Entering Other Worlds, part 2

The unresolved ending of Hitchcock's The Birds

When I mentioned to a friend that I was writing these posts about one-off sci-fi movies by mainstream filmmakers, he pointed out that I’d left Norman Jewison off the list. I readily pleaded guilty, my only excuse being that I’d originally made the list off the top of my head and hadn’t bothered to follow […]

Project Update: the editing process …

I’ve been pretty silent for a few months about my on-going, still-untitled documentary on Winnipeg movie theatres. The reason for that was a massive case of creative block which had me stumped. Faced with the material (28 interviews of various lengths, a slowly accumulating collection of archival and personal photos, a small amount of video […]

Entering Other Worlds, part 1

Watching Betrand Tavernier’s sombre, moving Death Watch (1980) recently, I started wondering about mainstream filmmakers who tried their hand just once at science fiction. While Tavernier’s film fits in with the humanistic themes which run through his work, was there a similar thematic consistency in other directors’ forays into the genre? Shot mostly on bleak […]

Recent Viewing part 3: brief notes

Two years after writing The Wild Bunch (1969), Walon Green teamed up with respected documentary producer David L. Wolper for one of the oddest films ever to win an Academy Award. The Hellstrom Chronicle (1971), although it got the Oscar for best documentary, isn’t actually a documentary at all … or at least it calls […]

Michael Dowse’s Goon: Made in Winnipeg

Winnipeg may have been put on the cinematic map by the international success of Guy Maddin, and there have occasionally been other interesting home-grown movies – the best feature ever made here, Greg Hanec’s Downtime (1985), is finally getting a DVD release sometime this year – but mostly, production in Winnipeg falls into the “service” […]

Recent Viewing part 2

I’ve been falling behind on my notes about what I’ve been watching, so I won’t be going into a lot of detail here, just making a few observations about some of the movies I saw in the past month. The Oxford Murders (Álex De La Iglesia, 2008) Spanish director Álex De La Iglesia has a […]

Recent Viewing part 1

The completist impulse is a key element of the collector’s mentality. For instance, I have forty-nine of Hitchcock’s features on DVD, plus his two Second World War propaganda shorts and season one of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. It’s not that I like all his films – in fact, I know I won’t ever watch some of […]

DVD of the Week: The War Room (1993)

D. A. Pennebaker was one of the founders of direct cinema, working with people like Richard Leacock and the Maysles brothers, Albert and David, to free documentary from the limitations of the voice-of-god narrator and didactic purpose. Their idea was that documentary should merely observe and record events, with no narration to impose interpretation. But […]

Blasts from the past

CarFree premiere

Genre Viewing: Science Fiction

Trawling the Internet

Listmania redux:
The Greatest Documentaries of All Time, part one

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