Kevin Costner – Duds and Diamonds

I was watching “Open Range” the other night on television and that got me pondering about the career of Kevin Costner as actor, producer and director. He gave quite a mature performance as Charley Waite the free grazer but he still couldn’t hold a candle to that old scene stealer Robert Duvall. Of course, Costner [...]

Film Making – The New Punks

In one of my previous posts I talked about the future of film-making and how easy it is to get started nowadays. Any one with a home video camera and a PC can make a film.
Well, it is even easier than that, because any one with a mobile phone (with camera that can take video) [...]

Film Making – The Future

It must be a great time to be a young energetic and imaginative film-maker at the moment. “The world is your lobster!” as Derek Trotter might have said. Why do I say that?  Because it seems to me that they have more options now than their predecessors ever had.
It was not so long ago that fresh-faced [...]

Heaven’s Gate (1981) – Film Masterpiece or Mess?

I’ve always had a fascination for this film. I’m not quite sure whether it’s the sort of fascination you get when you stumble upon a car crash (a rubber-necking sort of fascination) or an admiration for what the film was striving for and, maybe, could have been. The facts and figures around Heaven’s Gate are [...]