The Big Picture Magazine
Always on the lookout for cinemas that are keeping the spirit of independence alive, Sean Wilson recently caught up with Debbie and Gary – proud owners of The Blue Walnut Café – to discuss intimate settings, grassroots community and some fairly dodgy film tastes. Tucked away in the sleepy area of Chelston is one of […]
With certain years come certain musical milestones, soon etched into the minds of subsequent generations. 1977 saw John Williams’ Star Wars; 1960, Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho; 1974, Jerry Goldsmith’s Chinatown and so on. Likewise, it’s nigh-on impossible to imagine pre-1986, when Ennio Morricone’s landmark score for The Mission didn’t grace every chill out album under the […]
Sean Wilson roots out a common thread running through the Coen brothers films and examines the varying degrees of devilish interplay at work in the battle between good(ish) and evil. Aghast and stunned, Fargo’s detective Marge Gunderson (Oscar-winning Frances McDormand) is escorting dangerous psychopath Gaear Grimsrud (Peter Stormare), to prison. He has just put his […]
If ever a film made guys want to run around topless with a gun and a bandanna, Rambo:First Blood Part II was it – and Jerry Goldsmith’s ridiculously macho CD cover (not to mention the music!) confirms the suspicion. Sly Stallone’s second outing as John ‘get an extra supply of body bags’ Rambo was a […]
What more needs to be said about Psycho, other than it has exercised influence over every horror-thriller post 1960. Forgoing the larger budgets of Vertigo and North by Northwest, director Alfred Hitchcock wanted to dabble in the burgeoning independent market, so he stripped back the crew, retained the members from his tv show ‘Alfred Hitchcock […]
In the first of a regular web series, our resident film music aficionado Sean Wilson takes an indepth look at a carefully chosen motion picture soundtrack. Up first is the score to a truly unique cinematic experiment from 1999. Stage director Julie Taymor’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s grisly revenge tragedy Titus Andronicus is generally faithful […]