Flickering Myth

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

Has Showgirls actually become kind of good?

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Tom Jolliffe takes a look back at Showgirls, once universally derided and considered one of the worst films ever… but is it actually misunderstood? Upon its release in 1995, Paul Verhoeven’s trashy spectacular, Showgirls was obliterated by critics. It was a lavish, Vegas set tale with plenty of excess dismissed as vacuous, grimy and seedy. […]

Cinema’s Groundbreakers – Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon

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Continuing a look back at some of the most ground-breaking films in cinema, Tom Jolliffe takes a look at Rashomon… When looking back through the work of Akira Kurosawa, it would be difficult to pinpoint only one film as particularly ground-breaking. The truth his, through his early career in a post-war boom for Japanese cinema […]

An Undeniable Action Classic: Road House

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Tom Jolliffe looks back at the glorious action gem Road House… To quote movie aficionado Gordy LaSure (aka Richard Ayoade) from his book The Grip of Film (excellent read I shall add); “In the opening shot of Rowdy Herrington’s 1989 magnum opus about the secret world of security guards, the camera frames a pair of […]

Die Hard with Stallone, Seagal and Van Damme

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Tom Jolliffe ventures back to the 90’s, when three action icons made Die Hard riffs… It’s often said that the buff action specialists of the 80’s, who were larger than life and almost comically unstoppable were slowly pushed out of the forefront of the market by more every man heroes. Die Hard is often pinpointed […]

1930’s-50’s: The Golden Age of Mystery Films

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Tom Jolliffe on why the 30’s to 50’s were a golden age for mystery films… Whether it’s a murder mystery, or a cat and mouse quest to uncover a mystery, the 1930’s, up until the end of the 1950’s saw a prolific output of mystery films. Across world cinema, from Britain, to Hollywood to Europe […]

An Alternate Universe: Robert Pattinson plays The Joker

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Tom Jolliffe on why Robert Pattinson could have been even more interesting playing the Joker rather than Bruce Wayne… So an admission of somewhat contradicting myself. I’d recently written a piece on the potential for Batman fatigue given there’s so much Bat related action coming in the next year or two. Yet here I am […]

Wesley Snipes and a Welcome Return to Character Acting

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Tom Jolliffe looks at Wesley Snipes’ recent film work, and there seems to be a welcome shift to the kind of interesting character actor roles he was known for earlier in his career… Wesley Snipes saw something of a career down turn after hanging up his shades for Blade. Of course there have been well […]

An Action Classic That Never Happened: William Friedkin directs Stallone and Rothrock in The Executioner

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Tom Jolliffe dives back to a potential action classic that never got rolling. Sylvester Stallone as directed by William Friedkin, with Cynthia Rothrock also attached at one point… Let’s talks action. Let’s throw the name of an icon into the mix…Sylvester Stallone. The man who gave the world Rambo and Rocky. At a time during […]

September: The Movie Dumping Ground

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Tom Jolliffe looks back through the years at the month of September in Hollywood’s release calendar… Pretty much since Star Wars changed the face of film and ushered in the notion of the blockbuster, the cinema calendar has increasingly been segmented into pockets. Studios bet big and look to secure the summer releases. They tended […]