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Jim Jarmusch: Strange Tourist
The writer director Jim Jarmusch is in many ways a foreigner. He looks on his characters as if he just arrived in their world and is fascinated by their customs. There is no detail too small for him to obsess over. The camera lingers on every fashion choice, every book, every piece of cultural ephemera… Continue reading Jim Jarmusch: Strange Tourist
Astor Calendar Highlights
The iconic Astor Calendar™ can be imposing. With over a hundred movies packed onto a single poster –including the cult, classic and flat out bizarre– a cinema-lover can be quickly overwhelmed. With this year-ending calendar featuring everything from cannibals to robot cowboys, we’re taking a look at a few of the films that beg to be seen… Continue reading Astor Calendar Highlights
Dreaming Small
With major movie budgets ballooning, it’s important to remember that you don’t need the equivalent of Ethiopia’s GDP to make a movie. The rise of digital technology has launched a renaissance in low budget filmmaking. Some of these are amateur productions filled with jumpcuts and visible boom mics, but many are brimming with the character that can… Continue reading Dreaming Small
The Thing: Monsters In The Light
There is a rare psychological condition known as Capgras delusion, where sufferers believe that friends and family have been replaced by doppelgängers. In the early 90’s, one woman was hospitalised due to: …her belief that her husband had been replaced by another unrelated man. She refused to sleep with the impostor, locked her bedroom… Continue reading The Thing: Monsters In The Light
Dancing About Architecture
When it comes to the raw emotional power of great music, it seems Hollywood producers have taken the saying “talking about music is like dancing about architecture” as a challenge, rather than a warning. In two hours of narrative, their logic seems to go, we should be able to work out what makes a piece of music… Continue reading Dancing About Architecture
Truck Turner’s “Door of Freedom”
Truck Turner is a movie of a very specific time and place. To give you an idea of how specific, it contains countless multiple uses of the phrase “jive ass sucker”, a pimp parade and a protagonist with the Christian name “Truck”. The eponymous Truck is played by Isaac Hayes and it’s doubly strange… Continue reading Truck Turner’s “Door of Freedom”
David Lynch: In Dreams
The writer George Saunders has said that art’s job is not to believably recreate reality or even impart a message but to craft a “kind of black box [that] the reader enters. He enters in one state of mind and exits in another.” What the artist puts in that box could be anything, so long… Continue reading David Lynch: In Dreams
The Missing Pieces of Citizen Kane
Named #1 film of all time by just about every list of repute, Citizen Kane’s impact is almost impossible to overstate. And much like its protagonist, the film’s history is ripe with stories of intrigue and sabotage. Ostensibly the life story of millionaire newspaper man Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles), Citizen Kane is a series of… Continue reading The Missing Pieces of Citizen Kane
What We Talk About When We Talk About Aliens
The best possible way for an apocalypse to kick off is probably with Orson Welles’ soothing baritone. In 1938, on the Columbia Broadcasting Company, Welles’ explained that humanity was being watched by “minds that to our minds are to the beasts in the jungle, intellects vast, cool and unsympathetic [that] regarded this earth with envious… Continue reading What We Talk About When We Talk About Aliens
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