Winken and Blinken There is less reason to see this now than when it was made, except for the lesson that is more clear here than in current filmdom: how do you cinematically convey concepts that don’t fit our fairly limited vocabulary? The lesson here is stark, only because we have greater familiarity with computers… Continue reading War Games (1983)
Category: Ones
Films rated one star out of three
The Sinister Monk (1965)
4 Conspiracies In the heyday of mystery writing, we had Sayers, Christie, Chesterton and a dozen others who were artists of narrative curves. The game was to create a world, but us in it and only later let us know how wrong we were. And then we had formula pulp writers, many of whom had… Continue reading The Sinister Monk (1965)
Exodus (1960)
Stalled Ship I wonder what damage we are doing to ourselves by writing false history. All history is fictional. It must be because it abstracts single narratives from the hubbub of life. We hope that the narrative models something that can be traced back to facts, can be proved to be what we call true.… Continue reading Exodus (1960)
Jim Hanvey Detective (1937)
Straw Dogs You can do better than watching most current movies by noodling around with old detective movies from the 30’s. They are generally not very good, but collectively they defined the base for our most common idiom. This one, thankfully, has no racist comedy player. It does depend on colourful characters and is staged… Continue reading Jim Hanvey Detective (1937)
Double Door (1934)
Panic Room During the last depression, moviegoers were obsessed with the wealthy. As with the aristocrats in Europe, these folks neither created nor managed wealth. They just had it and wanted more. Here we have a domineering woman who believes she deserves it all, taking from rich peers in the same family. The thing can… Continue reading Double Door (1934)