*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 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
*contains spoilers Do you know The Three Sisters? No, they are not a wholesome singing group or a Motown invention… Otherwise known as The Three Mothers, they are evil witches from the Dario Argento (1940-) movie Suspiria (1977) and its remake (2018) of the same name… They can invade your mind and give you nightmares,…
Read more The Insidious Witchcraft and Toxic Femininity in Suspiria and its remake
*contains spoilers I went to my favourite local cinema early to get a ticket for The Father (2020) starring Anthony Hopkins as a man battling dementia and I sat in the deserted Gold Class lounge overlooking the trees across the road. There is a long line of trees and through the windows you cannot see…
Read more Anthony Hopkins and the Spirit of the Ent in The Father (2020)
*contains spoilers Fans of Gene Wilder (1933-2016 Alzheimer’s disease) and Zero Mostel (1915-77 heart aneurysm) who appeared together in the Mel Brooks comedy The Producers (1968) are probably not aware of the theatre of the absurd movie version of playwright Eugene Ionesco’s (1909-94) Rhinoceros (1974). While this isn’t a great movie, part of the absurdist…
Read more Actor Gene Wilder in Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros (1974)
*contains spoilers If we jump to Tucker’s The Cape Canaveral Monsters and while that film relates to the space race between superpowers back in the late 1950s, it is still relevant today with each rich nation seeming to be spending money on becoming the first to have a colony on Mars. I bet the Martians…
Read more The Cult of Director Phil Tucker’s The Cape Canaveral Monsters (Part Two)
