeitlin, 2012) I watched Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild just before it landed several Oscar nominations, and my reaction was quite mixed. The film has an impressive visceral power, anchored by the remarkable performance of 5-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis as Hushpuppy, the determined little girl who lives in […]
After I posted some old family pictures a while back which showed my father with the Titanic‘s second officer, Commander Lightoller, on a trip to Calais in 1939, I was contacted by Tiphaine Hirou of the French Titanic Society asking for permission to use the photos. I’ve just received a copy of Tiphaine’s interesting article […]
Someone recently posted a comment on one of my reviews for Blogcritics, calling me stupid for not “getting” a movie he’d obviously been obsessing over for a long time. Sometimes, of course, one doesn’t completely understand a movie the first time one sees it (I never could understand Pauline Kael’s assertion that she only needed […]