This is a review I wrote a few years back for Prairie Fire. A couple of reasons for republishing it here: 1) I don’t have a lot of time to write at the moment as I’m pushing to finish my documentary; 2) I recently ran into Caelum on the street and we had a chat […]
Released simultaneously with the Andy Milligan double-bill Nightbirds and The Body Beneath, the BFI Flipside edition of Ian Merrick’s The Black Panther (1977) resurrects an essentially lost British film which suffered a quick death because it took as subject something too raw for British audiences (or at least the British press) to tolerate. Merrick had […]
There’s far more stuff in the world than any of us can ever have complete first-hand knowledge of, so we often have to rely on second- and third-hand information about things we haven’t yet encountered. This leads to a tendency to form opinions about things we actually know nothing about … and judging by a […]
Even with the tens of thousands of movies released on DVD since the format debuted in the late ’90s, vast amounts of film history remain untouched. Of course, home video has always been a commercial enterprise, the preservation and dissemination of history mostly a by-product. Companies with large back-catalogues of titles have been constantly faced […]
I briefly got to know Kier-La Janisse when she worked with Dave Barber at the Cinematheque here in Winnipeg a few years ago. She had a wealth of experience as a programmer and an intense passion for genre films – while she was here, her brief, idiosyncratic ode to Italian bit-player Luciano Rossi, A Violent […]
My final brief look at one-off science fiction projects by mainstream filmmakers deals with three films which conjure up alternate worlds (or universes) with differing scales of resources. Quintet (Robert Altman, 1979) Robert Altman was one of the most eclectic directors of the ’70s, with works as varied as M*A*S*H (1970) and Nashville (1975), The […]
Researching for my documentary on Winnipeg movie theatres sent me on a long trip down memory lane, looking up movie ads in the newspaper archive at the library.
I sometimes feel kind of oppressed by the Internet – too much stuff to look at and read, and not enough time. I know I miss a lot, but you can’t spend all your time surfing. So it’s always a pleasure when someone you do check in with occasionally points you towards something of real […]
It’s 1979 and blithely charming narcissist Rex Romanski (Michael Reed) spots sultry Rita Marie (Ruth Sullivan) across the disco floor. Dancing inevitably leads to hot sex and they meet up at the club again the next night. But Rex’s eye is already roaming and he makes contact with the woman of his dreams, pornstar Amoreena […]
Perhaps disappointment isn’t quite the right word. I went into Ridley Scott’s new movie this past week without terribly high expectations. When a filmmaker decides to return to his first big hit 33 years later, it’s difficult not to believe that he’s running out of steam. The fact that he’s also working on a new […]