Flickering Myth

Geek Culture | Movies, TV, Comic Books & Video Games

Cage as Cage, Van Damme as Van Damme: Two Icons Play Their Ultimate Role

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Tom Jolliffe looks at Nic Cage in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, and compares with Jean-Claude Van Damme’s temporarily redefining role as himself in JCVD… April 2022 included a special day for me. It was something of an event. I got to see Nicolas Cage strut his stuff on the big screen. Maybe 10-15 […]

Northman the Barbarian: How Conan Courses Through The Northman

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Tom Jolliffe looks at the similarities between The Northman and Conan the Barbarian. Spoilers follow… After success and masses of acclaim for his small scale masterworks The Witch and The Lighthouse, director Robert Eggers went large scale in his third outing. The Northman is a big budget Viking revenge epic. In every way, it’s the […]

Is Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman a ‘vanity project’?

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Anghus Houvouras on Netflix vanity projects and The Irishman… Modern journalism is about rapid-fire reactions. That is the highest priority. Quickly getting a ‘hot take’ out for the world to see before anyone else does in the hopes of getting likes, upvotes and views. Getting things right is a distant second. Which is why I […]

The Art of Ambiguity in Cinema

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Tom Jolliffe looks at the finest in ambiguous cinema, and asks ‘how do you pull it off?’…  Often in the law books of screenwriting there’s a section which might tell the studious aspiring writer that a film must have clarity. Plot threads must lead to resolution. Each act and your central character arcs should be […]

The Return of the Raging Boll!

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Tom Jolliffe on the prospect of Uwe Boll returning to the director’s chair… In modern cinema, at a time when mega budget studio films are absorbing most of the finance and the vast majority of cinema exhibition space, there has been a shift in the medium. Cinema started as a place of creative expression, where […]

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End – 15 Years Later

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Hasitha Fernando looks back at Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End at 15… Somewhere in the early 2000s Walt Disney Studios had an ambitious plan of developing a feature length film based on one of their most popular theme park rides – Pirates of the Caribbean. To achieve their goal, they had producer turned […]

Five Essential Obi-Wan Kenobi Star Wars Stories From Beyond The Movies

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Ahead of the Disney+ premiere of Star Wars: Obi-Wan Kenobi, Ceridwen Millington looks at five essential Obi-Wan stories from beyond the movies… Obi-Wan Kenobi is definitely one of the most intriguing figures in the Star Wars universe. He is obviously one of the most important, being the first Jedi that viewers met and a mentor […]

The Must Watch Korean Films of Cannes 2022

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Tom Jolliffe looks ahead to three absolutely must watch Korean films about to hit Cannes… South Korean film and TV has boomed in worldwide appeal in recent years. The Oscars success of Parasite was followed by the all consuming power of Squid Game, which was THE water cooler series of 2021. The nation appears to […]

The Box Office Problem: The Desertion of the Cinephiles

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Tom Jolliffe looks at the disappointing box office returns for The Northman and The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, and the possible implications for cinema… The box office has been improving of late. We’re getting back to a stage of careful optimism and growth closer to the kind of numbers which films were pulling in […]