The Big Picture MagazineGabriel's earliest cinematic memory was believing a man could fly in Richard Donner's original (and best) Superman. Following numerous failed attempts at pursuing a career as a caped crusader (mild vertigo didn't help), he subsequently settled down into the far safer – but infinitely less exciting – world of editorial design. A brief stint at the Independent newspaper in London sharpened his skills but cemented his desire to escape the big smoke forever, choosing to settle in the west country. He set up the arts and culture magazine 'Decode' in 2003 and currently edits and art directs the Big Picture magazine. When asked by mates what his favourite film is he replies The Big Lebowski while when in the presence of film afficianados he goes all poncy and says Fellini's 8 1/2.
In this special 3 part episode, Gabriel and Tom select and discuss great director debuts from the year 2000 and up. Right out of the gate, these film-makers showed a clarity of vision and creative maturity that ensured theirs would be names (and films) we’d remember. In part 1, our spotlight focusses on Kenneth Lonergan’s […]
Jay and Mark Duplass’s film starts with Jason Segel’s 30 year-old slacker Jeff musing about the significance of fate into a dictaphone while sitting on the crapper. M. Night Shyamalan’s 2002 film Signs, with its thread of meaningful coincidences, points to a loose philosophy for Jeff to cling to as he idles away endless hours […]
There’s something uncomfortable in the way that gangster films often ask us to empathise with central characters who are, in effect, psychopaths. ‘Anti’ and ‘heroic’ are separated by a very thin line as the movie gangster is made of sterner stuff than us mere mortals, seemingly existing in a place once removed from normality; a […]
On September 26, 1993, a crew of eight people emerged from a huge ecological desert facility after two years of isolation. The facility, named Biosphere 2 and located in Oracle, Arizona, was constructed to replicate the earth’s various habitats in a closed environment as a forerunner for speculative ‘off world’ colonization. While the whole thing […]
There is a moral dilemma inherent in taking pictures of suffering. Famed war photographer Robert Capa once remarked that “It’s not always easy to stand aside and be unable to do anything except record the sufferings around one” and Larry Burrows, who covered the Vietnam war for Life magazine, often caught himself wondering if it […]
Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood was a huge hit when it was first released in 1966 – further establishing the writer’s celebrity status and creating a new literary term, the nonfiction novel, due to the book’s basis on factual events told in a novelistic style. In Cold Blood details the 1959 murders of the Clutter […]
We review Laura Wandel’s sensitive portrayal of childhood shortlisted for Best International Film at this year’s Academy Awards
It was purely by accident that I was recommended a film the other day which featured the actress Sally Kellerman who sadly passed away on the 24th February at the age of 84. The film was Adrian Lyne’s Foxes (1980), starring Jodie Foster as 15 year old tearaway Jeanie juggling the unfair demands of adulthood […]
Prior to the release in 1976 of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, based on Paul Schrader’s screenplay, the popular image in movies of taxi drivers were of amiable but somewhat chatty folk — prone to waffle on about the weather, politics or state of world affairs, while passengers did their best impression of accommodating politeness. In […]