film

The debate about the amount of violence on television isn’t going to end soon. There are too many people doing well-funded research for it to die quietly. By the time kids get to school they have seen, oh just heaps, of violent acts on television. They’ve also seen lots of programmes about sharks, but has anyone conducted a...
> film/1948/the-three-stooges-violence-spoken-here/

Think back on Hollywood hunk Val Kilmer’s career. It began with the spy-spoof movie Top Secret! where he was an Elvis-lite heartthrob who had girls swooning. Then he was in Top Gun; played brooding rock poet-cum-sex god Jim Morrison in The Doors; a testosterone-fuelled if troubled Batman; the well-hung porn star John Holmes in...
> film/1900/playing-it-gay-straight-men-of-the-cinema-bending-themselves-to-new-roles/

The best suspense movies can be very simple. There’s a lot you can do with a baby sitter, a telephone and a threatening phone call. Or two people abandoned at sea. The chill factor in the low-budget but still gripping Open Water - which engaged and terrified audiences in the mid 90s - came from a combination of primal fear and the...
> film/1908/steven-spielbergs-duel-the-open-road-as-a-death-trap/

When I was at intermediate school in 1962 the Cuban missile crisis occurred. The Russians were shipping missiles to sites in Cuba just a spit from the American mainland and president Jack Kennedy sent out vessels to turn the Russians back. The world took a sharp intake of breath as the threat of a nuclear war was real. So real that one day...
> film/1901/dr-strangelove-a-troubling-movie-for-troubling-times/

On the face of it, there would seem little common ground between European free jazz and the traditional music and Buddhist culture of Java. But for Aucklander Winston Marsh -- co-producer of the film Teak Leaves at the Temples the intersection is in the immediacy and “the sense of the now” in the jazz and the transience...
> film/1797/teak-leaves-at-the-temples-a-film-where-free-jazz-and-traditional-javanese-music-meet/