Tag: cinema
Interviewing Hal Hartley: Cinema, words and music
If Hal Hartley’s autobiography were written today, a fitting title might be Words and Music. The director, writer and composer, whose films have ranged from The Unbelievable Truth (1989) to the upcoming Ned Rifle (expected 2015), is as much concerned with the literary and musical components of his movies as the visual ones … and…
Crisis of the Undead: Zombies ate my movie script
Zombies are huge right now and never before have so many astoundingly bad films (and books… and TV shows… and video games) made their way into the mainstream. Never has the genre been populated by so many characters who are, in fact, less intelligent than the zombies they are up against. Never have there been…
Sturm und dreck: In defence of Hollywood
Whilst watching Ghostbusters (1984) on Esquire TV the other night, I came to a peculiar conclusion. Hollywood ain’t so bad. There’s recently been a lot of talk about this American movie-churner-outer and the quality of its productions. That somehow, the world of foreign films is a more satisfying land. That Hollywood has had its share…
Revisiting a classic: The Grand Hotel
Grand Hotel (1932) isn’t a perfect, or even great movie, but it is an interesting one. By most accounts, Grand Hotel was the first movie to have multiple headlining stars, rather than just one or two. Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, John Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore and Wallace Beery all shared the headlines for this film. Directed…
Unnoticed Injustice: Dirty Harry and the RoboCop reboot
What a difference 43 years makes. That is the time between the on-screen birth of Harry Callahan, Clint Eastwood’s iconic protagonist in Don Siegel’s brilliantly controversial Dirty Harry (1971), and the screen rebirth of Alex Murphy, freshly minted drone-with-a-heart-of-gold in Jose Padilha’s RoboCop reboot. Harry, for those who don’t remember, was the American conservative middle…