As a lifelong fan and even, dare I say, a student of movies, at this time of year I like to peruse the ‘best of’ lists from movie critics, looking for something I’ve missed that I’d like to check out in the next year. There is, I know, a gap
Continue readingTag: movies
Scripturient: Barbie: A Review for Conservatives
Hey there, conservatives (especially you conservative males!), let’s talk about the Barbie movie. Yes, I know nothing makes you want to take your AR-15 to the local Toys ‘R Us for a well-deserved shoot-up than a film about a girl’s toy (please don’t do it!). I mean, how dare anyone
Continue readingSong of the Watermelon: Top 10 Films of 2022
February, I suppose, is a bit late for a “Best of the Year” list. Getting through every single must-see movie in a timely fashion is no small task. Indeed, there are some I may never get around to (I’m looking at you, Maverick). But with the 95th Academy Awards ceremony
Continue readingScripturient: Musing on Universal Monsters
I can’t recall exactly when I watched each of the great original monster films (the classic “Universal Monster” films) — Dracula, Frankenstein, Wolfman, The Mummy, and the rest — some I saw before my teens, others in my very early teens and others throughout the ’60s. And I’ve seen them,
Continue readingViews from the Beltline: World’s top movie not what you might think
It may come as a surprise to Canadian film fans, but the top box office movie in 2021 is not James Bond’s No Time to Die or the legendary sci-fi Dune. It’s the Chinese blockbuster The Battle at Lake Changjin. It has some Hollywood elements, for instance heroic soldiers overcoming
Continue readingScripturient: Musings of a B-Film Junkie
I put a DVD of the 1939 film, The Gorilla, into the player and sat back to watch. Bela Lugosi (above, centre) starred beside the Ritz Brothers (trio above), a popular American comedy trio contemporary with the Three Stooges, Abbott and Costello, and the Marx Brothers. This would be the
Continue readingPostArctica: News From Home – a film by Chantal Akerman
How long is a long take? That’s the question I was asking myself as I began watching this mesmerizing film which is basically a lot of long takes in New York City while the director reads letters (with English subtitles) her mother had sent her from Belgium when she had
Continue readingPostArctica: I Yam What I Yam
A film by Bryan Konefsky TRT 16.5 minutes, Bryan Konefsky 2005 In 1929 monocular vision was not limited to the gaze of telescopes (Edwin Hubble) or movie cameras (Dziga Vertov). 1929 was also the year that the one-eyed, “strong to the finish” sailor named Popeye was first introduced to the
Continue readingSong of the Watermelon: Top 10 Films of the 2010s
I don’t really write about movies on this blog (lately I haven’t written much of anything), but with the decade coming to a close, I figure why not take a look back at a few cinematic standouts? There may be omissions (Marvel and Star Wars fans need read no further).
Continue readingSong of the Watermelon: Top 10 Films of the 2010s
I don’t really write about movies in this blog (lately I haven’t written much of anything), but with the decade coming to a close, I figure why not take a look back at a few cinematic standouts? There may be omissions (Marvel and Star Wars fans need read no further).
Continue readingPolitics and Entertainment: A Disappointing Crop of Oscar Nominations
The oddsmakers have Roma winning, and I agree that it should – pure cinema, as Hitchcock would say – but Green Book will win because it has all those comfy, timely liberal sentiments the Academy loves: an American white man and an American black man together learn through helping each other that humanity transcends
Continue readingScripturient: The Mummy, the remake and the re-imagining
Nineteen thirty-two. The year Aldous Huxley’s novel, Brave New World, was published. The Great Depression was at its worst. Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated Republican Pres. Herbert Hoover to become the American president in a landslide win. Gandhi went on a hunger strike. Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly
Continue readingPostArctica: Citizen Trump
Watching the Trump years at the White House is like watching Citizen Kane without knowing how it ends, without even knowing what “rosebud” will mean. We are, however, picking up the trajectory of the story and can clearly see that there will be a tragic ending because unlike all other
Continue readingSaskboy's Abandoned Stuff: Ford and Trump and Moe Peas In a Rotten Pod
That movie about the incapable political leadership from the future is actually already here, it won’t take 500 more years. Ontario has their Harper-style Fake News now too https://twitter.com/OntarioNew…/status/1026965194243751936 Some of it is due to this bad man. A host of the Ford videos, Lyndsey Vanstone, presents as a news
Continue readingThe Canadian Progressive: Why Black Panther’s Wakanda Is the Black Utopia We’ve Been Waiting For
Wakanda, the advanced fictional East African nation in Marvel Studios’ Black Panther film, is the the Black utopia imagined by the African diaspora and its allies since the trans-Atlantic slave trade. And Black Panther is the powerful, intelligent and compassionate Black superhero whose time has arrived. The post Why Black
Continue readingScripturient: Legends of Horror
Legends of Horror is the title of one multi-DVD collections of films I own. Fifty films in this package. They’re B-films for the most part (and a few of lesser quality), dating from 1927 (silent) to 1980, mostly in B&W, but those dating from the mid-1960s on are usually colour.
Continue readingPostArctica: Center Jenny, 2013 – Ryan Trecartin
The avant garde today? More from Ryan Trecartin here
Continue readingThe Sir Robert Bond Papers: Dunkirk (2017)
Reviewers have been so effusive in their praise for Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk that one suspects that something is very wrong here. The New York Times, for example, called it a “tour de force”, “a brilliant new film”, and “a characteristically complex and condensed vision of a war in a movie that is
Continue readingSaskboy's Abandoned Stuff: Wonder Woman
Last Tuesday I went to see Wonder Woman [9/10], with Jeri. We tried the reclining seat theatre at the Southland Mall. The chairs were no so great. They had cool electronic buttons to kick up the foot rest, but they didn’t recline worth a darn. As a Klein, I know
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: The DWR Sunday Religious Disservice – Christian Pop Culture Beyond Salavation
There was a time when religion commissioned great and wondrous art. Awe-inspiring cathedrals were built by the most grand and innovative architects. Beautiful music for masses were composed by the greatest musical minds in history. Religious paintings were created with skills and passion that have yet to be matched, even
Continue reading