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Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple: 4:50 from Paddington (1987)
Filmmaker(s): Martyn Friend

Travelling on the 4.50 from Paddington, Mrs McGillicuddy witnesses a murder on a passing train - but where is the body?

Missed Train The Marple stories — many of them — are lessons in narrative placement. We start with the basic notion of the mystery narrator shuffling through multiple created realities looking for what makes sense. Marple turns that into the clever notion of detection as gossip:...


Published December 12, 2022
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The 400 Blows (1959)
Angel faces hell-bent for violence.
Filmmaker(s): François Truffaut

For young Parisian boy Antoine Doinel, life is one difficult situation after another. Surrounded by inconsiderate adults, including his neglectful parents, Antoine spends his days with his best friend, Rene, trying to plan for a better life. When one of their schemes goes awry, Antoine ends up in trouble with the law, leading to even more conflicts with unsympathetic authority figures.

Real Fiction With this film began an experiment that was to ultimately fail after dozens of notable films. It was much like the experiment in art nouveau in architecture seventy years earlier. I suppose that every art has cycles which begin with a collapse of the...


Published December 11, 2022
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Space Battleship Yamato (2010)
The legendary sci-fi animation, a live-action film at last.
Filmmaker(s): Takashi Yamazaki

In 2199, five years after the Gamilons began an invasion of Earth, the planet has been ravaged by the aliens' bombs. The remnants of humanity have fled underground to escape the irradiated surface. One day, former pilot Susumu Kodai discovers a capsule sent from the planet Iscandar that tells of a device that can remove the radiation from the Earth's surface. The Earth Defense Force rebuilds the battleship Yamato with a new type of propulsion system to make the 148,000 light year trip to Iscandar in hopes of saving the Earth. Within one year, the radiation will drive the rest of humanity to extinction.

Teen Explosions I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about what the necessary ingredients may be for a successful space travel-centric sci-fi movie. ‘Interstellar’ used a device to place the images in the past, leveraging established movie notions. That was a movie that referenced and...


Published December 10, 2022
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100 Years of Horror (1996)
Filmmaker(s): K. S. Ravikumar

A multi-volume documentary on the history of horror movies. Hosted by veteran horror star Christopher Lee, this video series brings together footage from many notable (and some less notable) films from the silent era up to the 90's. Also included are interviews with many of the leading horror actors and filmmakers, in which they share their stories, opinions, and techniques on how to make the world scream.

Horrible I only watched a third of these before giving up, so I will do a blanket comment. This is many hours of stuff stretched out possibly three times as long as it deserved. Interviews are reused in multiple weeks. There is lots of footage from the...


Published December 8, 2022
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Seven-Up! (1964)
Filmmaker(s): Paul Almond

A group of British children aged 7 from widely ranging backgrounds are interviewed about a range of subjects. The filmmakers plan to re-interview them at 7 year intervals to track how their lives and attitudes change as they age.

This did not start as a folded adventure. It is a quite ordinary TV documentary. But it became so in later installments by Apted, where the interviews are largely about how the films affected their lives....


Published December 8, 2022
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The 39 Steps (1935)
Handcuffed to the girl who double-crossed him
Filmmaker(s): Alfred Hitchcock

Richard Hanney has a rude awakening when a glamorous female spy falls into his bed - with a knife in her back. Having a bit of trouble explaining it all to Scotland Yard, he heads for the hills of Scotland to try to clear his name by locating the spy ring known as The 39 Steps.

Step By Step Performances All but two Hitchcock films are cursed by the transcended achievement of those two. So the remainder will always seem pale in comparison while unfairly having elements of those retroactively applied. But I believe that the early Hitchcock was a simply competent filmmaker...


Published December 8, 2022
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36 Hours to Kill (1936)
Filmmaker(s): Eugene Forde

Duke and Jeanie Benson, an outlaw couple hiding out under assumed names. Duke realizes that he has a winning sweepstake ticket and will win $150,000 if he can cash it in without getting apprehended

Making Your Bed I watched this in preparation for “Europa”. Both are essentially railroad movies. This is about a gangster who has come out of hiding to take a train trip to from Los Angeles to Chicago to collect on a sweepstakes ticket. On the train, several...


Published December 8, 2022
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16 Blocks (2006)
1 witness… 118 minutes…
Filmmaker(s): Richard Donner

An aging cop is assigned the ordinary task of escorting a fast-talking witness from police custody to a courthouse, but they find themselves running the gauntlet as other forces try to prevent them from getting there.

Blockage Sometimes it is just the man. It is not a new thing that movies promote personality and that certain personalities find their time. One type is the everyman. James Stewart was of this variety. Not a great man or suave. Not a lover or hero. Bruce Willis mines...


Published December 7, 2022
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Monitor: The Prince of Denmark (1963)

Astonishingly Internal This is a BBC interview show that has Orson Welles, Peter O'Toole and some other older fellow (Ernest Milton) talking about ‘Hamlet’. Orson was well into retirement from attempting film masterpieces, including two ambitious Shakespeare productions. His ‘Othello’ is really something. He’d been in...


Published December 7, 2022
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The Midnight Sky (2020)
There's a universe between all of us.
Filmmaker(s): George Clooney

A lone scientist in the Arctic races to contact a crew of astronauts returning home to a mysterious global catastrophe.

Dersu Solaris Films about filmmaking and internal narrative will always get poor reception among the general public. Nolan is able to straddle the line by delivering worldly action; that’s why his effects have to be so practical. But in general, when you make a film with...


Published December 6, 2022
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