*contains spoilers The Price of Power (1969) is a spaghetti western directed by Italian Tonino Valerii (1934-2016) at a time when the assassination of public figures and politicians had peaked in the United States. Dead were Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King by assassin’s bullets the previous year, while the nation was still recovering…
Read more The JFK Assassination and Tonino Valerii’s The Price of Power (1969)
*contains spoilers Do you know what my Nietzschean cross to bear has been for the last twenty years and which has been an ordeal of innocence to survive? It is the web of toxic masculinity which exists in my neighbourhood… and the current state of fear by the media gaslighting the population hung-up by governments…
Read more David Bowie’s Revenge for Gaslight (1944) in the AC/DC war of The Prestige (Part One)
In terms of the tontine of Gaslight and the revolution against the union of toxic ‘gas-lighters’ in your neighbourhood or otherwise and the survivor is Angela Lansbury (1925-). She turned up in Brisbane nearly a decade ago and gave us a rendition of Driving Miss Daisy with the voice of Darth Vader of Star Wars…
Read more David Bowie’s Revenge for Gaslight (1944) in the AC/DC war of The Prestige (Part Two)
*contains spoilers The Island (1980) is a misunderstood film with a possible demographic that was unable to view it, which is why it failed so miserably at the box office upon its initial release. This tale of a twelve-year-old boy adopted by murderous modern-day pirates of the Caribbean is also one of the great father-son…
Read more The Cult of a Pirate’s Rites of Passage in The Island (1980)
*contains spoilers For some the meaning of life is the movies. And some readers of this article may be lost without them. Isn’t that absurd that the movies as opposed to some divine being in the universe should be the meaning of life? … Or at least part of it? Perhaps you believe in both!…
Read more The Religion of Movies and The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985)
*contains spoilers Who was Lord Rochester (1647-80 venereal disease, liver disease and kidney failure), the main character of the Restoration set historical movie The Libertine? Played by Johnny Depp (1963-), who is near perfect in the role, his name was John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester… He died prematurely and his works, despite being of…
Read more The Cult of Pornographic Prose in The Libertine (2004)
“Just how good an actress are you?,” asks Tom Conway (1904-67 cirrhosis) of Jean Brooks (1915-63 hepatitis and cirrhosis) in The Falcon and the Co-eds (1943). And that is the question. If ever there was an actress who was unremarkable it was Jean Brooks. Yet this actress who was doomed to a life of alcoholism…
Read more The Cult of Actress Jean Brooks in Women in the Night (1948)
*contains spoilers Phantoms (1998) is based on the Dean Koontz (1945-) novel which he also adapted to the screen. It remains his only true cinematic screenplay which is a shame because it’s a very good one. It begins with Dr Jennifer Pailey (Joanna Going 1963-) taking her sister Lisa (Rose McGowan 1973-) to her small-town…
*contains spoilers Director and screenwriter Larry Cohen (1941-2019) died on March 23 of undisclosed causes. He left a small trove of low-budget B-grade material. Notable are the It’s Alive trilogy (1074, 1978 and 1987) about mutant babies. Those movies play on any expecting parent’s fears as, in the original movie It’s Alive (1974), a mother…
*contains spoilers As many will already know, Orson Welles’ movie The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) was taken out of his hands by RKO studios and over an hour was hacked from it. What remains is still regarded a masterpiece. The same type of thing happened with Jean Renoir’s (1894-1979 heart attack) last American movie The Woman…
