Films @ Dave’s Info Cafe

I watched Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven” last night again and marvelled at the screenplay by David Webb Peoples. There are many things to admire about it. As most of you will know the premise of Unforgiven is that a killer comes out of retirement after 11 years to do one last killing for money when he [...]

I watched Elizabeth on the TV the other night. Again. It must be the third or fourth time that I have seen the film. It never ceases to amaze me. It is the ultimate political thriller and still manages to rack up the tension even though you know she survives and thrives in the final [...]

The western as a genre was dead until 1989 but was revived by, of all things, a made for TV mini series directed by an Englishman. That series was Lonesome Dove, a four part drama, that rekindled an American love for the western. It was made for the small screen but it had epic ambitions [...]

John Ford’s westerns have influenced so many directors throughout the world so it was not so much of a surprise when “westerns” started being made outside the Hollywood system. The most famous mutation of the traditional western was the spaghetti western. These were films made largely in Europe (Spain being the most believable location to [...]

I haven’t really posted anything about genres so far so I thought I would start with one of my favourite genres – the western. Genres are a way of categorizing films that have a loose set of similar characteristics. They are inevitably vague with flexible boundaries but include sets of conventions that recur in many [...]

A film lives or dies by its beginning. If you haven’t hooked the audience within the first twenty minutes it is an uphill battle from then on. The first twenty minutes of a film are crucial to its success artistically and, no doubt, financially. A brilliant beginning can make a good film great or a [...]

To pigeonhole it, I suppose you might call it a revenge thriller. You have to admire its bravado and confidence in the cinematography and acting.

I know I’ve already done a post about Continuity and Montage editing some time ago but I’ve had some more thoughts recently that help explain and develop the idea of Montage. As you will know from my previous post, the idea of montage is to put seemingly unrelated pictures or scenes together that leaves the [...]

Many people have read the books by Thomas Harris that introduced the serial killer, Dr Hannibal Lecter, to an unsuspecting world. Who can forget Anthony Hopkin’s performance in Silence of the Lambs when that story was transferred to the silver screen. However, his first appearance was several years earlier in a small but pivotal cameo [...]

As you can see from the first part of this I am a fan of the old style epics which are usually historical stories with universal themes involving large scale conflict, and where no expense is spared, either on the costumes, settings or numbers of extras to fill the screen. However, apart from Gladiator and [...]