This really was a thoroughly crap film back in the day and though it hasn’t improved with age, I guess it was onto something (well at least the novel on which it was based). Here is Joe Dante making a case for the film to be reassessed, at least on the grounds of its prescience. Here too is…
Philosophical filmmakers are few and far between, understandably so, but even more depressing is that professional philosophy is perversely plagued by the unphilosophical — i.e. the virtue-signalers and thought and language police. Anyway, one of the few philosophically orientated filmmakers is Wim Wenders and one of my favourite films of all is his Wings of Desire/Der Himmel über Berlin. As…
Malick, the greatest living American filmmaker, has never made the consistently good fully philosophical film that we know he’s quite capable of. I fear that unless he dumps the star actors, he never will. I suppose that beginning with the Thin Red Line (after a 20 year hiatus) he understandably exploited high-priced luvvies eager to embellish their resume with…
Though it’s going on 40 years since Performance was made (1968, released in 1970) it is still the most modern of films with “adult themes” (philosophical and otherwise) from an age when films weren’t primarily made for fuckwits. The themes of social, sexual and gender identity make the fuss being made about these issues now seem so tired…
Dirk Bogarde (along with Klaus Kinski) ranks as one of the two greatest screen actors of the post-War era. I realize that this may be somewhat controversial given what Hollywood (I include the Brit luvvies) take to be its finest. Bogarde was very bright, literate, articulate, dignified, brave, philosophical, had integrity and importantly was very scathing — he…
In life, as in film, I’ve always been fascinated by repetition. I have yet to come across a decent review of this one of the most powerful of all films made (this despite its flaws). Even Roger Ebert seems to skirt things. If one substitutes the “bourgeois cosmopolitans” with the ruling class of sophisticates that run universities…
No, not Maimonides but Werner Herzog. Here’s a review in The Telegraph — Herzog is more a wayfarer than a wonderer. Herzog is a wanderer – on foot, wherever possible – and the sheer amount of information he has gleaned about different corners of the world takes the breath away. Travellers, soldier-poets, artisans, astronauts –…
