Category: Articles
Blood and Bandages: Paramedics on film
For most of my life, I have only ever seen ambulance crews and paramedics portrayed in two ways on film. They were either the much respected platoon medic, featured in so many war films, particularly American ones, or the laughable buffoons of English comedies, in particular, the ‘Carry On’ series. In the latter, ambulancemen were…
Elvis Presley and the movies: Watching ‘The King’ at work
I never gave Elvis Presley much thought until the Christmas of 1961, when my older sister broke down in tears after opening the Blue Hawaii soundtrack album. I got a pair of bongos that same morning, and played along on them to the record. I had seen Elvis the previous year in the western Flaming…
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,…
Love at first shot: When great directors meet their muse
It was the 2010 character study of Greenberg (2010) that brought Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig together. He plucked her from an extensive audition process with only a few New York Mumblecore films to her name. Clearly both on the same artistic wave-length, there’s a definite sense of love in the air between actress and…