TCM once again offers a very elegant video tribute to those movie people who died during the year — actors, writers, directors, producers. Seeing so many familiar (and a few unfamiliar) faces in this brief assembly causes a sense of shock — news of many of these deaths somehow passed me by during the year. […]
Author: Kenneth George Godwin
Flipside: extreme male anxiety
The latest pair of releases from the BFI’s Flipside series offer a fascinating snapshot of what was happening to the male sense of identity at the height of the feminist impact on filmmaking in the ’70s and early ’80s. While people like Sally Potter, Lizzie Borden and Marleen Gorris were dissecting and reformulating the ways […]
Recent viewing, part 3
Jalmari Helander’s Rare Exports (2010) began as a couple of shorts (2003 and 2005) which were a success on the Internet. In the form of industrial training films, they depicted the hunting, taming, and training of wild Santa Clauses in Northern Finland. These are strong, rather vicious creatures which end up being marketed around the […]
Damnation and the Fields of Ambrosia
Nostalgia can be an odd thing. As I’ve been working on my documentary about the history of movie-going in Winnipeg, and thinking about how much time I spent in the old theatres which no longer exist, and what it felt like to sit down in the dark to see something I’d heard or read about […]
Recent viewing, part 2
You could make an interesting double bill out of Daniel Barber’s Harry Brown (2009) and Joe Cornish’s Attack the Block (2011). Both are set in crime-ridden British housing estates where residents are terrorized by youth gangs, both have a gritty tone which strives to create a sense of relevance and immediacy. But while they have […]
Recent viewing, part 1
Since reading Chris Fujiwara’s book about Jacques Tourneur, The Cinema of Nightfall (Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore and London, 1998), I’ve been searching out films by the director, particularly ones unconnected with the genres he’s best known for, horror and noir. I recently got hold of a cheap VCI disk featuring a double bill of […]
Ken Russell (1927-2011)
Although I no doubt had read about Ken Russell‘s film of D.H. Lawrence’s Women In Love (1969) when it was released, I didn’t see it until some years later. My first real memory of him is from late 1970 or early ’71. I was living in Newfoundland then and my mother still subscribed to a […]
Disk error: No Blade of Grass (Warner Archive)
There are always risks involved when revisiting a movie that impressed you years ago, when you were a lot younger and no doubt more arrogant but less wise. But it’s hard to resist taking the chance. Last year I was pleasantly surprised to find that Andrew Marton’s Crack in the World was not only just […]
Stanley Kubrick part 1: Becoming Kubrick
My first encounter with Stanley Kubrick’s work came before I was ten years old. Sometime in the early ’60s, my parents took me to see Spartacus, probably at the Odeon in Chelmsford. For years afterwards, two things stuck with me: the gladiators training in a kind of cage and Jean Simmons, holding her baby, riding […]
Sci-Fi Savant by Glenn Erickson: book review
I’ve been reading, and appreciating, the DVD Savant on-line column for years. Apart from Glenn Erickson’s almost terrifyingly prolific output, it’s the scope of his work that impresses. He writes in an accessible, conversational style, and yet avoids the superficiality which a lot of web-based criticism is prone to. He has a remarkable knowledge of […]
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