Expelled Grey Matter

When you hear about a "new wave" in film, I am sure that the first thought you have is of the French New Wave of the late 1950s and early 1960s.  Those films, to varying degrees of success, had a certain feel of time and place and liberation as well as similar thematic issues. 

That is why it is hard for me to understand why a number of Australian films get grouped under the "Australian New Wave" moniker.  The one overwhelming theme, if there is one, is the fact that the censors backed off to the point that it was worth it for Australian directors and actors to stay at home and have an actual film industry rather than heading to Great Britain or the United States.  The Australian New Wave, therefore, encompasses everything from Picnic at Hanging Rock to Mad Max, as well as a number of war films, art films and movies that are commonly called "Ozploitation" in the U.S.  About the only unifying theme is that the movies are, first and foremost, proudly Austr…

A bit of a warning here.  Typically I stray away from adult films, largely because they are barely films and more because they are inherently silly.  Since recently, for the interest of a podcast that I am doing with a friend critiquing, song by song, the works of Electric Light Orchestra, I checked out a film from 1976 called Ecstasy in Blue.  The reason for that was because that particular film uses ELO's music (without permission) as well as the closing music for Carrie, a piece by Wendy Carlos and I am sure several other bits of stolen copyright material.  The opening made it look like something I would review here but, alas, it ended there.  The director obviously had some talent, but the movie was your basic extremely low-budget 1970s porno, made after the whole porno chic trend had ended.

While that film in no way fit the format of my typical reviews, it got me thinking of one of the few adult films I have actually wanted to see over the years: Café Flesh.  It was a movie …

I don't think we'll ever see a period of cinema again that matches the early 1970s through the late 1990s.  That is a long period to think about, and film changed quite a lot during those decades; truly, the way films were made and audience expectations make films from those different decades appear almost like different species.  However, there was one thing that was true throughout: a director with a vision, if he played the game and made the big bosses enough money, could at some point do whatever they wanted - and, for some reason, studios let them.

This has rarely turned out well.  While Apocalypse Now somehow managed not to be the big disaster it looked like it was going to be, the same could not be said of Heaven's Gate.  As good as the latter movie is, it suffered from so much hubris from its own director and bad moves from the studio in order to try and survive after dumping so much money into the project that whether or not a quality film had been made was besid…

Howard Hughes is a subject of legend.  A multimillionaire, accomplished aviator, strange recluse and the instigator of numerous grandiose failures, he was the inspiration for both the villain in Diamonds Are Forever and had his own Martin Scorsese biography film (The Aviator), in which he was played by Leonardo De Caprio.  So much of Hughes's own story and personality looms over this film that, even today, it is more talked about than actually seen.

The truth is, it is neither the bloated mess you would expect a rich playboy's pet project to be, nor is it the grandiose statement he intended to make.  However, it is, in many ways, as innovative a piece of filmmaking as Citizen Kane or The Battleship Potemkin, just in terms of special effects and what could be done with a camera.  Filmed between 1927 and 1929, then largely refilmed before its release, there is still so much here that would influence action films in the future even if the underlying story itself was a bit trite …

It seems that we have reached a sort of singularity where the only movies released at this point are either super hero films or the latest Star Wars sequel or side project.  I know that somewhere out there someone is making decent (or indecent) action films that aren't mega-budget cartoons. 

Cartoons, however, seem to be what we are in for these days.  For some reason the recent round of Marvel films leading up to Avengers: Infinity War have seemed more and more like listening to a hyper six-year-old tell us about a movie he saw rather than attempting to be movies themselves.  Sadly, although I may be in the minority of truly liking Thor: The Dark World much more than its predecessor, the third visit to Asgard does nothing to improve on the series.

We find our titular Asgardian God (Chris Hemsworth) getting himself purposely captured by Surtur (Clancy Brown), a fire giant intent on bringing forth Ragnarok, or the end of days, to Asgard.  To prevent this Thor slays him and steels …

Dario Argento is known now primarily as a horror director, thanks to Suspiria and a string of supernatural and slasher features from his peak creative period from the mid-1970s through the late 1980s.  Highly influenced by Alfred Hitchcock and his own mentor Mario Bava, Argento himself became an influence on Brian De Palma, George Romero, John Carpenter and a number of classic American suspense and horror directors.

Before turning to horror, Argento was one of the most noted directors of giallo films, a genre of Italian crime films that often featured a combination of complex whodunit plots and brutal murder scenes.  Though he would return to the genre later in his career, Deep Red (originally titled Profondo rosso) was one of the last he would do for quite a while.

During a conference on parapsychology, psychic Helga Ulmann (Mach Méril) suddenly has a vision of the murderous thoughts of someone in the audience.  The experience causes her great concern, largely because the thoughts d…