Deconstructing the machinery of cinema.
This is a story that takes more than eight years to tell. It begins with a Hollywood studio electing to mount an all-new screen adaptation of a popular folkloric saga, and it ends with a loss of about $150 million. There is something of an epic saga about the development of the film in question, ...
In the beginning, a man opened a magical puzzle box and was dragged into hell for an eternity of torture. He escaped, his skin flayed from his body and what was left of him forced to hide in the attic while his ex-lover provided him with innocent victims to murder and use to restore his ...
Hollywood is, if nothing else, opportunistic. Take as an example Lamont Johnson’s 1983 science fiction adventure Spacehunter: Adventures In the Forbidden Zone. One-part space opera, one-part Mad Max pastiche, it took advantage of a then-new technique for shooting feature films in stereoscopic 3D – a novelty that had been popular in the 1950s but proved ...
Fairy tales have been adapted to cinema for many decades. The most obvious is Walt Disney’s ground-breaking 1937 animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs but as a genre they have been inspiring films since movies were in black and white and silent. Across the world, the fairy tale adaptation has seen a variety ...
Within Japan Humanity and Paper Balloons has long been celebrated as one of the greatest films ever made, as well as one of the most significant films in the jidai-geki, or period drama, genre. Internationally, however, it has remained obscure until very recently. Part of its problem is that its director, Sadao Yamanaka, died a year after ...
A corrupt media tycoon (Jonathan Pryce) attempts to start a war to profit from the news coverage. Only two people seem placed to prevent the death of millions: a Chinese intelligence officer named Wai Lin (Michelle Yeoh), and British secret agent James Bond (Pierce Brosnan). In 1995 the film studio MGM/UA scored a massive commercial ...
‘It’s the greatest show time!’ announces a clown as he impossibly squeezes out of a tiny automobile. A circus ring seems like an incongruous place to begin a science fiction film, but before long we are following a middle-aged police officer from circus to corridor to train and beyond, without explanation or logical sense. We ...
