Quentin Tarantino is fluent in various cinematic languages, to the point that he’s liable to switch dialect not just sentence to sentence, but word to word. The heist film, Blaxploitation cinema, the kung fu epic; his films duck and weave in and out of all of these. But it seems like he thinks in the… Continue reading Tarantino’s Wild West
It takes a unique kind of confidence to take millions of someone else’s dollars to make a movie. To possess that confidence because you’ve made a hit album seems almost heroically misguided. It’s like thinking you can fly a commercial plane because you’re an experienced formula one racer. Giving the GDP of a small country to a… Continue reading Musicians Behind the Camera
“Toke, toke it up man! Kinda grabs you by the boo-boo, don’t it?” Tommy Chong, Up in Smoke The stoned protagonist is a proud cinematic tradition. Red-eyed and confused, these baked heroes give the audience a pleasing contact high while generally lacking the self-destructive impulses of their heavy drinking counterparts. Their love of marijuana is… Continue reading Reefer Madness
No matter how close they might hew to reality, movies can’t help but be a reflection of the people who made them. Despite ostensibly being set in the same city a couple years apart, the New York of Woody Allen’s Manhattan is not the same place as Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. The former is a city… Continue reading Evolution of the West
“Joey, have you ever been in a Turkish prison?” Captain Oveur, Airplane The stock of spoof films has fallen quite a lot in recent years. From the relentless battering of Scary Movie’s in the early 2000’s to the Friedberg and Seltzer glut of jokeless reference-athons (Meet the Spartans, Vampires Suck, the forthcoming Who the F#@K… Continue reading The Incredible Trip in a Crazy Airplane
Watching a bad movie can be an incredibly depressing experience. You’re watching paper-thin characters spout inane dialogue while perusing some ill-defined McGuffin when a horrible realisation dawns on you: you have paid for this feeling. If not with money, then at the very least with your time. At the end of a ninety-minute bad movie… Continue reading What Makes a Good Bad Movie?
The Astor Theatre Blog 