Tag: cinema
That infamous B-flick: The Giant Claw
Well I’ve taken a look at quite a number of vintage treasures for Curnblog, most of them in the realm of science-fiction and fantasy, with a couple of them being quintessential, influential classics from that crazy decade, the 1950s. So, it should come as no surprise that I would return to said decade to look…
Faith no more: Why Scorsese’s Silence is a haunting work of art
‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ The desolate words of Jesus Christ on the cross offer one way into Martin Scorsese’s new film, Silence. The film inhabits the character of a 17th Century Jesuit missionary to Japan who is forced to recant his faith. The ‘silence’ being referred to in the film’s…
Why I just couldn’t like ‘Rogue One: A Star Wars Story’
SPOILER ALERT: IF YOU’VE NOT SEEN ROGUE ONE, OR HAVE ANY INTEREST IN SEEING IT, DO NOT READ ON. I was little late to see Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and if I’m to be totally honest I wasn’t in any rush. Last year I wrote a very positive review of Star Wars: The…
The Best of the Rest: The Forgotten Writers, Directors & Performers of 2016
The unloved. The strays. The mutts. There’s value here, but you have to look a little harder. As we all remember John Winger saying, no one is “more faithful, more loyal, more loveable than the mutt.” All right, that’s a very strange (and perhaps a little insulting) way into my annual nominations for the writers,…
Dangal: The perfect Bollywood film for the uninitiated
There is a general resistance to Bollywood cinema in Western countries. This isn’t so much because of any strong objection to them, as it is because their structure is so fundamentally different from the output of Hollywood. They are frequently quite long, invest heavily in a sense of the melodramatic, and perhaps most significantly, the…