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
There is a rare psychological condition known as Capgras delusion, where sufferers believe that friends and family have been replaced by doppelgängers. In the early 90’s, one woman was hospitalised due to: …her belief that her husband had been replaced by another unrelated man.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
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”
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 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
The action movie hero is a strange beast. These brawny archetypes affect an everyman attitude in the first act, yet by the third have proven to be indestructible superhumans. As quick with a joke as they are to take off their shirt and reveal their He-Man-esque physiques, these heroes know just what to do when… Continue reading Die Hard: Walking On Broken Glass
On the face of it, weddings are simple events, a ritualized pledge of love between two people. But they can also be emotional battlegrounds for dysfunctional families, mating opportunities for the happily single, depressing slogs for the unhappily single or massive, apocalyptic bacchanals for those that way inclined. Simple logistic desicions are loaded with dramatic… Continue reading Till Death Do Us Part: Weddings in Movies
There’s a certain kind of country town that’s just inherently creepy. It’s the kind of place so cut off from the world that strange rules and beliefs can form and grow, safe from society’s critical gaze. In 1973’s The Wicker Man these small-town beliefs manifest in a climax so brutal and bizarre that its image… Continue reading Death & Rebirth in The Wicker Man
If you’ve visited the Astor recently you might have seen a promotional short that we’ve become particularly enamoured with. It’s an original 1940 trailer for The Grapes of Wrath and it’s a bizarre Frankenstein of stylistic elements: old-fashioned news bulletin, corporate advertisement and (lastly) traditional movie trailer. A bellowing, transatlantic voice talks about the national fervour for… Continue reading From Novel to Screen
NOTE: This article contains a mild spoiler for Me, Earl and the Dying Girl and a major spoiler for Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back “The audience knows the truth…the world is simple. It’s miserable, solid all the way through. But if you could fool them, even for a second, you make them wonder and… Continue reading The Magic of the Twist
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