There is such a narrow boundary between interest and infatuation, and no one knows this better than the protagonist of Love and Death on Long Island, which focuses on a few months in the life of a pedantic English writer who finds himself accidentally seeing a teen-oriented comedy, and by almost a serendipitous turn of…
Author: The Postmodern Pelican
A Touch of Class (1973)
Infidelity is rarely funny, and in the rare instance that it is the source of a comedic romp, it often carries with it a sense of needing to rationalize what would drive characters to engage in sordid extramarital affairs – whether it be portraying their married life as one of dull and listless convention (as…
Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022)
The principle of “elevated” horror has become the bane of the existence of many fans of the genre, with the belief that this movement towards more trendy, auteur-driven horror is somehow indicative of the genre being taken seriously, rather than it just being the natural progression that tends to happen over time, where more prominent…
Murder, He Says (1945)
Something we don’t speak about very often is the vast number of comedies about outright murder produced during the 1940s. It seems like this decade, more than any other, made films that intentionally provoked laughter on the subject of the cold-blooded killing of people, whether it be strangers or those from within one’s domestic circle….
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022)
I’d like to start this discussion with a brief personal anecdote, which I believe helps establish a clear foundation for the forthcoming conversation. In 2019, I visited the World Press Photo Exhibition in Hanoi – and while there were dozens of incredible photographs, one stood out to me. The photograph, taken by Philip Montgomery, is…
Dirty Work (1998)
Hindsight is both a curse and a blessing, especially when it comes to the eventual critical reanalysis that every film will subsequently have at some point in its life, whether positive or negative. This is particularly relevant to the subject of today’s conversation, the Bob Saget- directed comedy Dirty Work, which was reviled as a…
Babylon (2022)
We’ve spoken on many occasions about the fact that Hollywood’s favourite topic of conversation is itself – you’d struggle to find someone within the industry that didn’t operate in a way where they loved nothing more than the sound of their own voice. There is certainly not any shortage of works that make bold and…
The Rose (1979)
From its very first moment, in which we see a small group of people enter a garage, which has posters and photographs of many counterculture icons plastered across every inch of the walls, we know that The Rose is going to be a challenging film, precisely because in this group of people, the one person…
Decision to Leave (2022)
For over half a century, we have seen many filmmakers engage in an act of chasing after Alfred Hitchcock – obviously not in the literal sense, but rather in how there have been concerted efforts to follow the guidelines he meticulously set down in his long and prolific career, with the term “Hitchcockian” becoming one…
I Know Where I’m Going! (1945)
One of the universal truths that we should all come around to believing is that, regardless of how much we try and attribute their films to being the product of style over substance, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger were masters of their craft. Whether or not we find value in the spectacles of Black Narcissus…
The Postmodern Pelican 