-
WolfmanOz at the Movies #45
Great movie endings Sometimes the ending of a movie can elevate it to another level – think of The Bridge On The River Kwai, Casablanca and One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest to name a few classics. So the following 3 selections are from lesser known films that have an outstanding ending/climax. With the release…
-
WolfmanOz at the Movies #44
Demonic Possession It’s now 49 years ago that William Friedkin’s supernatural horror classic The Exorcist was first released (actually at Xmas in 1973). The film is based on the novel by William Peter Blatty, which it follows very closely in depicting the demonic possession of a young girl and her mother’s attempt to rescue her through…
-
WolfmanOz at the Movies #43
Epics from Ancient History With the advent of televisions in the lounge rooms of everyday families in the 1950s, the response from the studios and film-makers was to try and provide their audiences with something TV couldn’t provide i.e. spectacle and widescreen (cinemascope). The first theatrical film released cinemascope was 1953s The Robe a biblical…
-
WolfmanOz at the Movies #42
Fast Eddie The seedy atmosphere of the pool hall was never better portrayed than in Robert Rossen’s 1961 drama The Hustler. Starring Paul Newman as “Fast Eddie” Felson, a small-time pool hustler who wishes to break into the big-time of professional high-stakes pool wagering by challenging the best player in the country, the legendary Minnesota…
-
WolfmanOz at the Movies #41
Revisionist Westerns During the 1960s at the height of the Vietnam War, a new sub-genre within the Western genre was starting to take hold i.e. the Revisionist Western. What was now becoming increasingly mainstream within Westerns was a new view that subverted the old myths, romances and traditions that had stood the genre for so…
-
WolfmanOz at the Movies #40
A master filmmaker David Lean was born on March 28th, 1908. During the course of his life he directed 16 films over a period of 42 years from 1942 to 1984. Although the number of films he directed was relatively small, the quality of output across his films rank him as one of the greatest…
-
WolfmanOz at the Movies #39
Hell will hold no surprises for them . . . 1971 was quite a year for controversial films – from Stanley Kubrick’s dystopian A Clockwork Orange to Sam Peckinpah’s blood drenched Straw Dogs to Luchino Visconti’s adaption of Death In Venice, but none had the impact of Ken Russell’s historical drama The Devils which graphically…
-
WolfmanOz at the Movies #38
Knights of the Round Table The fantasy genre has probably become the dominant genre of movies of the 21st century. Whether it be prehistoric dinosaurs running amok, Marvel super heroes saving the universe, the world of Harry Potter, the never-ending Star Wars franchise, or even films based on the works of J.R.R. Tolkein, fantasy rules…
-
WolfmanOz at the Movies #37
Guv’nor After a weeks’ sorjorn in Auckland New Zealand visiting family, I’m back to resume my weekly film post. The gangster genre has been a staple in cinema ever since the medium begun. In America, the emphasis tended towards the Mafia and other various ethnic origins, but in the UK the genre was never quite…
-
WolfmanOz at the Movies #36
Come and play with us Danny When it was released in 1980, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining did well at the box office (after the relative failure of his previous film Barry Lyndon) but it perplexed critics and reviews were generally mixed. But over time, like so many of Kubrick’s films, it has been reappraised and…