It’s always tough to be original, but I was made nervous last year as I started on my documentary about Winnipeg movie theatres when I learned that local writer Russ Gourluck was working on a book about Manitoba movie theatres called Silver Screens On the Prairie. Russ has written a number of books on local […]
This is a review I wrote a few years back for Prairie Fire. A couple of reasons for republishing it here: 1) I don’t have a lot of time to write at the moment as I’m pushing to finish my documentary; 2) I recently ran into Caelum on the street and we had a chat […]
I’ve been reading, and appreciating, the DVD Savant on-line column for years. Apart from Glenn Erickson’s almost terrifyingly prolific output, it’s the scope of his work that impresses. He writes in an accessible, conversational style, and yet avoids the superficiality which a lot of web-based criticism is prone to. He has a remarkable knowledge of […]
I recently started work on a documentary about the history of movie theatres and movie-going in Winnipeg. A brief article about the project in the Winnipeg Free Press has brought an amazing number of calls and emails from a wide range of people who have quite passionate memories of the old neighbourhood theatres and the […]
I recently re-read two of my favourite film books. The first was published in 1971, and I’ve read it maybe five times since then. The second was published twenty years later, in 1991, and I’d only read it once before, back in the early ’90s; I just read a reprint put out a few years […]
Guest blogger Howard Curle follows up his previous account of William K. Everson’s class on British Cinema at New York University with an in-depth look at one of the movies Everson introduced him to: John Baxter’s Love on the Dole (1941). John Baxter & Love on the Dole (1941) By Howard Curle One of the […]
Forty years after Pauline Kael wrote her hatchet job Raising Kane (The New Yorker, Feb. 20-27, 1971), the myth of Orson Welles’ arrogance and failure is apparently still alive and kicking. In his August 13 column, Glenn Erickson over at DVD Savant passed on a link to a Wall Street Journal article by their resident […]
A few weeks ago, in a post about things I dislike in movies, I mentioned the death of narrative at the hands of modern communications technologies. I just came across this July 28 column by Joe Queenan in the Guardian on-line edition, in which he elaborates on the same issue. I’m glad to know I’m […]
The recent guest post here about William K. Everson by my friend Howard Curle reminded me that I have a copy of Everson’s Classics of the Horror Film (Citadel Press: Secaucus, N.J., 1974), which I hadn’t looked at … well, probably in a couple of decades. Dipping into it and re-reading some of the chapters, […]
Issues of censorship and freedom of speech are always more complicated than we’d like. It’s never just simply a clear cut question of “this” or “that”. The complete denial that certain elements of pop culture, for instance, can’t possibly do anyone any harm under any circumstances, doesn’t really hold up – of course some people […]