While their more notable collaboration may have been The Third Man (quite simply one of the greatest films ever made), Carol Reed and Graham Greene did collaborate on a few other projects, one of which is the woefully underrated The Fallen Idol, which is based on a short story Greene himself wrote in the 1930s,…
Author: The Postmodern Pelican
Best Sellers (2021)
Films about writers are about as effective as books about filmmaking – they’re only good to a certain extent, since there is an inherent challenge in cross-medium interference, whereby looking at one through the lens of the other can sometimes be a bit difficult. However, when they work, it can sometimes be extraordinary, especially when…
Nobody’s Fool (1994)
We all know someone like Donald “Sully” Sullivan – a person whose fierce rebellion against anything that even vaguely suggests that they are on the older end of the spectrum becomes almost their entire personality, which makes them both frustrating and endearing individuals. This is the stock character that occupies Robert Benton’s exceptional Nobody’s Fool,…
Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul. (2022)
In a quote that is often evoked when the subject of belief is brought up, Karl Marx so boldly called religion “the opium of the people. It is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of our soulless conditions”, which has often been appropriated as the source…
Unfaithfully Yours (1948)
It seems almost absurd that Preston Sturges continuously fades into the background when we are talking on the subject of greatest filmmakers to ever work in the genre of comedy. Much like his contemporaries Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder, Sturges was a filmmaker with a clear authorial vision, which extended beyond him being merely a…
Elizabethtown (2005)
Despite having both critical and commercial success over the course of a few decades, Cameron Crowe remains one of the more polarizing filmmakers working today, specifically because he seems to lack a certain panache that makes him interesting. He had radical successes with Jerry Maguire and Almost Famous, so much that he was essentially given…
Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022)
What is art other than just finding creative ways to tell a story? Every individual that has been compelled to create something has done so in order to convey a particular message, whether it is capturing something external in the world that surrounds them, or a more subtle meaning embedded within their minds. We are…
Waking Ned (1998)
There was roughly a twenty-year period between the 1980s and early 2000s where it was impossible to take a step outside one’s own front door and not be bombarded by the latest cinematic British sensation. For some reason, Hollywood grew to really appreciate these irreverent stories of the British Isles and their prodigious offspring, so…
Dédée d’Anvers (1948)
By all accounts, Dédée d’Anvers is a deeply conventional film. It takes the form of a run-of-the-mill melodrama about a lonely and depressed sex worker who is under the ferocious control of her cruelly abusive husband, and who dreams of escape, which comes in the form of a dashing and valiant seaman that literally sails…
Resurrection (2022)
Resurrection is a film that was made about two decades too late. This kind of deeply disturbing, undeniably bizarre psychological thriller seems to be more at home with those low-budget blockbusters that centered on ordinary people having their fragile lives shaken by the presence of some vaguely psychopathic individual, who gradually encroaches into their lives…
The Postmodern Pelican 