Film festivals create a peculiar psychological space, lifting you out of “reality” and immersing you in a subjective world where what you see up there on screens in dark auditoriums becomes more important than anything else – even eating and sleeping seem to become irrelevant. The Toronto International Film Festival Having lived mostly in Winnipeg for […]
At the height of the Cold War official propaganda was aimed at lulling the population into accepting the idea of nuclear war as somehow normal and “manageable”, as depicted in the Central Office of Information short The Hole in the Ground (1962) which shows no-nonsense bureaucrats getting on with the job of “maintaining order” during an attack on Britain.
As readers and viewers, we tend to be greedy. We want access to everything a creator may have done, regardless of that creator’s wishes. If an author dies leaving an unpublished manuscript, we expect to be given access to it, even if the author him- or herself had clearly stated that it wasn’t ready to […]
Not surprisingly, given the amount of time I spend watching movies at home, I came across quite a few worthwhile titles during the year. I’ve already written about many of these in this blog, so will just offer capsule comments here (in no particular order) about ones that I particularly recommend. Dramatic features The World, […]
Although I watch more films now than ever before, I hardly ever get out to a movie. Twenty years ago, before I paid much attention to home video (I didn’t own a VCR until 1995!), I saw about 120 movies a year in theatres. This past year, barely 30. But with DVD and Blu-ray, I […]
I’ve been hung up for a few weeks in my plan to re-watch all of Stanley Kubrick’s films in chronological order because the prospect of sitting through Spartacus one more time was a bit daunting. There was a three year gap between the success of Paths of Glory and this, the biggest production of Kubrick’s […]
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 […]
Hard to believe, but I posted my first entry on this blog one year ago today. At first there was a bit of frenzied activity, with posts going up every day or two. Back in February, I went to once every five days, then in March just once a week. I hadn’t done this amount […]
I recently took a one-week trip to Beijing to attend my brother’s wedding. The city itself is fascinating, built on a monumental scale (or as dissident artist Ai Weiwei puts it, “inhuman”), and Beijing traffic is one of the most terrifying things I’ve ever encountered. I didn’t have a lot of time to explore, but […]
In light of this week’s post on Matthew J. Avant’s “found footage documentary” Lunopolis, it seems like fortuitous timing that Glenn Erickson over at DVD Savant has just passed on a couple of links dealing with Les documents interdits, a series of found-footage shorts by French filmmaker Jean-Teddy Filippe. For anyone who enjoys the form, […]