"Privilege and Edvard Munch prove engaged with the same essential point of enquiry: the idea of the artist as a barometer of their moment in history..." - I look at two Peter Watkins classics at Film Freedonia: filmfreedonia.com/2025/06/06/p...
There needs to be a word for describing when various fringe concepts and concerns leave the petri dish of niche online communities and gain Frankensteinian life in the internet beyond...
Viewing: Tibor Takacs' I, Madman. Too cramped in budget to be the exercise in style it wants and indecisive in story, but still an enjoyable, occasionally striking meta-horror-noir. Jenny Wright a winning lead.
...Vale Drew Struzan, THE Hollywood poster artist to a generation. This one of his worked on too few people, alas, but it worked on me as a lad when I saw it on a VHS box.
I've gone back to using my old iPod recently because I realised that combining one of the things that's most fun and relaxing - playing music - with one of the major sources of anxiety - a phone - was a profoundly bad thing to do.
...Vale the illustrious Diane Keaton, a hard one to take in part because she always seemed eternally vital. In memoriam, my essays on Francis Coppola's The Godfather trilogy... filmfreedonia.com/2019/02/23/t...
I had a similar experience with the Night Gallery pilot a few days ago. They talk about modern TV being more cinematic but that pilot was more genuinely cinematic than most modern movies.
Viewing: Kenneth Branagh's All Is True. Interesting, well-acted but fidgety attempt at a portrait of an aging bard, alternately soap opera-ish, sitcomy, and awkwardly pseudo-modern. Ben Elton, you sir are no Will Shakespeare.
2/2 ...just a dude who only needs a couple of good whacks from the hero to go down. The swirling leaves of autumnal England, stage curtains of romance and veils of death, posh manse and mud pit. Vale Norman Eshley.
Rewatch: Richard Fleischer's See No Evil. Amongst many qualities, the pleasures of a genre prototype long before it's hardened into formulae. A frail heroine who learns to save herself but without improbability or Ripley-ish kiss-off lines. A psycho killer is...1/2
That splendidly dreamy scene of Johnny riding with Kathie down the moonlit road, finding the light beyond the darkness at the edge of town. The shiny prize that means nothing and everything. An inception point of post-WWII culture, promising everyone from Elvis to David Lynch.
Terrific film, far more than the study-in-cool meme it's usually reduced to; complex and ambivalent study in insiders and outsiders, different forms of anarchy and violence; impotent anarchists versus superficially placid, ruthless "normal" people; romance in no-man's-land.
