Tag: Film
-
A Deliciously Macabre Cult Movie
The best horror movie I’ve seen in a while is called The Stranger From Afar, or it’s original name, Marebito. Here are excerpts from a review on Midnight Eye: “Can I face the terror to which the only escape is to kill myself?” Shinya Tsukamoto, director of the cult films Tetsuo and A Snake…
-
A Sci-Fi Screenplay Written by Artificial Intelligence
Here’s an intriguing article about a screenplay written by a computer. I found this at ARS Technica. Knowing that an AI wrote Sunspring makes the movie more fun to watch, especially once you know how the cast and crew put it together. Director Oscar Sharp made the movie for Sci-Fi London, an annual film festival…
-
The Last of the Hippie Filmmakers
Via Taki’s Magazine, Joe Bob Briggs looks back on Tobe Hooper and the making of the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre. I enjoyed this article on several levels: Film history, biographical, human interest, horror movies, and just plain good writing. Brigg’s calls Hooper “the last of the hippie filmmakers.” Here’s a brief quote from the…
-
Dark Glories and Edge Zones
This is from a blog called A Year in the Country: “Recent years have seen a ‘rural turn’ in British cultural studies. Artists have wandered into an interior exile and a re-engagement with the countryside – its secret histories, occult possibilities. Psychogeographers are drawn to its edgezones and leylines, fringe bibliophiles are rediscovering the dark…
-
From Gothic Thriller to Art Film
Another fun website that reviews and analyzes genre films is Braineater, created and maintained by Will Laughlin. In this installment he reviews the French film La Chambre ardente (1962), “a movie that sits somewhere between an art film and a Gothic thriller,” directed by Julien Duvivier, based on a classic novel by the American author…
-
The Scattershot Lunacy of Movie Director Richard E. Cunha
Anyone who has visited Bill Ectric’s Place for any length of time knows that I like reading about low budget B movies, especially horror and science fiction. Sometimes watching them can be fun; sometimes reading about them is better than actually watching them. Unless you are either watching them on Mystery Science Theater, or with…
-
7 Films About Neuroses & Psychoses That Don’t Get Enough Attention
Jonathan Eng writes on CURNBLOG, “Film history is jam-packed with neuroses, psychoses, and character disorders writ large and small. As Vivian Leigh and Dustin Hoffman and Javier Bardem and Natalie Portman can attest, having a DSM-5 condition can lead to an Oscar. Russell Crowe, in A Beautiful Mind, had to settle for a BAFTA. “When…
-
Inherent Vice Revisited
With Inherent Vice now a movie, I thought I would repeat this post that originally appeared at Bill Ectric’s Place on 2011: The books of Thomas Pynchon are so chock-full of cool references, I had to make two collages for this blog entry. Pynchon is one of my favorite writers. I recently read his noir-hippie…
-
First of the Fifties
Movie producer George Pal with Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis Destination Moon produced by George Pal, is widely considered the first science fiction film to attempt a high level of accurate technical detail. Filmed in Technicolor, based on a book by Robert Heinlein, adapted for the screen by Alford Van Ronkel and James O’Hanlon,…