Tag: Satire
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Elmer Gantry (1960)
Watching a few Burt Lancaster movies recently and I was contemplating him as an actor, how he fills up a frame with his tall, athletic physique and his garrulous, charismatic, confidence. Lancaster won the Oscar for Best Actor for playing the title role of Elmer Gantry (1960), based on the Sinclair Lewis novel, and it… Read.
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Society (1989)
I remember first reading about Society (1989) in a list of the worst sex scenes in an Empire magazine, and has grown in notoriety to the point of a satirical horror cult classic. Directed by Brian Yunza, the producer of Re-Animator who used the success of that film to broker a two picture deal where… Read.
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Amarcord (1973)
I really became swept up in Amarcord’s (1973) approach to depicting a place, a time, a memory. Directed by Federico Fellini, and while not strictly autobiographical, the film is based on his memories growing up, set in the village of Borgo San Giulano during the 1930s and Benito Mussolini’s Fascism. Rather than having one character… Read.
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Defending Your Life (1991)
This might be a generalisation, but it felt like the late-1980s/early-1990s were all about high concept comedies, usually involving time travel, reincarnation, body swapping, and the afterlife. I remember the video cover for the Albert Brooks film, Defending Your Life (1991), but watching it had eluded me until the Albert Brooks collection on the Criterion… Read.
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The Cars That Ate Paris (1974)
All I really knew about Peter Weir’s first film The Cars That Ate Paris (1974) was its memorable title and the iconic image of the VW bug covered in spikes, which was used a lot in the advertising that sold it as a genre horror film (and is even referenced in Mad Max: Fury Road).… Read.