The Big Picture Magazine
If “art is an act of violence” as the uncompromising Nicolas Winding Refn has attested, then his vicious Viking abstraction Valhalla Rising must surely belong in the Louvre. Cut to the bone in terms of narrative and dialogue, the only thing harsher than the inevitability of (often brutal) death in Refn’s powerful and primeval journey […]
“I really couldn’t respect a man unless he were a great swimmer,” says Alice Brandon (Ginger Rogers) to Joe Holt (Joe E. Brown) in Lloyd Bacon’s comedy You Said A Mouthful (1932). A common feature of screen comedies in the 1920s and ’30s was social commentary on masculinity, with comedians often cast as shy, timid […]
He’s the greatest jazz guitarist in the world except for a “gypsy in France”, declares Emmet Ray (Sean Penn), the subject of Woody Allen’s Sweet and Lowdown (1999), a fictitious docu-comedy about a talented musician forgotten by history. Emmet is not a likeable character. He is unfaithful, a kleptomaniac and an egomaniac. On the surface, […]
The moment the title card is smashed to pieces and the famous samba and bossa nova sounds burst through, ushering in a sea of colour and movement, is both a physical shattering and a symbolic one. This playful and powerfully energetic film is not faithfully translating the classic Orpheus story to Brazil, it’s reimagining it in the heat, sweat and delirium of carnival, completely to its […]
As with the main character in Homer’s Odyssey, from whom Ulysses’ Gaze (1997) gets its name, Theo Angelopoulos’ sadly forgotten 1995 film follows another tragic figure on his journey home. A filmmaker named ‘A’ (believed to stand for Angelopoulos) tells a story of how he once took a photograph of a landscape, only for the […]
Joseph Pevney is a name you don’t hear often, although his output as a director was prolific. He made eighty or so productions, and gained success with a few commercial hits, including Female on the Beach, Tammy and the Bachelor, and (fun fact!) the first 14 episodes of Star Trek. His mostly forgotten The Midnight […]
At its core, farce is dependent upon ridiculous situations. So how’s this one for you? In the often overlooked 1986 film Ruthless People, Ken and Sandy Kessler (Judge Reinhold and Helen Slater) don duck masks and kidnap Barbara Stone (Bette Midler), the wife of Sandy’s ex-boss Sam (Danny DeVito). Sam stole the Kessler’s life savings […]
The parody/spoof genre has gone from strength to strength across both TV and film, but to pinpoint exactly where it began is a difficult task. No doubt its success over the last 20 years was ignited by the popularity of Police Squad, which morphed into Airplane and Naked Gun, and subsequently spawned many imitators looking […]
Propaganda films exist to sell a varnished version of real events, which makes it even more remarkable that a movie made when the outcome of World Ward Two was far from certain would so boldly write the epitaph for Hitler’s Third Reich. Adapted from Graham Greene’s magazine story, Alberto Cavalcanti’s 1942 classic Went The Day […]