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WolfmanOz at the Movies #75
Tourists on the menu. The first time watching of a favourite film can be a particularly memorable event, and I will always recall my first viewing of Jaws when the family went to see it way back in the summer of 1976. It would have to rank as one of my top five most purely…
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WolfmanOz at the Movies #74
I think it would be fun to run a newspaper. It is with some trepidation that I write about a film that is often considered one of the greatest film ever made – Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, released in 1941. This quasi-biographical drama examines the life and legacy of newspaper tycoon Charles Foster Kane, brilliantly played by…
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WolfmanOz at the Movies #73
One flew East . . . One flew West. The 70s produced some of the most interesting and worthy Hollywood movies. Before the era of blockbusters, and ever increasing dumbing down of the cinema art by the Hollywood power-brokers and greedy moneymakers, there was this short but truly amazing window of time that produced many…
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WolfmanOz at the Movies #72
Damn you all to hell ! In the year 1968, two movies came out that changed modern day science-fiction films forever – Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey has been the most celebrated out of the two (and my all-time favourite movie), but Planet Of The Apes stands on its own ground and has…
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WolfmanOz at the Movies #71
The ultimate man of conscience It is a widely accepted axiom that it is easier to make a good movie out of a bad play than out of a good one; a bad play can be altered with a clear conscience so that its mishandled virtues are brought to the fore in a different medium,…
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WolfmanOz at the Movies #70
A Tale of the Christ There are some films that make a lasting impression when you see them for the first time, and Ben-Hur (the 1959 version) is one such movie for myself. I first saw it on a re-release in the early 1970s when my parents took the family to see it on a…
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WolfmanOz at the Movies #68
Hope is a good thing Was what prisoner Andy Dufresne says to his fellow prisoner and close friend Ellis “Red” Redding in the superlative prison drama film The Shawshank Redemption. Released in 1994, the film was a box-office disappointment and despite being nominated for a swag of awards it wasn’t until its release on VHS…
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WolfmanOz at the Movies #67
Those who about to die salute you With the introduction of cinemascope/widescreen in 1953 starting with The Robe, cinema saw a growing popularity of Biblical/historical epics throughout the 1950s and 1960s. One of the best, and, certainly one of the most discussed was Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 film Spartacus. The film was inspired by the life…
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WolfmanOz at the Movies #66
Star of stage, screen and alimony Was the epitaph suggested for himself by actor and comedian Peter Sellers. Sellers was a prodigious talent, touching on genius at times, although almost all of his best work had been completed by the mid 1960s. Born Richard Henry Sellers in 1925. He began accompanying his parents in a…