The Big Picture Magazine
Less than a month since the release of Blade Runner 2049, and thirty-five years after the premiere of Blade Runner, I am still celebrating the original. Set in a dystopian 2019, Ridley Scott’s film envisioned a decaying Los Angeles, bleak and neon-lit, with overpopulated streets and striking cityscapes of dark buildings soaring up into smog-covered […]
January 10th, 1927. It was on this day, 90 years ago, that Fritz Lang released Metropolis – not only a key film of the German expressionist movement, but also the primordial science fiction movie. Set far in the then-distant year 2000, the themes and designs of Metropolis forged new paths for cinema. It is impossible […]
The work of the costume designer is often overlooked, and as a consequence, books covering the connection between fashion and film are few and far between. But as Martin Scorsese says, “costume is character”. Film costume isn’t all about the dress. Great film costume grounds characters, advances the narrative, speaks more than words do, gives […]
Ali MacGraw in Love Story 1970s Ivy League campus… 1960s industrial Milan… 1950s Hollywood… Very different backdrops to very different different movie stories, united by a sartorial canon that advances the concept of style, regardless of character, story, or decade: the camel coat. The timing couldn’t be more perfect to look at this item, as […]
The notoriously perturbing boat scene on the lake in Leave Her to Heaven (John Stahl, 1946) is impossible to forget – thanks to Gene Tierney, of course. A truly exceptional femme fatale, she’s at her very best in the role of psychotic Ellen Berent, delivering a layered, riveting performance. Gene’s angelic beauty and her unblinking cruelty are […]
So there I was, standing in line, surrounded by a Sith Lord, a space rebel and a slave girl…
Forget put-upon, would-be journalist, Andy Sachs (infused with subtle innocence by Anne Hathaway), bitchy PA Emily Charlton (the wonderfully acidic Emily Blunt) or Priestly herself (a career defining turn from Hollywood icon Meryl Streep) – it was really ‘The Book’ which played the pivotal role in The Devil Wears Prada, director David Frankel’s acid sharp pastiche on the fickle […]