Word: filmic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...American dope smuggler in the hellish prisons of a Middle Eastern country and his eventual escape make up the plot of Alan Parker's shattering new film, Midnight Express, but to so limit the description of the movie is something akin to samming up Citizen Kane as the filmic biography of a newspaper magnate. Like all extraordinary movies based on real people or actual events, Midnight Express has boldly transcended the limits of its true-life story to bring forth a larger-than-life refinement. The five-year incarceration of Billy Hayes becomes an inspiring epic of one very ordinary...
...Adventures of Robin Hood. Erroll Flynn's greatest romantic performance is Captain Blood--but Robin Hood is preferred by many transexual classicists because of the cute breeches. None of the Disney gruel here. Second greatest soundtrack to Days of Heaven. Some filmic dryasdusts dredge up the 1914 seven hour version with Belgian director Lionel Von Rennselaeaer's lighthearted experiments in figure/ground confusion done on highly explosive nitrate stock, but the lead was played by a stolid burgher whose sword work looked something like Boog Powell trying to bunt. Flynn, the great rakehell, leaves no doubt that he knew...
Like ephemeral puffs of exhaust, current commercial movies are exhaled by a sidetracked Hollywood locomotive caught in the cartoon loop of capitalist consumption. When we can gain sufficient distance to see ourselves in the Hollywood mirror, we may hopefully give due recognition to other filmic trains of thought which reflect light on the nature of film as perception, and cultural utterance. Brakhage, as a metaphor for the exploding, embryonic, experimental film ghetto of insight, is an opportunity for those interested in the potential and future for film to discover a most human vehicle of introduction...
Last week I took the Red Line down into the Combat Zone, to check out an "art film". What I saw was barely filmic, let alone artistic. The Astor Theatre on Tremont Street was showing Private School Girls, a German import. I had not been enticed by the silly ad in the Globe ("Karen made the Dean's List... and a few others"), but by a simple desire to see what skin flicks were all about...
Othello. Stuart Burge's direction of a British National Theater production, starring Sir Laurence Olivier, Maggie Smith, and Frank Finlay, is a record of an outstanding stage production. Avoiding, for the most part, the elaborate "filmic" effects of so many Shakespearean films, it shows that straight-forward filming of a play can succeed admirably...