A common thread that weaves its way through most films dealing with the British Empire is the exciting, Boy’s Own spirit of martial bravado. Lives of a Bengal Lancer, The Four Feathers and Gunga Din all embody this spirt in their own way. The flip side, portrayed far less frequently on screen, are the frequent compromises needed to maintain the Empire itself. While Bruce Beresford’s sublime Breaker Morant does feature at least one enthralling fight scene (a rather fantastic example of fish shooting OUT of a barrel) the bulk of the film takes place within the courtroom. It’s in this setting that Jack Thompson delivers perhaps his greatest performance as he lays out his closing argument in defence of Morant, Witton and Handcock. I’m delighted to offer this review is part of the British Empire in Film Blogathon hosted by The Stalking Moon and Phantom Empires. Breaker Morant – directed by Bruce Beresford (1980) In Short Up against impossible odds during a courts martial he knows to be rigged, defence lawyer Major Thomas presents his devastating argument. Trailer...

This is super cute. 14 famous film breakdonws recreated using only stock footage from...

Removed from his home country and deposited in a dusty backwater a man might be expected to drift. Removed from his job, reduced in social standing and abandoned by his wife that same man might drift further still, perhaps into isolation, introversion and morose self pity. This is certainly the path Geoffrey Fermin, former British Consul to the Mexican town of Cuernavaca is taking in Under the Volcano, a late entry in the great John Huston’s canon. We’re never told whether the exit from the diplomatic corps was forced or voluntary, but it hardly seems to matter. We meet the former consul on the eve of Mexico’s Day of the Dead. He is immaculately turned out in tuxedo and shades and is being heralded through the town’s graveyards by a wild dog. He has been drinking. He arrives at a local bar and continues to drink. Then he manoeuvres a friend into a nightclub and proceeds to drink more, a lot more. He also disgraces himself so repairs to a local chapel where he says a prayer to the virgin Mary that estranged wife return to him. The next day, in the dying hours of his all-night bender she returns to him. A hallucination? Some Mexican magical realism? Or has Yvonne, embodied by the fragrant Jacqueline Bisset really decided to return to the arms of her dipsomaniac ex-husband? The rest of the film follows the pair – later joined by Geoffrey’s half brother, who may or may not have had an affair with Yvonne – as they debate politics, philosophy and the future, all the while surrounded by the ongoing celebrations of death. Does this sound like boring film-making? A self indulgent experiment by Huston? Well from a certain point of view it might...

Invented by Garrett Brown in the early 70s, the steadicam shot has become one of the most dynamic and exciting forms of cinematography. Here is a tremendous supercut put together by Refocused Media as an homage to the...

Lovely Tribute – no more words...

Christian Annyas over at the marvelous Movie Title Stills Collection put together this single slide of all of Stanley Kubrick’s logos. Nice to see them all in one place. My fave title must be A Clockwork Orange, though my favourite of his films is, I think Barry Lyndon. All Kubrick title cards are...

This is wonderful – a supercut of movies that break the 4th wall. H/T Leigh...

Scott Saslow’s summer project for the Color Fundamentals course at FAU. It’s a representation of the colour wheel using movie clips. The music is from Sneakers, A Beautiful Mind, and Bicentennial Man, all composed and conducted by James Horner. Scott...

There’s a nice running gag that plays out again and again in The Stunt Man. The main character performs a sequence of increasingly preposterous death-defying feats and just as he’s about to make his escape he falls into the clutches of a horde of germanic soldiers. The director waits perhaps a beat too long to yell ‘Cut’ and our protagonist begins to doubt this is a movie after all and maybe this mob really is out to tear him to shreds. It serves as both a neat look inside the fevered mind of the main man and as a metaphor for the tricksiness of the film itself. Cameron is a young loner on the run from the law who takes refuge in a beach town. His arrival causes the inadvertent death of the lead stunt driver on the set of a movie shooting in the area so the director, for his own warped reasons but also because he’s “fallen madly in love with the dark side of your nature” hires the new arrival to fill in for the dead man, even making him dye his hair and take on the man’s name. Cameron is happy to go along with the charade as it keeps him out of the hands of the cops and since it pays $600 a stunt and he discovers he’s something of a natural, it’s easy money too. The problem is that as the film progresses and the director begins to dream up increasingly bizarre feats for him to perform Cameron starts to wonder whether he is being lined up for a fall, soon to go the same way as his predecessor. Sure Cameron is a naive kid and might be unable to see the blurry line between fiction and reality...