Shock Corridor

Brief break in the Hitchcock - it's coming, I swear. Just watched this... 'The Angel's Share' ...twice. Loved it. Ken Loach is a wonderful director. Not in the same the way perhaps that I've talked about Hitchcock (IT'S COMIN'!!!) or Wong Kar-Wai or Orson Welles. Ken Loach succeeds because he loves people. He can get performances from actors that have never, or barely, worked before that other directors can't coax from actors that have done the job for years (look at Paul Brannigan in the scene at the TASC). In this film he, and the equally wonderful writer Paul Laverty, also show how comedy doesn't need to be over exaggerated and can be firmly situated in 'real' life, in circumstances we can all understand, as well as being sympathetic to it's subjects, and not feeling the need to be abusive or condescending to them or us. They bring the people usually frowned upon by society and those usually looked upon as the stalwarts of soci

Howdy. Offft! This one has been a long time coming but here's another wee post looking at some of Alfred Hitchcock's output...his filmic output, nothing else - certainly nothing biological that would be disgusting. It seems timely as a load of his films have had a digital makeover and Vertigo (1958) completes it's 30 year climb to the top of the BFI: Top 50 Greatest Films of All Time list. Anyhee, the gist is, I read an article in the Guardian recently which described Hitchcock's representation of women in a less than flattering light: 'the female characters in his [Hitchcock's] films range from stupid to cunning to traitorous' ( Bidisha, Guardian, 2010 ) and I thought...ohh, I don't know about that and immediately sprang into action, composing this response. In my own immutable, straightforward and succinct style, this is currently looking like two posts and it will hopefully end there. The crux of these posts is to suggest that the female charact