Category Archive: FILM
Incitement
Caesar stabbed in the forum & elsewhere, painted by Vincenzo Camuccini (@ Moderna)
Julius Caesar (1601) (Dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1953) A good film of a great play, scribbled when Shakespeare was limbering up and entering his white hot phase. The story is mainly of Brutus, nicely and very glumly played by James Mason as the ‘reluctant’ conspirator. All of the key players are good, although one might say Louis Calhern plays Caesar much like he was as the big spy boss in Notorious (that playing strangely fits the minor but key part in the play but is much too vigorous for a 66 year old prone to fainting spells). Suetonius called Caesar “deified” and suggested that…
Continue Reading →Duel
Goliath & David: Peterbilt 281 tanker vs Valiant Plymouth
(Dir. Steven Spielberg) (1971) TVC’s all-time favourite trucking movie. Even with the padding of additional scenes to lengthen the story for theatrical release after its debut on U.S. television, it is still a masterwork of ruthless economy in its staging, editing and plot. Dennis Weaver is the perfect Mr. Average who plays a little chicken with a foul, evil-looking old rig, and gets a hell of a lot more than he bargained for. Everything hangs together – everything is plausible – the tension is built up seamlessly and then, “there you are: right back in the jungle again.” Spielberg is…
Continue Reading →The Heart is a lonely Hunter
(Carson McCullers) Not as completely ghastly as a Flannery O’Connor but up there in the southern Gothic oh-my-gawd stakes. The ultimately empty, Christ-like Singer and the yearning tomboy Mick are stock characters perhaps but they live and breathe in this story of poverty, hopelessness and waste. Ian Hunter’s “Cambreau” from Strange Cargo and Conrad Veidt’s “Stranger” from The Passing of the Third Floor Back meet Scout Finch in a boarding house, a café and a ditch.
Continue Reading →Boyhood
Mozart didn't goof off in the darkroom
(Dir. Richard Linklater) (2014) Why all the fuss? The only evidence of twelve years of production is the aging of the characters. A tired story line – a feckless, unthinking mother, no father. Boy falls in love with girl next door. As Dopey Mum says, “I just thought there would be more.”
Continue Reading →Interstellar
"MATT DAMON!!"
(Dir. Christopher Nolan) (2014) It is shocking how Hollywood, where marriage equality is all the rage, seems unable to avoid schmaltzy deployment of The Nuclear Family as its trope for love and sacrifice. In the visually impressive Interstellar, a former NASA ace stumbles, through the dust of his corn fields, onto a super-secret (off balance sheet) NASA base, where the head guy only needs to finish that knotty maths equation (or make up something in its place) in order to save the world from a kind of agricultural Ebola, doubtless the product of pulping that mountain of IPCC reports and…
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