“We make movies” says World Wrestling Entertainment chairman Vince McMahon in the 1999 wrestling documentary, Beyond the Mat.
The WWE didn’t actually make movies then, they only made wrestling. That fact, combined with Vince’s trademark “I am a crazy man” delivery, prompted lots of chuckles at the screening but he had a point.
There are many parallels between professional wrestling and cinema. I’ve been wrestling for 15 horrendously painful years now and it continues to astound me when people who love the fiction of cinema are unable to reconcile that same love with the fiction of wrestling.
Is vengeance ever justice? Is taking the law into one’s own hands for the apparent betterment of society ever acceptable? Can two wrongs ever make a right? These are among the philosophical questions asked in John Doe: Vigilante, the new Australian film by director Kelly Dolen. In the tradition of Michael Winner’s Death Wish, Neil Jordan’s The Brave One, and TVs Dexter, the film features a confessed vigilante killer who offs the crims who haunt our streets. In this film, the vigilante spends much of his time attempting to explain and justify his actions to authorities, […]
Greg Sestero has patience to spare. A fact not surprising considering his involvement in the making of The Room, a film considered one of the best worst films ever made. The film, with cult appeal similar to Troll 2 and the Ed Wood films, has screened regularly at Melbourne’s Cinema Nova. Star of the film, and author of The Disaster Artist (Simon & Schuster), the new book about making The Room, Sestero recently spent two nights entertaining Nova guests with a documentary screening, a Q&A, a rousing screening of Wiseau’s film, and a hell of a lot of […]
“Did you ever see that scene in Scanners where that dude’s head blew up?”
This month sees the release of David Cronenberg’s seminal Scanners on BluRay through Criterion. To celebrate, we’re looking at seven films from the director’s early career –- films that, when viewed back to back, showcase the development of one of cinema’s great visionaries
Canadian-born Cronenberg’s work is often inspired by the inner workings of the human body: its pleasure receptors, its tendency to mutate, and its ongoing war with infection. Cronenberg has been making movies since the 1960s. His films, while challenging, contain a strange, […]
Only John Jarratt could compare the horrors of Mick Taylor’s limb-slicery to the majestic waves of high tide Bondi Beach. It sounds like an impossible metaphor, but hearing it via Jarratt’s surprisingly soft-spoken eloquence, it makes sense. Jarratt suggests rough waves, like the Australian outback, contain as much magnificence as dread. And that there’s something innate in all of us that wants to take a closer look.
We’re drawn, as audiences, to what we fear. Jarratt’s film, Wolf Creek [2005], exemplified this by creating its own waves at the Aussie box-office bringing a profit in excess of $25 million worldwide, […]
