Popular culture is awash with the horror genre. Television shows, video games, movies and literature on the occult gush forth seeming to make the ironic point that the more our society becomes scientifically secular the more appetite there is for the supernatural. It seems impossible to avoid the tsunami of paranormal investigators, zombies, vampires and their [...]
Moralists make much of immorality in movies. They are disgusted by scenes of sex and the viewing of violence. The prude is horrified by all that is lewd and nude and crude and rude. In his horror at the horror what the moralist may miss is the deeper morality of most movies. In The Ethics of [...]
I went to see Blade Runner 2049 last night. I wish I hadn't. There are so many awful things to say about this film I hardly know where to start. First of all, one goes to a science fiction film looking for some imagination. There was little here. Once again they had flying cars in a [...]
The movie mogul Sam Goldwyn rightly growled through his cigar to a screenwriter, “If you want to send a message use a telegram.” Didacticism in storytelling is always a disaster because the audience sniffs out a sermon and switches off. They do so not because they disagree with the point of the sermon, but because they [...]
One of the most influential forces in American cinema of the second half of the twentieth century is a man who was not a film maker at all. The self styled ‘mythologist’ Joseph Campbell, became a mentor for the new breed of film makers of the 1970s. John Boorman and Francis Copolla have acknowledged their debt [...]
Cave Wall - 19 Some time ago I watched a fascinating documentary on the assassination of President Kennedy. It was a scientifically accurate study of the controversial events of that November afternoon in 1963. The scientist involved gathered every scrap of data available and correlated them. He used photographs, film footage, sound recordings, speedometer readings, ballistics [...]