Cinema Review

Written by James Rose (READ FULL ESSAY)
Offscreen: Vol 10, issue 10
Representations of the Modern Male in Alexandre Aja’s The Hills Have Eyes

[extract] Although twenty-nine years have passed since its first release, the possible interpretations of Craven’s narrative are as relevant now as they were back then. Given this Aja and writer Grégory Levasseur choose not to drastically alter Craven’s original story for their recent remake. This adherence is in some ways a hindrance for they change very little in terms of narrative structure and so the critical readings of Aja’s film are, to some extent, as equally applicable to Craven’s original. But, to their credit, Aja and Levasseur do make minor alterations, most notably to Doug Wood’s narrative. In addition to changing his surname, they place Doug into more psychological and physically gruelling conditions and so amplifying his violent transgression. In a responsive balance to this, the mutant family is given a greater identity by living in a semblance of a normal home, a nuclear test site village. Both changes lend weight to the film’s critical readings, predominately making the growing similarities between the two families, as much as their initial difference, more obvious. [extract]

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Written by Donato Totaro (READ FULL ESSAY)

Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film Meets The Sandman

[extract]For those interested in more documented analysis on the stalker/slasher film, a recent television documentary series called On Screen, which devotes single hour programs to examining important Canadian films, looked at Black Christmas in its first season (it is now in its second season), interviewing many of its cast, crew, and notable film critics. The question of the film’s pedigree as the first stalker/slasher film, and its influence on John Carpenter is touched on briefly toward the end of the documentary. (Information which was previously stated by Clark in his commentary track to the 2002 Critical Mass special edition release of the DVD, which reveals that Carpenter, who had seen and admired Black Christmas, asked Clark if he was considering making a sequel to Black Christmas. When Clark replied in the negative, Carpenter asked him, rhetorically, that if he were to make a sequel what would he call it? Clark replied with the title “Halloween” and added the plot fragment of the killer being caught and institutionalized at the end of the first film, and the sequel picking up with the killer escaping and returning to the same location to continue killing. To set the record straight, the self-effacing Clark has never made much of this handed down story information, and is quick to point out that Halloween has many more differences than similarities to Black Christmas and stands as its own film.)[extract]

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Dir. Robert Altman; Year - 1973

I wrote a few paragraphs about Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye nearly a year ago, when I knew even less about movies and writing about them than I do now and before I realized any one else would see my drivel. I was perceptive enough then to guess that an additional viewing would greatly enhance my appreciation of the film and my instincts proved accurate. As with Altman’s subsequent teaming with Elliott Gould, California Split, the director’s update of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe mystery improved dramatically on a second screening. Seeing both in fine-looking theatrical prints surely helped, but it was just as important to sit down and relax with the film, enjoying its little inspired touches instead of focusing on the advancement of the story. (READ FULL REVIEW - CLICK HERE)

Source: Clydefro - filmjournal.net

[extract] I’ve heard Fernando Meirelles and Katia Lund’s 2002 Oscar-nominated film to be likened to Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. Much like Antonia Bird’s drama Priest (2004) been likened to The Exorcist because they both feature members of the church questioning their own faith, the two films couldn’t be more dissimilar. Take away the theme of crime and the time-switching narrative and you’ve got two films as far apart as the geographical regions where they were filmed. City Of God isn’t interested in over-stylised characters that overplay the merits of the metric system or theatrical violence and pop-culture references, it cuts far closer to the bone than that. And perhaps most importantly, unlike Pulp Fiction, City Of God seeks to tell us something we didn’t already know – and I’m not talking about the French new wave. [extract] (READ FULL REVIEW HERE)

Written by Robert Castle

A key image in Citizen Kane appears after Susan Kane leaves Xanadu forever. First, Kane destroys her bedroom and, at the end of his eruption, he discovers the glass ball that evoked the film's opening line and enigmatic coda: “Rosebud.” He walks from the room past stunned servants and, seconds later, a pair of mirrors in which he's briefly reflected infinitely into nothingness. A key image for the film because it limns Kane's elusive real self, but also a key moment in film and literature for the transition from the modern to the postmodern.

“Postmodern” is a slippery concept, so much so that the difficulty in defining it touches the very essence of its meaning. The transition from the modern to postmodern world represents a move from irony (which suggests some comprehension of our beliefs, as well as involvement in our present circumstances) to deadpan (a lack of surprise to, and increasing remoteness from, our world). Postmodern literature, art, and film detach the audience from the content of the artistic subject, with little or no pretense to re-engage the two. As a result, the individual's place in the world, as well as in the artistic work, diminishes to a cipher as one gets lost amid a plenitude of realities — “realities” because, they increase in proportion to our inability to resist them (from our stance of weakened beliefs).

The postmodern world, thus, has little tragedy left in it — tragedy needs a heightened if not embarrassing measure of belief. Things must matter gravely. Charles Foster Kane nearly takes on a tragic dimension when we view his potential for greatness. Yet the more we ponder his greatness in Citizen Kane, that is, the more the film's other characters reflect on Kane's life, the less tangible his greatness becomes. At his most dynamic and grave, Kane shapes the news that people pay attention to; the Spanish-American War becomes “his” war; he collects great art from all over the world; and he becomes so important that he can run for governor (possibly on the way to a presidential bid). Paradoxically, his trivialization of the news (a prominent headline reads: SPANISH GALLEONS FOUND OFF THE JERSEY COAST) underlines the diminution of his character. While much is made of his inability to love, combined with a pursuit to replace or win back his mother's love, the real tragedy may be that he's creating a world that has no room for tragic men or gestures! Amidst the scandal of his love affair with Susan Kane, his losing the governor's race, and his divorce, Kane's character calcifies into a controlling, self-centered monster, beyond giving and receiving love, beyond all tragedy, at the entrance to postmodernity.

The infinite mirror images of Kane recall the many Kanes we had heard about throughout the movie, the many Kanes that would never coalesce into the substantial tragic figure he imagined himself as, complete with the key to the mystery of his ultimate failure (cf. article on Citizen Kane in this issue). Indeed, many of the characters played by Orson Welles in his movies — Michael O'Hara in The Lady from Shanghai (1948), Franz Kindler in The Stranger (1946), Sheriff Quinlin in Touch of Evil (1958), Falstaff in Chimes at Midnight (1965) — collapse upon themselves psychologically as their last illusions are stripped away. They aren't the men they supposed themselves or had others believe them to be; their moral centers have weakened and don't maintain the authority or power they once had. (READ FULL ESSAY)

Written by Daniel Stephens

This essay investigates failures in the British film industry that have heavily influenced the problems faced by U.K. film producers today (READ FULL ESSAY)

According to the Film Council’s own statistics film ‘production in Britain fell by 30 per cent to £800 million as the number of indigenous films that started shooting in the country dropped from 45 the previous year, to 27.’ (Hopkins, 2005) Hopkins sees the problem as Labour’s move to stop tax breaks that encourage foreign investment in British films.

‘Britain’s film industry last night gave warning that it will suffer a severe fall in income this year because of confusion over lucrative tax breaks that persuaded Hollywood studios to spend almost £500 million in the UK last year.’ (ibid.)

‘Britain will become a no go area for filmmakers’ said executive producer Russ Smith (BBC Online, 2004) The issue is not the government’s initiatives to support indigenous films through Lottery Funds and the Film Council, indeed ‘contrary to popular opinion, ploughing money into the production side of British cinema is not and never has been the main problem’ (Wayne, 2002. pg 9) but largely the need for American investment, meaning such measures that discourage such investment are largely unhelpful to the industry. (READ FULL ESSAY)

Written by Daniel Stephens

This overview of the Hollywood Studio system during the 1930s looks at its influence on cinema today (READ FULL ESSAY)

The ‘Studio System’ during the 1930s strangled independent cinema and took such great liberties to turn a profit that creativity was severely compromised. The ‘Studio System’ was run by the producer’s that worked within it, and the films that they produced were under their total control. The creative driving force behind movies that were later seen, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, of the directors and writers, was generally lost to the ‘system’. What directors complained about was an objection to the ‘adaptation of Hollywood to a decentralised management system first introduced to American industry by general motors in the 1920s, and itself evidence of the studios assertion of their existence as industry rather than art form.’ (Maltby, 1995. pg. 85) The producers, once assigned to a project, would hire directors and writers to work under them, but as producers supervised all aspects of production from writing and shooting through to editing, writers and directors argued for change and creative freedom that eliminated ‘the involved, complicated, and expensive system of supervision which separates the director and writer from the responsible executive producers’. (Maltby, 1995. pg 83) The Screen Director’s Guild condemned those producers who ‘have little respect for the medium, less respect for their audiences and excuse their lack of imagination by ridiculing it in others.’ (Maltby, 1995. pg. 83) Producers were involved in more than one film at a time, sometimes three or four, so it would seem a perfectly viable argument that their creative involvement should be much less than those writers and directors involved with individual films primarily. Yet producer’s had control over every creative aspect, more ‘control over the development of the film’s story, its script and editing, than any other individual’. (Maltby, 1995. Pg. 85) Certainly the best way to evaluate this aspect of the ‘studio system’ is to look at the auteur directors during the 1970s, and how their films represented their totalitarian belief in how a story should be told through the medium of cinema. Such examples would be Steven Spielberg with Jaws (1975), Francis Ford Coppola with The Godfather (1972), and Martin Scorsese with Taxi Driver (1976), in that as director’s they had final say on how the scripts were brought to the screen, and all closely edited their own films. During the 1930s, many times directors wouldn’t even see the script, ‘it was quite normal practice for him or her to be given a script only a few days before he or she was due to start shooting’. (Maltby, 1995. pg 85) It seemed the job of directing was seen by the studio heads as rather uncreative, and the idea of telling a story was a collaborative process between the producer and the team of production staff, including the writer and director, below him/her. As Frank Capra once said, ‘there are only half a dozen directors in Hollywood who are allowed to shoot as they please and have any supervision over their editing.’ He went on to say that ’80 per cent of directors today shoot scenes exactly as they are told to without any changes whatsoever, and that 90 per cent of them have no voice in the story or editing.’ (Maltby, 1995. pg. 85)

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When you are the star of a film franchise that has so far taken more than $1.5 billion at the global box office, and the latest film in that series is one of the year�s most highly anticipated action events, you may well be forgiven for being just a teensy bit cocky. Yet there doesn�t appear to be the slightest trace of arrogance, or even over-confidence, emanating from Tobey Maguire when he meets Film Review to chat about the imminent release of Spider-Man 3. Instead, the 31-year-old actor is surprisingly modest about his screen achievements as the Marvel Comics hero.

Perhaps, as he talks of the challenges he faced in continuing the franchise, it is his intention to avoid the banana skin of beating the drum too loudly for a movie for which the expectation is already sky high. But on the basis of the Spider-Man 3 footage that we have been allowed to see, the young actor should have no worries. This movie looks as though it has once again lifted the bar on the action sequences, and has the juicy bonus of a plot that�s deeper, darker and even more fascinating than the previous two Spider-Man hits. (READ FULL REVIEW)

Dir. James Marsh
Review by Ben Dooley (READ FULL REVIEW)

In James Marsh’s The King (2005) a young Mexican named Elvis (Gael García Bernal) discharges himself from the US Navy to meet, for the first time, his American father, Pastor David Sandow (William Hurt). Things don’t go as smoothly as Elvis might have hoped: David now has a family of his own and is not interested in accepting his new son, the product of a relationship with a Mexican prostitute in his youth. Elvis, whose mother is now dead, takes desperate measures in reaction against this rejection and in the hope of gaining acceptance from his father. The film has caused a certain amount of controversy, Variety labelling it ‘a noxious film morally and an aggravating one dramatically.’ Marsh’s film builds to slightly unconvincing extremes as Elvis instigates incest and murder within the family, allowing for a reading of his outsider character as nothing but a ‘devil,’ which seems to be the reason for this accusation of ‘immorality.’ The King is, however, altogether too strange and poetic in style to be considered any kind of threateningly moral polemic. (READ FULL REVIEW)

Two cowboys, aged around 20, get a job in the summer of 1963, tending a large flock of sheep on the remote Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming. After some days have passed, their relationship turns physical. They leave Brokeback, they both get married, and, four years later, renew their loving relationship and continue to meet, now and then, on fishing trips into the wilderness, in a hopeless effort to rediscover their days of innocence on the mountainside.

Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain could be viewed as a film about homosexuality, which plays with the conventions and limits of the Western genre. It’s also a story of “an archetypal relationship which haunts the American psyche” [1] and a tale of loss and unfulfilled dreams. The argument I will set forth here is that director Ang Lee, in reversing the Western hero’s surface sexual characteristics (the cowboys usual macho masculine appearance is here being appropriated by gay sexuality –taking into account the inherent homosexual implications of the traditional Western hero), offers up a pure archetype of the romantic figure which can be found at the core of the Western mythology.

It is commonplace in film theory that the origins of the Western hero be traced to the speculative Romantic world. Starting from André Bazin, various critics have underlined the Western’s relation to the medieval romance. [2] As Kathreen Esselman points out, “the image of the knight and the concept of the quest are reflected in the American Western” [3] as a (distant) echo of the romantic turn of the ninenteenth century which brought about an awakening of interest in the Aurthurian romances that had maintained their popularity throughout the late Middle Ages.

The epic hero of the Western, torn between naturalness of the wilderness and the artifice of civilization, inhabits a timeless environment [4], defined by a landscape upon which the hero is fated to carry out his destiny. According to John Cawelti, the “formula” or standard plot structure of a Western is centered on an “epic moment” of confrontation between the pioneer and the wilderness. [5] “A transformation into an epic is evident in the set-ups of the shots, with their predilection for vast horizons,[…] which refuse to be limited by the frameline and restore to space its fullness.” [6] (READ FULL REVIEW)

Written by Ryan Diduck

A unique and interesting essay that presents a very alternate view of Alfred Hitchcock's Marnie (READ FULL ESSAY)

In her seminal post-feminist reading of the works of Alfred Hitchcock, The Women Who Knew Too Much, Tania Modleski asserts an integral binarism: “[the] male spectator is as much ‘deconstructed’ as constructed by the films, which reveals a fascination with femininity that throws masculine identity into question and crisis.” [2] Indeed, this ‘crisis of masculinity’ is a –if not the– central trope of much auterist criticism of the filmmaker’s text since the inception of both Hitchcock and the auterist prototype. However, this particular analysis is, ab initio, no more an attempt –as previous theorists (i.e. Bellour) have made– to rehabilitate the patriarchal ideal of Hitchcock-as-auteur for discursive feminist criticism, as it is an incantation and flourish of said criticism to support (if not further) Modleski’s thesis that: “[…] the strong fascination and identification with femininity revealed in [Hitchcock films] subverts the claims to mastery and authority not only of the male characters but of the director himself.” [3] Addenda can be applied in the form of potentially connective notions: both of implicit authorial intentionality, as well as interstitial, ‘free-floating,’ or (un)differentiated spectatorial position. And though Modleski largely ignores the film (focusing instead upon ?Vertigo??, 1958), it is in this way that, particularly, Marnie (1964) is an apt subject to bisexual critical readings; and not bisexuality immediately, in the sense of fluidity of sexual identity and preference, but moreover, the dualistic nature of both explicit/implicit intention/reception of the filmic/extra-filmic, and their attached subsequent criticism. (READ FULL ESSAY)

Written by Daniel Stephens

An interesting and thoughtful retrospective review of Withnail and I, looking at director Bruce Robinson's influences and the legacy of one of British cinema's greatest films (READ FULL ARTICLE)

For many, the first introduction to Bruce Robinson’s tale of friendship at the end of the ‘greatest decade in history’, appears not in the form of a video, a curry, and a group of mates, but by the discovery of an intoxicated body lying forlornly on the living room floor. ‘What happened here,’ someone will ask, to hear the reply: ‘He was playing the Withnail and I drinking game.’ Of course, anyone not familiar with the film might not immediately see the significance until reminded, ‘you know, the one where you drink every time Richard E. Grant drowns his sorrows in either alcohol or lighter fuel. Of course, the lighter fuel must be reserved only for terminal cases and those who can’t afford the alcohol.’

Of course many associate the film with student life. The living in squalor – the kitchen with an ever-growing tower of dirty dishes turning last weeks leftover chips and gravy into new life forms, larger with every day, seeking south for winter. It’s easy for your average student to take one look at the greasy stove and congregation of plates and cutlery (that are beginning to smell like a morgue) and decide to ‘sort it out tomorrow’. It’s even easier to start watching ‘Withnail and I’ trying to sort out their own messy sink because at least you get to keep your hands clean and have a few laughs for good measure. (READ FULL ARTICLE)

Written by Daniel Stephens

This essay critically investigates and evaluates feminist theory regarding Ridley Scott's science-fiction horror film Alien (READ FULL REVIEW)

Looking at feminist writer Laura Mulvey’s analysis of the classical Hollywood film it is interesting how Alien (Scott, 1979) defies her claims about scopophilia, in that the film both subverts her ideas about voyeuristic visual pleasure and narcissistic visual pleasure. (Mulvey, 1975/1989, pg. 353) Mulvey claims that scopophilia (the desire to see) is a fundamental drive according to Freud and that it is sexual in nature. Therefore film uses this in two ways – one is that of voyeurism, both of character, figure and situation, and the second is that of narcissism within the story and the image. She sees scopophilia as a structure that functions on an axis of activity and passivity and that this is gendered. From a voyeuristic point of view, her analysis of classical Hollywood film established ‘the male character as active and powerful: he is the agent around whom the dramatic action unfolds and the look gets organised. The female character is passive and powerless: she is the object of desire for the male character.’ (Mulvey, 1975/1989, pg. 353) This appears to be reversed in Alien as the active and powerful character who defeats the alien and outlives all, including the men, is female. Furthermore, the dramatic action unfolds around her, and the male characters are presented as weak – Captain Dallas makes mistakes, he breaks quarantine laws and cannot protect his team, eventually dying; and robot Ash, whose look and appearance is that of a man, malfunctions and fails his duties. From a narcissistic point of view, Mulvey argues that the audience is forced to see the male character as the powerful, idealised one over the female because she cites Lacan’s concepts of ego formation as the driving force. Lacan claimed that a child derives pleasure from a perfect mirror image of itself and forms its ‘ego’ based on that idealised image. Mulvey therefore says, the ‘representation of the more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal ego of the male hero stands in stark opposition to the distorted image of the passive and powerless female character.’ (Mulvey, 1975/1989, pg. 354) (READ FULL ESSAY)

Written by Daniel Stephens

This excellent essay looks at bias and narrative point of view in Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan (READ FULL ESSAY)

In Saving Private Ryan, ‘focalisation’ forms a major part of the narrative as it ‘shapes our perception of the fabula [story]’[1]. The way in which it does this is by omitting story information in the plot to create a focal point for the narrative. As we are introduced to Captain Miller, the main character of the film, we are immediately focused on his part of the overall story. This is only a minor part of the focalisation that the narrative creates, because through the suppression of gaps we are quickly told who is on the side of the ‘bad’, and who is on the side of the ‘good’. In the initial battle sequence we know German soldiers must be dying. We see them shooting, yet this is all we see. This suppression of gaps helps focalise the story on Miller and the Americans while delineating a divide between what the plot believes are the good and bad. The gap however is temporary, as we see dead German bodies being searched and/or moved. We fill in the gap that other German soldiers must have died in the firefight previous. Although the gap is suppressed, ‘surprise’ is not its goal which is usually a major use of the suppressed gap. In this case, the gap (which we can imagine would be German soldiers screaming in pain, and dying in much the same way as the Americans) localises our attention on the American soldier’s deaths. It creates a causal relationship in that the ‘barbaric’ German bullets kill the ‘helpless but heroic’ Americans. Therefore when, in this case, we fill in the gap, through the subjective view presented to us, the dead German soldiers are mere trophies of the ‘heroic’ American’s who have survived this long. Because of this set-up, when American soldiers later kill surrendering Germans there is less a sense of reversed-barbarism more an awful feeling of payback. The cause and effect of the events presented in the first battle work on the audiences generic expectations of a war movie, and reinforce the ‘good’ and ‘evil’ divides. As mentioned, it is very subjective as we are told who is ‘good’ and who is ‘bad’. (READ FULL ESSAY)

Dir. Stephen Frears (READ FULL REVIEW)

I can’t say ‘The Queen’ particularly inspired me in any sort of way. It was a well-made drama with some nicely-placed humour, but it was also a lot like watching a very average soap-opera. It comes as little surprise it was nominated for Oscar’s – it steers clear of genre sensibilities, deals with the upper-crust, and has a leading performance from someone imitating a famous historical figure. In effect, Oscar gold.

Not that I can fault Helen Mirren who deserves her Academy Award for best performance. Her portrayal of the Queen is mannered and at times amusing. Yet, putting the royal family into a drama about tragedy and loss is both over-sentimentalising a relic that doesn’t deserve such attention, and caricaturing famed figures whose lives are already constructs of media derision and, at times, fascination. It’s most telling that Alistair Campbell’s scorn and egocentric asides are the most truthful and believable attributes of a film that first asks its audience to suspend their disbelief, and then asks us to suspend our disbelief for the over-privileged, out-of-date, out-of-touch royal family. When it comes to the second part, it becomes increasingly difficult and awfully easy to find ‘oneself’ shouting words like ‘robots’ and ‘who are ya’ at the screen. (READ FULL REVIEW)

Context is everything in movies. In any particular scene, a line of dialogue can elicit hearty laughs if given the right set-up while the same exact line might cause an audience to break down into tears when used in a different situation. The idea of context is just as important for directors and, to a lesser extent, actors. It can be helpful for the viewer to look at a film within the director’s larger filmography, especially taking into consideration where the filmmaker was at that point in his career. A perfect example of the importance of context is Billy Wilder’s Stalag 17, released in 1953 and made after the smashing critical success of Sunset Blvd. and the potentially crushing disappointment of Ace in the Hole. Adapted from a Broadway play by two men who had actually been in a POW camp, Edmund Trzcinski (who plays the recipient of a Dear John letter in the film) and Donald Bevan, the comedy-drama now looks like the beginning of Wilder’s ”if it worked once, it might work again” approach to taking successful plays and books and making them personal, yet accessible films. (READ FULL REVIEW HERE)

Written by Donato Totaro

An interesting essay about how cinema has progressed in the time of the internet (READ FULL ESSAY - CLICK HERE)

The evolution of film exhibition has, in a sense, come full circle. The first public screenings of moving pictures were in 1893 with Edison’s Kinetoscope’s, where a single person would put a coin into a stand-up wooden cabinet to view a 30 second film in a peephole viewfinder. Films then moved to a variety of ‘public’ locations (vaudeville theatres, amusement parks, carnivals, etc.) where the film was just one of several entertainment acts on a program, then to the first dedicated (mainly storefront) cinema houses during the Nickelodeon era (1905-1913), before the period of the movie palaces in the 1920s, which would proof the mainstay of the industry for decades. Since then movie exhibition has spread to include the popular drive-in theatres, televison, multiplex theatres, and museums, before returning ‘full circle’ to the single viewing experience of the home computer and the world wide web. Although the televison can be viewed by a single person, the original marketing for the new television promoted it as a ‘family’ experience; which is not the case with the home computer, which is normally set-up for the single principle viewer, much like its distant technological cousin, the Kinetoscope. In fact one of the pioneers of internet (or web) cinema, Lev Manovich, was the first to note this parallel, when he wrote, “the introduction of QuickTime in 1991 can be compared to the introduction of the Kinetescope in 1892: both were used to present short loops, both featured the images approximately two by three inches in size, both called for private viewing rather than collective exhibition” (“About ‘Little Movies’”).

Just as cinema had its own progenitors (Kinetescope, chronophotograph, the magic lantern, praxinoscope, etc.), web cinema had its antecedents with the appearance of Quick Time software and CD-ROM in the early 1990s. While the first generation of web cinema was under the influence of television, evident in the content of these first web films (soap operas and one-minute film serials), by 1999 web cinema already had its first annual film festival in a Paris café (The International Festival for Films on the Internet, FIFI). By 2000 web cinema had already matured, with web cineastes looking for ways to experiment with the form and medium of web cinema; and many dedicated web cinema sites began sprouting all over the internet. While web cinema started primarily in North America, European web cineastes joined the web cinema community in early 2000 and, because of good support by the broader film community (film festivals such as Rotterdam, museums such as the Georges Pompidou, government grant agencies, associations), quickly made important contributions to web cinema.

Film on the internet can be broken down into three broad categories: 1) Web sites that function as archives for mainly non-commercially viable films 2) Web sites that function as distributor/exhibitor of movies made exclusively for the internet (which I will call ‘internet cinema’), and 3) Web sites that function as promotional material for theatrical film releases (official film sites, trailers, electronic press kits). (READ MORE)

Written by David Church

This comprehensive essay looks at fantasy and horror cinema in relation to character disability and its representation.

As the field of disability studies expands and overlaps with film studies, its establishment of a politically progressive “minority cinema” (largely home to films by persons with disabilities, for persons with disabilities) is often overshadowed by its critiques of dominant patterns of disability representation as found in other films, most notably mainstream Hollywood pictures. As François Truffaut has suggested, cinema has followed two lines of historical descent: the realistic and the fantastic. Sobchack (1996) describes the rough division between the two overarching film styles as a question of whether or not filmic events either confirm or defy the natural laws and possibilities of verisimilitude (p. 312). Disability studies has largely focused its critical discourse on realistic films (or social realism, as it is alternately termed) for the basis of its politically minded liberation project, largely because social realism supposedly depicts the actual, everyday world—the world in which persons with disabilities find themselves (as captured in documentaries, another prominent source of disabled imagery). This identifiable “real world” as portrayed in social realist films [1] is nonetheless home to many negative depictions of disabled characters, ranging from the “supercrip” triumphing over all odds to the self-loathing cripple for whom a visible physical disability connotes an inner emotional flaw. Persons with disabilities are most often portrayed negatively as deviant, exotic, comical, pitiable, asexual, feminized, Otherly, metaphoric, powerless, dependent, tragic, and less than human. As Mitchell and Snyder (2001) note, disability studies operates largely within social realism because the control of images (according to the dictates of political correctness) is directly linked to actual political change; the division between politically “positive” and “negative” imagery will vanish only once political and social inequality between disabled and nondisabled people vanishes (p. 201). But while disability studies seems to focus primarily upon negative portrayals in social realist films, much less remarked upon are films of the “fantastic” variety, and the potential that these neglected films may hold for positive critical readings and empowering depictions of disability. I aim to briefly look at several intriguing and problematic areas as exemplified in a few sample films; while each of these fantastic films has been examined much more fully elsewhere, each represents a point of exploration largely overlooked by the discourses of disability studies. (READ MORE)

Dir. William Wyler (READ FULL REVIEW - CLICK HERE)
For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to be Humphrey Bogart, possibly the only thing Woody Allen and I have in common. That and the specs (plus the neuroses).

Who wouldn’t want to be the hard-bitten Rick Blaine, the resourceful Philip Marlowe or the quintessential noir detective Sam Spade? Who wouldn’t want to sweep Ilsa Lund off her feet, slap Joel Cairo around, or trade zingers with Vivian Sternwood Rutledge?

Well, ‘nobody wouldn’t’ is the simple, if clumsy, answer; these are characters as strong as, in reality, we are weak. They are desirable to women, unbeatable, implacable, always carrying a sharp wit and a loaded gat - and they are all, most definitely, Humphrey Bogart. Even in my pre-teens, I quoted him, practiced the famous lisp, pulled an imaginary snap-brimmed Fedora over my eye, his picture on my bedroom wall, next to la Dietrich, Karloff, Cagney and George Best. Here’s looking at you kids… (MORE)

Dir. Walter Hill (READ FULL REVIEW HERE)
The western, the genre that spawned the very first narrative film, has fallen on hard times. Critics have been writing the western’s obituary for around the past four decades, but while it’s taken an arrow, and is hurt bad, it’s not quite ready for Boot Hill yet.

Just when you’re ready to whistle up a coffin (or maybe make that three…), along comes an Unforgiven, an Open Range or a The Proposition, and there’s much talk of a dramatic revival. One that never really comes to pass.

What makes some great westerns so is seemingly, sadly, unfashionable for today’s Cineplex audiences - the comfortable longueurs of something that sprawls across the screen like Once Upon a Time In The West, the fresh-scrubbed, golden hued mythos of a Stagecoach or a Shane, the subtlety of male relationships that is the bedrock of a Red River or a Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid.

In the decades that westerns were produced by their 100s, they covered practically every situation one can think of, and cross pollinated into other genres - musicals, comedies, noir, westerns that took their lead from Shakespeare, from contemporary events, there are psychological westerns, graphically violent westerns, westerns that deconstruct the myths they themselves espoused at cinema’s dawn.

And when cinema-goers fell out of love with the cattle drives, the saloon bars and the dusty, wooden fronted, frontier towns, westerns took off into other settings, into outer space, for instance, with blasters replacing six guns, special effects usually in place of literate scripts…

The common thread of this most malleable of genres - an individual, or a group of men, pitted against an adversary where only courage and muscle, their wits and a six-gun will bail them out - has endured, though the location, the untamed America of the late 19th century, seemingly no longer strikes a chord with the vast majority of modern audiences, or at least enough to make the western the sure fire hit it once was.

Ironically television, once the western film’s - indeed, the movies as a whole - mortal enemy in the small screen boom of the 1950s, looks to be riding to the rescue. Over the past decade there have been several decent westerns on TV, some of them suffering slightly by being evidently underfunded (the sheer scale of the battle got away from the makers of Gettysburg, a huge army of 1000s of extras being beyond their pockets). But big screen values are now trickling down to the small. Leading the charge is Robert Duvall and Walter Hill, an acolyte of Sam Peckinpah, and both self-confessed lifelong fans of horse operas. (MORE - CLICK HERE)