This is a review I wrote a few years back for Prairie Fire. A couple of reasons for republishing it here: 1) I don’t have a lot of time to write at the moment as I’m pushing to finish my documentary; 2) I recently ran into Caelum on the street and we had a chat […]
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 […]
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 […]
I recently re-read two of my favourite film books. The first was published in 1971, and I’ve read it maybe five times since then. The second was published twenty years later, in 1991, and I’d only read it once before, back in the early ’90s; I just read a reprint put out a few years […]
Guest blogger Howard Curle follows up his previous account of William K. Everson’s class on British Cinema at New York University with an in-depth look at one of the movies Everson introduced him to: John Baxter’s Love on the Dole (1941). John Baxter & Love on the Dole (1941) By Howard Curle One of the […]
Forty years after Pauline Kael wrote her hatchet job Raising Kane (The New Yorker, Feb. 20-27, 1971), the myth of Orson Welles’ arrogance and failure is apparently still alive and kicking. In his August 13 column, Glenn Erickson over at DVD Savant passed on a link to a Wall Street Journal article by their resident […]
The recent guest post here about William K. Everson by my friend Howard Curle reminded me that I have a copy of Everson’s Classics of the Horror Film (Citadel Press: Secaucus, N.J., 1974), which I hadn’t looked at … well, probably in a couple of decades. Dipping into it and re-reading some of the chapters, […]
John Carpenter has had a long, uneven career, the chief foundation of which (after a couple of very good small features, Dark Star and Assault on Precinct 13) was the highly successful and influential Halloween. Personally, I’ve never understood that movie’s reputation and success. Apart from his facility with the widescreen frame and a strong […]
Many of us who live in relative urban comfort enjoy experiencing a vicarious struggle for survival through books and movies. This goes back at least as far as 1719 and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (how many times has that been filmed?). Crusoe, like many wilderness narratives, focuses on an individual separated from society, having to […]
There is a long, if not necessarily venerable, tradition in the arts of creating confrontational, deliberately offensive work to challenge received ideas and to make people conscious of their own conventional assumptions. When work like this is created, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to get indignant at people who are genuinely offended; in […]