Flying to England a few weeks ago for my nephew’s wedding, my experience of airline entertainment was even less satisfying than on my trip to Beijing last year. As before, the wide selection of movie choices was undeniably eclectic – in the “avant garde” section, for instance, we were offered Morgan Spurlock’s Comic Con Episode […]
I recorded the voice over for my documentary last Friday and spent the next few days making final detail changes in the edit. Yesterday, I turned the project over to the techies for on-line picture corrections and sound fix-ups and mix. So the editing is finally done and I’m feeling a kind of post-partum depression […]
My project of revisiting all of Stanley Kubrick’s movies in chronological order has, once again, been stalled for some time, although the delay in looking at Barry Lyndon again has nothing to do with the kind of reluctance I felt with Spartacus. Rather, it’s just been difficult to find a clear window of three-plus hours […]
Jim McBride was one of the most interesting and accomplished filmmakers to emerge in New York City in the ’60s, debuting with the remarkably assured and inventive David Holzman’s Diary in 1967. One of the earliest, and finest, examples of faux documentary, it fooled many people with its convincing portrayal of a filmmaker (L.M. Kit […]
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.
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 […]