Post thumbnail of “Out West, Down South” in The Italianist.
2 July 2010
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“Out West, Down South” in The Italianist.

My latest article, on the cinematographic nuances of Damiano Damiani’s political Italian Western Quien sabe? (1966), appears in this summer’s edition of The Italianist. This publication has become established as one of the leading international journals of Italian Studies. The annual Film Issue provides an outlet for research into an aspect …

Post thumbnail of Mannaja: A Spaghetti Valediction
9 June 2010
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Mannaja: A Spaghetti Valediction

“HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME
HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME
Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight.
Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight.”
(T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land).
Sergio Martino’s Mannaja / A Man Called Blade (1977) is about as entertaining a death-rattle as one might hope to encounter, but a terminal gurgle it remains. The Italian Western phenomenon …

Post thumbnail of Framing Class Conflict in Michael Cimino’s “Heaven’s Gate”
25 January 2010
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Framing Class Conflict in Michael Cimino’s “Heaven’s Gate”

Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980) is, from a multitude of perspectives, a book-end. If Owen Wister is said to have spawned the Western genre (in fact a slightly spurious claim, given the multifarious incarnations of the myth in popular culture prior to The Virginian), Cimino is widely credited as its …

Post thumbnail of “A Marxist’s Gotta Do What a Marxist’s Gotta Do”
11 January 2010
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“A Marxist’s Gotta Do What a Marxist’s Gotta Do”

Cultural Borrowings: Appropriation, Reworking, Transformation, edited by Iain Robert Smith, is now online. This exciting new eBook of original scholarship on processes of adaptation in film, television and new media is a special edition of the peer-reviewed journal Scope: an Online Journal of Film and TV Studies. It includes my …

Post thumbnail of The Men Who Stare at Goats: A New Vietnam Myth?
21 November 2009
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The Men Who Stare at Goats: A New Vietnam Myth?

At first sight, Grant Heslov’s latest offering The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009) resides alongside the whimsical fantasia of an earlier McGregor outing, Tim Burton’s Big Fish (2003): the picaresque adventures of a little guy in a mysterious dream world. There is, however, more to this film than such a …

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