Some things just sound like a bad idea. In 2010, Greg Wise, an executive producer at the BBC, decided to commission an adaptation of a long narrative poem by Christopher Reid to mark National Poetry Day in Britain. That poem, The Song of Lunch, tells of a bitter, sarcastic failed writer and editor who arranges […]
I first saw Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey in St. John’s, Newfoundland, when I was 13. Like a lot of people back then, I responded to it as an “experience” rather than a narrative. I don’t think I even thought about what it might “mean”, I just got caught up in the imagery, the […]
An 11-year-old orphan, discovered working in a maharajah’s stables by a cameraman on a scouting trip, represents one of the strangest anomalies in the history of movie-stardom. Osmond Borradaile was in India in preparation for a project based on a story by Rudyard Kipling when he met Selar Shaik and brought him to the attention […]
I had an interesting evening last Friday, thanks to Dave Barber at the Cinematheque. Dave and his co-workers at the WFG brought Craig Baldwin in from San Francisco for a weekend workshop on found-footage filmmaking. I didn’t have time for the workshop itself, but did make it to the Friday night screening of Tribulation 99 […]
In 17th Century Korea, two young children, a brother and sister, see their father killed and barely escape with their own lives. They seek shelter with the family of one of their father’s friends and grow up as outcasts, their father called a traitor. The boy, Nam-Yi (Park Hae-Il), grows up embittered, developing the skills […]
By 1964, Stanley Kubrick had been honing his filmmaking skills for more than ten years in a series of increasingly ambitious projects, all of which were somewhat conventional in terms of form and content – film noir, historical epic, war film. Even Lolita, although the subject matter pushed accepted boundaries, is recognizable as melodrama. For […]
In the 1950s, after he broke up with long-time partner Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis made a string of very successful comedies built around his, shall we say, distinct comic persona. Jerry’s schtick was a mixture of elaborate, agile physical business combined with an aggressive use of facial and vocal tics, which at their mildest were […]
“The confrontation between intelligence and animal instinct, between reasoning and brute force … without artistry and style, it becomes vulgar butchery, and it’s merely disgusting and cruel.” – Francesco Rosi Sometimes the subject matter of a film can present an obstacle to judging it fairly as a film. I felt myself faced with this issue when […]
After the experience of directing Spartacus, Stanley Kubrick got as far away from Hollywood as he could. He moved to England, where he stayed for the rest of his life and made his eight subsequent features. Interestingly, the first two of those films were both set in the United States, as if despite making the […]
When you buy more DVDs than you’ll ever have time to watch (one of the hazards of addiction), you end up with large backlogs piled on various shelves, the sight of which tends to nag at you. Sometimes, you can’t help asking yourself why the hell you bought them in the first place, but of […]