Posted in directors, film on Sep 7th, 2007 1 Comment »
The great David Thomson has said that David Fincher’s Zodiac — released on DVD this month — is his worst yet:
“A terrible disappointment in which an ingenious and deserving all-American serial killer nearly gets lost in the meandering treatment of cops and journalists obsessed with the case. A great deal of Fincher’s energy and most […]
Posted in B-movies, Horror, Industry, directors, film, politics on Jul 11th, 2007 No Comments »
Dispatches from this year’s Hay-on-Wye literature festival, courtesy of MovieMail correspondent Graeme Hobbs, confirm that director Robin Hardy is in fine fettle and still promising to deliver a much awaited ‘re-imagining’ of his cult 1973 film, The Wicker Man. Hardy has published a novel called Cowboys for Christ, which presents a new take on the […]
Posted in B-movies, Industry, directors on Jun 18th, 2007 1 Comment »
My recent MovieMail blog, Don’t Bisect Grindhouse, lamented the decision to split the not-yet-released Robert Rodriguez–Quentin Tarantino double-bill extravaganza in Europe and release Tarantino’s segment on its own. It argued, before I had seen the film, that cutting Grindhouse clean in half was against the spirit of the enterprise.
I’ve now had the opportunity to […]
Posted in Horror, Industry, directors, film, politics on May 23rd, 2007 11 Comments »
If you’re like me, you may have let yourself down by tuning into Celebrity Big Brother earlier this year when you discovered that the incomparable filmmaker Ken Russell was a contestant.
I don’t know what I was expecting from Ken, but he was a disappointment, looking bored and engaging in uninspired conversation with housemates sixty years […]
Posted in directors, film on Mar 18th, 2007 2 Comments »
“Ritual, ideas, relativity/Only building, no people, prophecy/Time slide, place to hide, nudge reality/Foresight, minds wide, magic imagery.”
Something about the Big Audio Dynamite (BAD) song E=MC2, which evokes the world of director Nicolas Roeg, seems to capture the essence of the man’s work even in the face of some decidedly crass lyrics: “Met a dwarf […]
Posted in B-movies, Horror, directors, film on Feb 19th, 2007 No Comments »
This month sees the DVD release of three films directed by the late, unheralded Sidney Hayers: Assault, Revenge (both 1971) and the remarkable Night of the Eagle (1962).
Hayers was a prolific journeyman working at the lower budget end of British film-making, delivering programmers and second features at a rate of knots, moving from horror to […]
Posted in directors, film on Jan 18th, 2007 1 Comment »
I never think of myself as a particularly devoted fan of anyone. I’m not one to queue up for hours to attend a book signing; I wouldn’t go too far out of my way to see a concert; I wouldn’t even go so far as to collect all the available DVDs of my very favourite […]