Clik here to view.
Devil Girl From Mars (1954)
In spite of plentiful competition, few film titles of 1950s are as strikingly, screamingly, irresistibly camp as Devil Girl From Mars, a low-budget British attempt to get in on the decade’s sci-fi...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Clik here to view.
For the Love of Film…start your engines!
Ladies and gentlemen, the time is here. A time to love, a time to die, a time…to blog. Yes, the third annual Film Preservation Blogathon is nigh: official kick-off time is Sunday, May 13, 10:00 a.m....
View ArticleClik here to view.
This is your captain speaking…
…as you can see, this blog is not really This Island Rod, per se, but in fact This Lifeboat Rod. Never fear, this is still a refuge from the cruel sea, the bloody conflict, the insanity that turns man...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Hold on for a thrilling finale...
It's the last day of the blogathon, friends, and what an event it's been: for all of you who have laboured so hard and so long to keep this cauldron of cinephilia on the boil, I salute you. But the end...
View ArticleClik here to view.
...The End.
Postscript: because I'm a really nice guy (you guys owe me something now, preferably in a bottle), I present two late-comers: Silken scribe Sheila O'Malley, she of the SheilaVariations, is fascinated...
View ArticleCoda: For The Love of Film
Well, folks, the 2012 Film Preservation Blogathon has wrapped up, and I can say without hesitation that it’s been a great success. The six days of the blogathon saw 112 bloggers post 208 essays,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Civic Mythology in Cinema: a sequence from Gallipoli (1981)
An academic piece.Amidst the visual and narrative sprawl of Peter Weir’s 1981 film Gallipoli, the sequence in which the film’s heroes Archy (Mark Lee) and Frank (Mel Gibson) spend a brief interlude in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Immortals (2011)
Billed by some as an artistic visionary’s riposte to the pompous, FX-driven, mythology-derived sludge that the CGI-riddled, post-The Lord of the Rings fantasy cinema has given rise to, Tarsem Singh’s...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Turn Me On, Dammit! (Få meg på, for faen, 2011)
Mordant Scandinavian slice-of-life movies aren’t much rarer than teenage angst flicks, but Jannicke Systad Jacobsen’s brief and gossamer, yet exact and flavourful Turn Me On, Dammit! is a superior...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Declaration of War (La guerre est déclarée, 2011)
It’s peculiar how a film can seem for me both intermittently striking and certainly deeply felt, and yet also curiously facetious all at once. Declaration of War, a labour of personal love from French...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Chronicle (2012)
There’s a real case to be made for the return of the B-movie to modern cinema screens: compact, smart, fast-paced films that don’t bear all the burden of being spectacles big enough to shake worlds or...
View ArticleClik here to view.
An Unavoidable Paucity of Posts
Apologies, all, for the lack of action on this blog in the last few weeks, and it's likely to continue for the time being, as I'm engaged in a large writing project at the moment that's eating up most...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Bourne Legacy (2012)
The original Bourne trilogy grew out of Doug Liman’s smoothly orchestrated, fashionably reserved 2001 adaptation of Robert Ludlum’s novel, and was expanded by Paul Greengrass into something less...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Lawless (2012)
Of the movies of 2012 I’ve seen so far, few have put together such a surplus of promising raw materials as Lawless, nor wasted them as egregiously. I'm no big fan of director John Hillcoat: whilst he...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)
Ten years after Sam Raimi’s Spider-Manreinvigorated the superhero genre with spectacular financial success and a measure of aesthetic worth, reboot time has rolled around already. Apparently...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Ladies and Gentlemen, presenting The White Shadow
Earlier this year, This Island Rod took part in the third annual Film Preservation Blogathon, alongside Marilyn Ferdinand at Ferdy On Films and Farran Smith Nehme at Self-Styled Siren, for the sake of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Les Démoniaques (1973)
Jean Rollin’s debut film, Le Viol du Vampire (1967), began life as a short quickly flung together at the behest of a distributor to fill out the allotted theatrical bill with another vampire film, and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Argo (2012)
Argo is a tale about a fake film, and it is itself a fake film. Made with perfunctory professionalism by a stolid actor turned stolid director, Argo sets out to explore one of modern geopolitics’...
View ArticleClik here to view.
MASH (1970)
MASH commences with a sequence that is at once extremely familiar and yet demands new attention. Helicopters carry mangled men in flight, suspended between heaven and earth, life and death, a sense of...
View Article