Author: Simon Hardy Butler
Interviewing Beverly Ross and Ferris Butler: Skits, films and rock ’n’ roll
To me, they’ve always been Uncle Ferris and Aunt Beverly, yet Ferris Butler and Beverly Ross have much more to them than merely a personal relationship. Ferris, a former film-school student of Martin Scorsese’s at New York University who went on to create the cult cable show Waste Meat News before writing for Saturday Night…
Hallucinations on film: Six startling unrealities in cinema
Some of the most memorable scenes in the cinema have involved hallucinations seen by movie characters, and although one could argue that film itself is an apparition – an imaginary product consumed as popular art – it’s hardly redundant to crow about the best such images on the screen. Here are six of the…
Fugitive visions: Foreign film and the new iconography
One perfect shot does not a bad film fix. I learned this many years ago during a screening of Alek Keshishian’s With Honors (1994), a Sven Nykvist-lensed flick that, if I remember correctly, featured among the generally dreary sequences an incredible, blink-and-it’s-gone image of a church towering behind Brendan Fraser’s character. It didn’t make the movie watchable,…
Sex and the movies: The age of anticlimax
We need better sex scenes in the movies. You may laugh. Even snicker. But it’s a problem. Sex scenes today, in general, stink. True, this is a broad statement, and there are many exceptions. I wonder, though, if filmmakers in the not-so-new millennia often view such content as obligatory, like a car chase in an…
Cinema and combat: Is filming a great battle scene a lost art?
Is filming a great battle scene a lost art? I pondered this question recently after watching The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013) in all its lengthy, kill-the-orcs-in-creative-ways glory. Director Peter Jackson certainly knows how to helm an epic contest—the thrilling defense of Gondor in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) is…