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The Death of the Author: The Impact of Off-Screen Behaviour on On-Screen Antics…

The rather convolutedly-titled Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho will be arriving soon, the director’s Vertigo was recently named by Sight & Sound as the best film of all time and the British Film Institute is running a season of the director’s films. (There’s even a nice blu ray box set being released in October.) However, this focus on Alfred Hitchcock has, naturally, brought some focus on to the less pleasant aspects of his character. October, for example, will also see HBO airing The Girl, a documentary exploring his relationship with Tippi Hedren. She has some choice words on his character.

“I think he was an extremely sad character,” she said during a panel discussion of HBO’s upcoming The Girl, which recounts her troubled relationship with the director. “We are dealing with a brain here that was an unusual genius, and evil, and deviant, almost to the point of dangerous, because of the effect that he could have on people that were totally unsuspecting.”

Of course, such accusations and allegations are by no means new, but it does raise an interesting question about those masters of cinema. Even for those of us who resist the supermarket tabloid gossip about engagements and break-ups and cute-sounding-couple-nicknames, is it ever possible to divorce filmmaking from the person either in front or behind the camera?

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Non-Review Review: Wanted

We caught Wanted on Sky Anytime this evening, and figured it was worth a look. My aunt loved it, my uncles seemed less-than-enthuised, and me? I’m not quite sure what to make of it. If I had to sum it up, I’d say that there are worse ways to spend an evening, but there are a whole host of better ones too. On the summer blockbusterfare, this is pretty distant from The Matrix or The Dark Knight or even Iron Man. It doesn’t have the kitsch value of Independence Day either (“… and today… is our… independence day!”). But it is significantly better than Transformers or Bad Boys II.

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