Category: Media Studies

El Topo (Movie): Meaning, Analysis

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There is a cliché I want to see retired, no made illegal – the cliché of comparing something edgy to something bland by claiming ‘Such-and-such is like (insert bland item here) on acid’. The only exception would have to be El Topo, which really is a ‘Western on acid’. More specifically, this is a spaghetti western on a heavy dose of surrealist artist Luis Buñuel, author Herman Hesse and general 1960s esoterica. 

It’s obvious why this, the original midnight movie, was embraced by the likes of John Lennon, Dennis Hopper and Timothy Leary. It’s a violent, brutal, confusing, occasionally fascinating and allegorical film. Alejandro Jodorowsky infuses the violence of Peckinpah, the style of Leone and the eroticism of Arrabal. Jodorowsky not only writes and directs, he also plays the title role (which translates as ‘The Mole’), a mysterious black-clad gunfighter who claims to be God travelling through the desert, initially with his naked seven-year-old son . . . Read More

Easy Rider (Movie): Meaning, Analysis

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Just how cool is Easy Rider? 

Apparently we’ve now reached ‘post’ post-modern. There is a commercial running in America where a dull office drone is inserted via computer-generated animation into footage of Peter Fonda on his chopper from Easy Rider. Turns out the 9 to 5’er is just having a daydream aboard a commuter train because he is high … on Pepsi! 

People may argue that if Dennis Hopper himself will now do any number of corporate ads, then you could just as easily appropriate his creations also. If this is true, then remember that the movie didn’t get lame, the culture did. Rather than diminishing the spirit and era of Easy Rider, I think the ad indicts our own, therein making the film more appealing and vital. Shame on the vandals, not the object of their vandalism. 

Easy Rider is enjoyable as a moment frozen in time. No matter what hindsight casts upon it, or how it is appropriated and reinterpreted, it is hard to imagine a . . . Read More

Dr. Strangelove: Summary & Analysis

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The sheer audacity of attempting a dark comedy about nuclear annihilation at the height of the Cold War and only months after the assassination of President John Kennedy, would have assured Stanley Kubrick cult filmmaker status. 

When US General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) orders wing attack plan R into operation he sets planes on an irreversible bombing run into Russia. Powerless to stop them without the relevant three letter access code, the US President (Peter Sellars) and his advisors plan to warn Russia as best they can to prevent as many of the planes reaching their targets as possible. However, when the Russian Ambassador (Peter Bull) warns of the doomsday machine – a machine that will destroy all life on earth in response to a nuclear attack – things look bleak. 

Well shot, well written and well acted, it is a masterpiece of filmmaking. Kubrick embraced black and white when filmmakers began embracing it as an artistic choice. Camera . . . Read More

Down By Law (Movie): Summary, Analysis

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Jim Jarmusch is one of the filmmakers whose entire body of work – Stranger than Paradise (1983), Down by Law (1986), Mystery Train (1989), Night on Earth (1991), Dead Man (1995) and Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999) – has garnered a cult following. There is a distinctive ‘Jarmusch style’ running through his films, most evident in his pacing. He relishes taking his time, indicating his characters with odd, seemingly incidental details that say as much as any heavy exposition. 

It is often difficult to choose a single film when there is a cult around the director’s body of work. Comparable in many ways to another contemporary American cult director, Hal Hartley, each Jarmusch film is a step in the artist’s evolution. The scope, budgets and themes may expand with each picture, but an unmistakable style is imprinted on all. All his signature flourishes are in evidence in Jarmush’s second feature Down by Law. A low-budget, black-and-white cult favourite . . . Read More

Donnie Darko: Explained

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Dark, Darkest, Darko. 

Donnie Darko has already garnered a cult following. For over two years it has enjoyed an uninterrupted run in New York City, every Friday and Saturday at midnight at the Pioneer Theater. Even if the film fades from popular consciousness, it still may serve the purposes of illustrating some of the elements of cult cinema and how self-awareness affects whether an audience embraces a film. 

If pressed to give rules regarding cult films, I have imagined there would be only one rule; that one may not set out to purposely make a cult film. It’s like giving yourself a nickname – there is simply no way to do it. However, Donnie Darko seems to be a film constructed from a recipe of cult cinema elements. It self-consciously endeavours to be a cult film, and in so doing makes no small effort in informing viewers that they should agree. If the aforementioned rule were true, this would disqualify Donnie Darko. Yet it . . . Read More

The Day The Clown Cried (1972): Summary & Analysis

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What thread connects the varying projects elevated to ‘cult film’ status? There is no single definition to be sure, but you will appreciate the recurrence of exaggerated fascination developed by viewers for a specific film. At times this enormous interest is inversely proportional to the actual size of the audience. In other words: small audience plus huge fascination equals ‘cult film’. This logic necessitates including a film that has managed to become a true Hollywood legend and yet has been seen by less than 20 people. 

The film is the notorious The Day the Clown Cried based on a story about a dislikeable, unsuccessful (and gentile) German circus clown named Karl Schmidt who was sent to Auschwitz for satirising Hitler and was subsequently used by his Nazi captors to lead unsuspecting Jewish children into the gas chamber. Yes, someone wrote it. Someone else read it and actually said, ‘Yes, let’s do it!’ Someone financed it and someone even shot . . . Read More

Dawn Of The Dead (1978 Movie): Summary & Analysis

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When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth.

George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) is a low-budget classic, there is no disputing that. His second zombie feature Dawn of the Dead , however, is a bigger and more audacious film. Not exactly a sequel, Dawn of the Dead explores parallel themes with an expanded budget. I chose it over the first because one imagines that this is the film Romero wanted to make in the first place. And I for one am glad he did. It builds on the spirit and ideas of the original while establishing an identity of its own. 

The film has all the elements crucial to effective storytelling: great atmosphere, sympathetic characters and urgent pacing. It is this delicate crafting that allows some films to transcend mere horror. The characters ask the questions we would ask and take the steps we would take, and without being predictable it manages to always choose the most sensible . . . Read More

A Clockwork Orange – Movie – Explained

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Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell) is the leader of a quartet of ‘droogs’ in an unspecified English city in the near future. They spend their nights raping, brawling, attacking helpless drunks and breaking into houses. 

Fissures develop in the group when two of the four members, Dim (Warren Clarke) and Georgie (James Marcus), express an unwillingness to continue blindly following Alex’s lead. Alex’s response is to slash both of them. They bide their time and nurse their wounds until the opportunity arises to set Alex up. They strike at the scene of a botched burglary/murder, knocking him senseless and leaving him for the police. He is tried, convicted and sentenced to 14 years in prison. 

Alex becomes a model prisoner, upon whom the Minister of the Interior, anxious to reduce the prison population, allows brainwashing experiments to be conducted. He is sent to the Ludovico centre where he is forced to watch footage of brutal beatings, rape and Nazi . . . Read More

Carnival Of Souls (1962): Synopsis, Analysis

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Hailed as a low budget unintentional horror masterpiece, Carnival of Souls has become the standard for the late 50s, early 60s genre of American horror. Yet, conversely, it also seems to transcend the category entirely. Its deliberate pacing and unorthodox composition elements honestly seem more attuned to the sensibilities of contemporary, French new-wave cinema than its counterparts in American drive-in fare. Whether through its limited resources, or by conscious choice, Carnival of Souls ends up illustrating truth in the auteur’s axiom ‘less is more’. 

In 1962, industrial film director Herk Harvey decided to make a horror film. He had previously made about 40 films for school and industry with such titles as: What About School Spirit? (1958), Caring for Your Toys (1954), Street Safety Is Your Problem (1952) and Your Junior High Days (1961). He enlisted the help of fellow Kansans John Clifford (screenplay) and Maurice Prather (cinematographer) to help him, and . . . Read More

Brazil (Movie): Summary, Explanation

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When Kafka wrote The Trial, he set it out of any specific point in history, making it contemporary to all time. Whereas in 1948, when George Orwell wrote 1984, it had a necessarily futuristic element to it. When Terry Gilliam fused both these stories into his intellectually loaded and visually remarkable masterpiece, Brazil, one of the many ingenious aspects lay in his recognising that he was making both a contemporary film and a film out-of-time. He therefore created his own ‘meta-reality’. 

In Brazil, a generic Western society has become a bureaucratic web. The simplest exchange requires mountains of paperwork and strict adherence to procedures has replaced anyone’s ability to critically think about the banality and brutality around them. Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) is an anonymous functionary in a bland government ministry, ‘Information Management’. Much to the consternation of his upper class mother, Sam has repeatedly turned down promotions to the more . . . Read More