Categories
Feature

Waiting for Something to Happen in Paul Schrader’s The Card Counter

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 […]

Categories
Feature Four Frames

Four Frames: The Friends of Eddie Coyle (Peter Yates, 1973)

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 […]

Categories
Feature

Past Evils Return in Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear

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 […]

Categories
Fashion & Film Feature

The Armani Aesthetic and Film Costume Appropriation: Sam Shepard in Voyager

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 […]

Categories
Feature Music & Film

Self-Isolation Soundtrack: The Music of If Beale Street Could Talk

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 […]

Categories
Feature Four Frames

Four Frames: The Irishman (Martin Scorsese, 2019)

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. […]

Categories
Feature Screengem

Screengem: The Plaster People in After Hours (Martin Scorsese, 1985)

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 […]

Categories
Feature Screengem

Screengem: The Laughing Wallpaper in Scorsese’s The King of Comedy

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 […]

Categories
Feature Thousand Words

Thousand Words: We merely get in their way: The fierce chemistry of Herzog and Kinski

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 […]