The Big Picture Magazine
“It’s a fucking fairytale town, isn’t it? How can a fairytale town not be somebody’s fucking thing?” asks Ralph Fiennes’ cockney gangster Harry (Ralph Finnes) in Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges. A favourite childhood retreat of Harry’s, Bruges is the hideout to which he has sent hitmen Ray (Colin Farrell) and Ken (Brendan Gleeson) after Ray’s […]
World Film Locations: Glasgow is one of the latest releases in Intellect’s World Film Locations book series. Representing Scotland’s biggest city, it is a book of contrasts, from Glasgow’s kitchen sink social realism by Ken Loach and Peter Mullan to the recent trend for using Glasgow as a set for Hollywood backdrops. Last year the […]
Gus (John Cassavetes) and Mary (Jenny Runacre) jump out of a black London cab and into the sanctuary of Henry’s Soup Kitchen, a non-descript café, Gus pausing momentarily to throw the fare through the cab window, desperate that the incessant rain doesn’t touch him. The pair have spent the night together, sharing a complicated, fleeting […]
Much has been made about the rich heritage of LA’s modernist residential architecture but Thom Andersen, in his wonderful film-essay Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) suggests that ‘Hollywood movies have almost systematically denigrated this heritage by casting many of these houses as the residences of movie villains.’ A look back at many of the houses […]
The brief scene at Los Angeles’s MacArthur park comes exactly half way through Nicolas Winding Refn’s slick and stylish thriller as Driver, drawn out of his solitary existence by new love interest Irene and her young son Benicio, takes on a risky grab-n-go getaway gig to protect them from harm. As befalls every criminally minded […]
As we prepare for the publication of World Film Locations: Las Vegas next month – the latest in our series of books exploring the relationship between the city and cinema– Marco Bohr examines one of the many evocative moments in Godfrey Reggio’s masterly medidation of life, Koyaanisqatsi. In Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi, a group of middle-aged […]
Martin Scorsese’s engrossing four hour documentary odyssey through the Italian films that played a large part in his cinematic education expands our own On Location feature into an all encompassing exploration of personal identity, history, ancestry, geography and changing national cultural, political and social climates. Executive produced by Giorgio Armani and recently released for the […]
Kiss Me Deadly—a brutal, brilliant film noir that set the high-water mark for Cold War paranoia—is finally getting the deluxe DVD reissue it deserves on June 21st courtesy of the wonderful folks at the Criterion Collection. Below is a pivotal scene from the film as featured in the World Film Locations: Los Angeles book available […]
Continuing our tie-in series of articles to celebrate the launch of the World Film Locations book series in July – and as a tribute to director Sidney Lumet who sadly passed away on April 8th – we look at how New York’s Hell Gate Bridge (which connects Queens, the Bronx and Manhattan), provided the perfect […]