Apr 1, 2015

Roy Scheider as Dr A. Benway in Naked Lunch (1991). 1: Naked Lunch (1959) by William Burroughs So I am assigned to engage the services of Doctor Benway for Islam Inc. Dr. Benway had been called in as advisor to the Freeland Republic, a place given over to free love and continual bathing. The citizens […]
Jun 10, 2014

The Spider’s Stratagem (1970) is Bernardo Bertolucci’s adaptation of the Jorge Luis Borges story The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero; Death and the Compass (1992) is Alex Cox’s adaptation of the story Death and the Compass by the same author; Spiderweb (1977) is an earlier adaptation of Death and the Compass which is […]
Jan 2, 2011

Flower Me Gently (2010) by Linn Olofsdotter. • “Many of Moorcock’s editorials are published here, and they still make exhilarating reading. Then, as now, Moorcock set his face against a besetting English sin: a snobbish parochial weariness, an ironic superiority to the frightful oiks who have started filling up the streets. You can almost hear, […]
Apr 17, 2009

Blood, guts and bullets | Alex Cox on death scenes in Spaghetti Westerns.
Posted in {film}, {noted} | Comments Off
Aug 24, 2006

Cockfighter is a film by Monte Hellman from American cinema’s great decade (the Seventies) that we’re not allowed to see in this country because it contains cruelty to chickens. This week the Edinburgh International Film Festival halted a planned screening after being informed it contravened a 1937 law: Change to Programmed Performance: Cockfighter Mon 21 […]
Posted in {film}, {pulp} | Comments Off
Jun 16, 2006

Va-va-voom! Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and Orson Welles’s great Touch of Evil (1958) both came at the end of the film noir cycle in the late 1950s. Both films look into the dark heart of American life during that decade, with Aldrich tackling nuclear paranoia and Welles dealing with racism towards Latin-Americans and political and […]