Tag: film
History and the movies: How to avoid telling lies and getting it wrong
I have long held a fascination with the complex and chaotic relationship that cinema has with the representation of history. Since the earliest beginnings of humanity’s attempts at iconographic representation, we have endeavoured to tear the past from the vague and intangible clutches of memory and thrust it into the living present moment. Despite these…
Michael Parks: Crusty Genius
As a teenager I developed an almost unhealthy obsession with the movie From Dusk till Dawn – most especially with one scene in particular. The scene in question featured a monologue from a crusty Texas lawman on the joys of alcohol abuse and the dangers of being served food by the mentally disabled. Aside from…
Silly, Slimy and Offensive: The Heart of Gross-Out Comedy
Flicking through the usual assortment of reality shows, cop shows, cartoons and current affairs programs that littered the airwaves last night, I fell upon a film that has always induced an inordinate amount of rage deep within my heart. This film is by all measures silly and at least mildly offensive, which is of course…
How Michael Bay taught me to stop hating Spielberg and start hating Michael Bay
As a young film student just out of school, I once shared the usual contempt that all serious film connoisseurs were expected to display for Steven Spielberg. From young students to senior lecturers, everybody I knew agreed that Steven Spielberg was the leading auteur of a kind of ‘lesser’ cinema, centred on spectacle, devastation and…
A Melburnian Aussie in an American Grocery Store!
You’ll have to excuse me for a moment while I make an incredibly tenuous connection between my 20km trek to Melbourne’s USA Foods grocery store and my relationship with cinema! No American will ever understand the complex relationship that a non-American cinephile has with American junk food. We all know about Twinky’s and In-N-Out burgers, but few of us have had…