The Big Picture Magazine
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 […]
You’ve got to have friends. “Keep your friends close but your enemies closer.” We all need to know who our real friends are. “I trust Mr. Brown, I do not trust Mr. Grey.” Friends in high places. “Make him an offer he can’t refuse …” Crime film aficionados will recognise the lingo, and feel they […]
This quarantine provided the time to finally view Martin Scorsese’s remake of Cape Fear (1991), originally shot by director J. Lee Thompson (1962) and based on John D. MacDonald’s The Executioners (1957). The innocent 90s-child in me can’t help but happily recall the iconic Simpsons spoof, “Cape Feare,” with Sideshow Bob tied under the family’s […]
Giorgio Armani’s menswear, and womenswear, aesthetic defined and ruled an era, giving birth to a new form of democracy, a new modernity, a new elegance, by going against the grain and proposing diffused lines, a less severe allure to the male figure, and a less constricted allure to the female figure. It was an aesthetic […]
So much of Barry Jenkins’ James Baldwin adaptation If Beale Street Could Talk (2018) looks and feels like Love. All its wonder and joyous trepidation and all its pain and fear. The intensity with which the characters of Tish and Fonny stare at each other, and by design, us, is palpable. The energy pierces the screen and […]
MATTHEW 25, 6: And at midnight there was a cry made, Behold, the bridegroom cometh; go ye out to meet him. Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman (2019), his final – we think? – go round the mobster realm and that detailed world and times he knows so well is peopled by … well, let’s just say “colourful” characters. […]
At the root of Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (1985) is a telling paradox: though the film chronicles a nightmarish, serpentine journey through New York’s Soho neighbourhood, it is ultimately a story of entrapment. The protagonist’s sense of being stuck in a life of routine is symbolised through a recurring, startling prop: plaster sculptures of humans […]
Taxi Driver’s portrait of ’70s downtown New York, complete with neon signs and porno theatres flashing through the night, is an image that sticks with you like no other. Never before has a film so full of sexuality, rage and loneliness been kept at boiling point for so long, and Travis’ final howl of violence […]
When film conversation turns to the greatest filmmaker/actor partnerships common touchstones are Scorsese and De Niro (latterly DiCaprio), Ford and Wayne, Kurosawa and Mifune, Leone and Eastwood, Fellini and Mastroianni or Bergman and Ullmann. Casting a shadow on the conversation is the work of director Werner Herzog and actor Klaus Kinski. Their partnership, in this […]