Letterboxd — Your life in film

The Hunter is a curious film of no particular critical reputation. Although it has some novelty value as the last film to star the popular Steve McQueen, The Hunter is sadly a missed opportunity. McQueen was dying from cancer and sometimes the man’s frailty adds an extra dimension to the character he portrays. Indeed, in that he plays a modern day bounty hunter the film clearly aspires to the modern Western that gradually emerged following the work of director Don…

The droll, deadpan humor of independent director Jim Jarmusch has in no small part contributed to his virtual lionization as one of the great American auteurs. Although his early films have their following, it was his moody black and white Western, Dead Man that earned him his current popularity. The film was virtually dumped by its distributor, only to then steadily develop a devoted critical and popular following. It was also the first film where Jarmusch fused his fondness for…

It is difficult to make a film about the lifestyle of society’s outsiders without any sense of either revulsion or romanticization. The problem is exacerbated with films dealing with drug abuse and addiction, which is still condemned in American society more often than examined with any sociological concern for the actual attendant lifestyle of especially long-term drug users. The question of just how junkies live their lives has however long been an issue in so-called Beat literature inspired in particular…

There was a time when Burt Reynolds was considered a fine actor as well as a box office star. Films like Deliverance especially indicated his ability. However, his smug, somewhat smarmy smart-ass persona soon emerged and his peak period from 1973 to 1980 (when he was in the yearly lists of top ten most popular stars) cultivated a kind of good ole boy image. Prominent amongst the crop of hits in this period was Smokey and the Bandit, directed by…

In America in the early 20th Century, burlesque was a major form of popular theatre, consisting mainly of scenic props, thinly clad women and an air of comedy. Out of this evolved the elaborate theatrical spectacle of vaudeville, essentially a succession of variety acts. Vaudeville acts toured the hundreds of theatres throughout the country and vaudeville soon became the dominant form of popular theatre. However, the increasing number of movie screens through the late 1920s, especially in the early talkie…

Grease is often reported as being the most successful modern Hollywood musical. It was made at a time when the musical was considered a dead form of entertainment. Indeed, although the stage show of Grease, originating out of Chicago in 1971, had been a long running Broadway hit, the film version was passed on several times before producer Alan Carr got it going. Carr insisted that the original stage choreographer Patricia Birch was retained for the movie, and her work…

The film of Fuzz is a promising but flat conflation of a number of influences in popular culture in the early 1970s. It is the first script by Evan Hunter, better known as novelist Ed McBain, and was the first film made of his popular series of books. McBain created a police precinct full of characters, set in the fictional city of Isola, in 1956 with the novel Cop Hater. He would develop these characters, and the form of the…

Harvey Keitel has long been one of the more daring actors in Hollywood. Known, like Robert DeNiro, for his early work with famed director Martin Scorsese, Keitel often took out of the way and unusual roles outside of the mainstream to balance his mainstream work. Always a character actor rather than a star, Keitel lent his presence to two raw depictions of troubled, despairing and sexually tormented humanity. The first of these was director James Toback’s Fingers and the second…

Based upon the best-selling self-help book by Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo He’s Just Not That into You is Hollywood’s embrace of the hugely-successful self-help and self-empowerment movement. To those who see meaning and value in this popular genre the film carries an enormous responsibility: to balance the optimism, self-confidence and self-assertion that underlie successful self-actualization with the populism needed to transform such material into a Hollywood hit. But bringing this connection from the bookshelf to the big screen is…

Defiance is the latest film from Edward Zwick who last summer helmed Leonardo DiCaprio in the smash hit Blood Diamond. As evident in Defiance as in that adventure, and indeed much of Zwick’s work since essaying terrorism on American soil long before 9-11 in The Siege, is the director’s socio-political criticism, here being a rationalist reaction to the dynamics of faith in World War Two. Indeed, Defiance functions as a revisionist, rationalist appropriation of Holocaust mythology, echoing Spielberg’s Schindler’s List…

Father Oliver O’Grady has been described as “the most notorious paedophile in the history of the modern Catholic Church.” For decades, with the full knowledge of the Catholic hierarchy, O’Grady sexually molested child after child only to be forgiven, protected and shuffled around from parish to parish by his superiors, Bishops and Cardinals, all during the time when Cardinal Ratzinger (the future Pope) had domain over the investigation of child sexual abuse within the Catholic Church in Rome and America…