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
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”
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
“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
“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?
Arnold Schwarzenegger contains multitudes. Action star, 1970’s Mr Olympia, governator, upcoming host of Celebrity Apprentice. But he is also the vessel through which some of the finest action-film writers have funneled their genius. Much like Frank Sinatra, Arnie is not a writer but an amazing interpreter of material, in his case mostly pun-based insults yelled… Continue reading Arnie, The Violent Poet
Every now and again, a film will come along that changes the way I look at cinema. When I was still in my teens, I attended a cinema on Bourke Street late one evening to see a motion picture I had long been curious about: Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), adapted from the 1962… Continue reading A Clockwork Orange
The Astor Theatre Blog 