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
There is a rare psychological condition known as Capgras delusion, where sufferers believe that friends and family have been replaced by doppelgängers. In the early 90’s, one woman was hospitalised due to: …her belief that her husband had been replaced by another unrelated man.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
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
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
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
In 2016 it seems almost antiquated to refer to a piece of fiction as dangerous. Words like “shocking” or “disturbing” have become so overused that they’re now only good for adorning horror movie posters. But there are still films like Salo or The 120 Days of Sodom that retain an aura of real power, a fear that… Continue reading The Contaigous Evil of Salo
The American West is an imaginary landscape, a shared myth that communicates ideas about reality rather than the reality itself. In recent years the wild west has shifted from the realm of history to that of myth, a foundation upon which we tell stories about ourselves and our so-called civilization. The Revisionist Western exists as… Continue reading Revisiting the 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
Blade Runner: The Final Cut simply refuses to fade into the vast catalogue of forgotten film history. Its persistence as film’s pedestal sci-fi owing to its innovative and intelligent contemplation over ontological questions of authenticity and artificiality as they pertain to a rapidly, and terrifyingly, techno-advanced, mechanized, global future society. Set in Los Angeles in… Continue reading Blade Runner – The Final Cut
Given the world’s ever-increasing obsession with technology – the way gadgets control us more than we control them; as these technologies, supposedly designed to make our lives easier, only lead to further reliance on technologies – Modern Times (1936) is now more timely than ever before. The promised future of a world where machines do… Continue reading Chaplin Greats
The Astor Theatre Blog 