Tag: cinema
Women of The Wild Bunch: Peckinpah, Misogyny and a Credible Moral Code
You know you’ve got a good marriage when your wife agrees to watch The Wild Bunch (1969) with you. I must say, I was quite surprised that she made this decision in the first place. Trudi’s sole previous experience with the films of Sam Peckinpah was watching the disturbing, controversial Straw Dogs (1971) years ago—a…
Down on the Street: London Road and the Music of Fear
It can’t be the easiest way to write. Go out, find people who’ve been through something bad, interview them and then spend months working the material into a script. In the case of London Road, it may have been worth it, as first a hit stage musical and then a movie came out of it.…
Casey Affleck’s I’m Still Here: Joaquin Phoenix and his celebrity-crazed, media-devouring public
You’re probably more up to date with showbiz news than I am. Your finger is probably more firmly on the pop pulse than mine and your flippage through celebrity gossip mags more frequent. If, by chance, you’ve never heard of the film I’m Still Here, I strongly recommend you stop reading now and hire it…
The Westerns of Budd Boetticher and Randolph Scott: A Film Primer
I’m almost embarrassed to admit that I am a latecomer to the six Westerns that make-up the collaboration between Budd Boetticher and Randolph Scott. (There is a seventh, but I’ll do them the courtesy of pretending it doesn’t exist). These six films, released over the course of just five years between 1956 and 1960, mark…
Reconciling with Cinema: Never Enough Time for Catching Up
Sometime in the late 1990s, cinema and I came to terms with the inevitable. We’d been drifting apart for some time and now it seemed that the distance between us had become too great. It should have been a painful wrench. I’d grown up with movies; they’d been a still point in a peripatetic childhood.…