Being Bonus Film #2 for Hooptober 2021 The second bonus film for Hooptober 8.0 is an early Amicus picture called The Skull. Amicus is kind of the lower rent little brother of Hammer, which isn't to say they were bad: their speciality was really more the anthology film. The Skull feels a lot like them... Continue Reading →
Hooptober 8.0 – Queen of Black Magic (1981)
Being Film #28 for Hooptober 2021 A real quick summary/review of the classic (I guess?) Indonesian horror film Queen of Black Magic goes something like this: Evil Dead and Hausu vibes mark this horror revenge flick as a young woman seeks revenge after being left for dead at the hands of her ex-lover and the... Continue Reading →
Hooptober 8.0 – The Devil Rides Out (1968)
Being Film #27 for Hooptober 2021 Featuring Christopher Lee in a rare (if slightly excitable) heroic role, The Devil Rides Out is a great slice of near-cosmic horror. It may get more than a little heavy-handed with its pro-Christian themes trouncing the evil satanic cult (a touchstone of many of director terence Fisher's films) but... Continue Reading →
Hooptober 8.0 – Captain Clegg, aka Night Creatures (1962)
Being Film #26 for Hooptober 2021 This week I'm diving into some older fare, starting with a 1-2 punch of Hammer Horror. Though there is little in the way of horror and the mystery of Captain Clegg, or Night Creatures as it was released in the US is cleared up for audiences pretty quickly, I... Continue Reading →
Masculin, Féminin (1966)
My Jean-Luc Godard education continues with Masculin, Féminin, his 1966 portrait of the youth culture in Paris in the months leading up to the 1965 presidential election. It's a flurry of different visual and aural ideas cut together and framed in a off-kilter documentary style whose purpose isn't anything like a straight narrative, but rather an empathetic if distanced view of the lives of the young men and women Godard found himself surrounded by in Paris.
Band of Outsiders (1964)
It's strange, but until watching Band of Outsiders my only exposure to Jean-Luc Godard was Breathless almost eight months earlier. Kind of a long wait between films, especially after the wonderful taste Breathless left in my mouth, but that wait may have made my feelings toward Band of Outsiders a little sweeter than they would have been otherwise.
Breathless (1960)
Breathless may not have been the movie to "officially" kick off the French New Wave, but after its release there was little doubt it would be the standard bearer for the movement. Written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard based off a treatment by Francois Truffaut, Breathless leaps off the screen and tears into its story with a youthful exuberance that embraces its roots in American genre films while gleefully tearing apart the staid tenets of how those films are structured.
Yojimbo (1961)
The movie opens. A man stands in the foreground, his back to the camera. We don't know him yet, but the camera tells us everything. The mountains in the background are positively diminutive, telling us this man is larger than life, and over the course of the next two hours he's going to prove that perception correct...