Much of what I’ve seen in a theatre this year qualifies as genre movies. One day I’ll have to sit down and evaluate my viewing in some systematic way to figure out why I spend less and less time on serious drama as I get older (I have a friend who’s just the opposite; he […]
Fifty years ago today (the day after JFK was assassinated), as a nine year old boy living in a small village in southeast England, I sat down after what we then called “tea” (our evening meal) and started watching a TV show I knew nothing about. It had several characters in a blue police phone […]
A lot of my movie viewing is genre based. My appreciation of familiar forms and variations goes back to childhood, when fantasy, horror and science fiction first appealed to me. Mysteries and thrillers came a bit later, for some reason – maybe because they’re at least to some degree rooted more in reality than imagination. […]
For such a type to be successful means that its conventions have imposed themselves upon the general consciousness and become the accepted vehicles of a particular set of attitudes and a particular aesthetic effect. One goes to any individual example of the type with very definite expectations, and originality is to be welcomed only in […]
In the summer of 1997, I attended a film editing master class in Rockport, Maine. The Rockport media workshops are prestigious, attracting students from all over the world. In my class there were people from the US, Canada, Europe and Australia, and at the first meeting, we were each asked to introduce ourselves to the group.
Howard Curle recalls another formative experience with William K Everson’s class at NYU in the ’70s; The Sound Barrier, a key film in David Lean’s career
I’ve been a fan of Shintaro Katsu’s series of films about Zatoichi, the blind swordsman, since I came across Home Vision Entertainment’s DVD editions of the first two, The Tale of Zatoichi and The Tale of Zatoichi Continues (both 1962) many years ago in the video department of Winnipeg’s long-gone A&B Sound. I was grabbed […]
In his review column today, DVD Savant Glenn Erickson, in the course of writing about an interesting East German thriller from the ’60s, mentions that the disk has been mastered at a ratio of 1.85:1 although the film was shot and released at 2.25:1. In other words, despite the fact that it’s been released by […]
It’s Monday morning and I’m still coming down from an exhilarating weekend high. My friend Dave Barber, programmer of the Cinematheque, has been talking to me since last year about screening my documentary, Going: Remembering Winnipeg Movie Theatres, but the question was always how to fit it into his schedule. Well, that and the fact […]
Growing up in England during the late 1950s and early ’60s, my experience of British film was a mix of now-forgotten B-movies, coarse comedies (I loved the Carry On films, which seem all but unwatchable now), and occasional big productions (Zulu remains a vivid childhood memory). Hammer horror was tantalizingly out of reach, restricted to […]