Robert Altman
In most, Shelley Duvall’s characters were defined by the strange, guileless naturalism she brought to her roles, exemplified most by her ability to talk.
This time, Jake and Kristy dive into a pair of films from two of the greatest and most quintessentially American filmmakers of all time.
Westerns are brilliant because, like all great genres, they possess a wealth of contrast; while…
This week in the Video Dispatches, we cover the home video releases of A Star Is Born, Diamonds of the Night (1964) and Brewster McCloud (1970).
November saw the release of three Robert Altman films on Blu-ray: Brewster McCloud, The Gingerbread Man and Gosford Park. We delve into the last two.
With a Finger in Each Ear, We March Blindly On The Vietnam War, which had begun as a geopolitical chess match in the 1950’s, escalated into a full blown land war in 1965 when President Lyndon Johnson authorised the use of American ground troops to help South Vietnam defeat the Communist North. More than any conflict in the 20th Century, Vietnam segregated America into a civil war of ideals. The burgeoning counterculture rejected and rallied against it, even denouncing the troops themselves.
If you ask somebody about the war films they’ve seen, the first titles that come to mind are usually large-scale epics that feature scenes of combat and violence. These films effectively depict the horrors of war. However, the level of action in some of these films can be distracting and compromise our emotional involvement with the characters once we see how quickly they can vanish, and the level of violence that can occur.