*contains spoilers And now for something completely different… Beyond the unisex toilet where whatever wants to go as well as being a part of or watching Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) while the rest go over the rainbow… We have the original midnight movie cult of director John Waters (1946-) and transvestite actress…
Read more The Filthy Genius of Director John Waters and THAT actress Divine (Part One)
*contains spoilers I’ve been going frequently to the cinema of late – I went twice last year – but this year in Australia I’ve already been a couple of dozen times. The results aren’t encouraging in terms of product or the number of patrons going during the week. The movies they show have been pretty…
Read more Is Cinema and Old Hollywood Dead? Long Live the 75-inch Smart TV!
*contains spoilers There is a science fiction movie out there which is already a cult movie to those who know it and it is called The Space Children (1958). Yet its innocence in this world sees it barely rate a four on the IMDb as it tells of a future on Earth perhaps saved from…
Read more The Cult of Divine Intervention in The Space Children (1958)
*contains spoilers “They think you are a freak!” read the placards left over from the abandoned climate change protest… And, no, they weren’t necessarily about my paranoid self – it was instead both God and the planet that were being treated as a freak in a world at odds with its own spirituality and the…
Read more The Failure to Replenish Mother Earth leads to Silent Running (1972)
*contains spoilers The two films Peerce made following The Sporting Club were A Separate Peace (1972) which is based on the latent homosexuality amid the athleticism and secret societies of American selective boarding schools in the novel by John Knowles (1926-2001). Writer Gore Vidal (1925-2012 pneumonia) in the later period of his self-mythologising claimed to…
Read more The Cult Movies of Director Larry Peerce and The Bell Jar (1979) Part Two
*contains spoilers Director Larry Peerce (1930-) is a name which is critically linked to films which are regarded as plain awful in terms of the critics raving upon their release… And yet this film-maker was some sort of activist in terms of the social comment and issues of his films in the 1960s until his…
Read more The Cult Movies of Director Larry Peerce and The Bell Jar (1979) Part One
*contains spoilers Upon that fateful return to my home town a few years after moving interstate and quitting my first job… I resumed work as a journalist in that snake pit of a newsroom after failing again to produce a novel worth publishing and instead tossed off something worthless… And then shortly afterwards the poetess…
Read more The Evolution and Revolution of Love and Clint Eastwood’s Breezy (1973) Part Two
*contains spoilers This is a semi-autobiographical article about losing your virginity through an act of adultery, the concept of love in the Clint Eastwood movie Breezy (1973) and my nerdy brush with Clint himself many years ago after growing up admiring him as a two-fisted role model of masculinity to an apparently clean-cut kid… It…
Read more The Evolution and Revolution of Love and Clint Eastwood’s Breezy (1973) Part One
*contains spoilers This year of 1941 and the others are symbolised in Return to Peyton Place with the placement of cars. Selena drives an old 1941 series convertible just when the original movie was set, while the outsider Scandinavian ski instructor played by Gunnar Hellstrom (1917-2006 natural causes) drives a 1960 Renault which is a…
Read more The Genius of Writer Grace Metalious and Return to Peyton Place (1961) Part Two
*contains spoilers Was writer Grace Metalious (1924-64 cirrhosis) some sort of genius or was it the screenwriters which helped to make the movies based on her novels Peyton Place (1957) and Return to Peyton Place (1961) such memorable experiences which sit together with some kind of trashy perfection? They are not great movies, but in…
Read more The Genius of Writer Grace Metalious and Return to Peyton Place (1961) Part One
