Roderick Heath
@roderickheath.bsky.social
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New on This Island Rod - yes, you read that right - I look at the Citizen Kane of pulp adventure movies, William Cameron Menzies and Marcel Varnel's Chandu The Magician:
thisislandrod.blogspot.com/2026/01/chan...
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Chandu The Magician (1932)
A gem of the early sound era, Chandu The Magician is also one of the purest attempts to conjure on the cinema screen the flav...
https://thisislandrod.blogspot.com/2026/01/chandu-magician-1932.html
about 13 hours ago
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"A gem of the early sound era, Chandu The Magician is also one of the purest attempts to conjure on the cinema screen the flavour of a certain kind of pulp storytelling..." - new (!) at This Island Rod:
thisislandrod.blogspot.com/2026/01/chan...
about 7 hours ago
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New on This Island Rod - yes, you read that right - I look at the Citizen Kane of pulp adventure movies, William Cameron Menzies and Marcel Varnel's Chandu The Magician:
thisislandrod.blogspot.com/2026/01/chan...
loading . . .
Chandu The Magician (1932)
A gem of the early sound era, Chandu The Magician is also one of the purest attempts to conjure on the cinema screen the flav...
https://thisislandrod.blogspot.com/2026/01/chandu-magician-1932.html
about 13 hours ago
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reposted by
Roderick Heath
Here it is: Confessions of a Film Freak 2025, the biggest yet, featuring comments on 76 films and my Favourite Films of the Year list:
filmfreedonia.com/2025/12/29/c...
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Confessions of a Film Freak 2025
By Roderick Heath Jump to review index Jump to Favourite Films of 2025 List Both personally and in cinematic terms, 2025 has been a very rough road, and perhaps the end of the line in general. As s…
https://filmfreedonia.com/2025/12/29/confessions-of-a-film-freak-2025/
21 days ago
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Viewing: McG's Terminator Salvation. I started watching this once back when, didn't finish. I should have left it that way. Generic post-'poc shoot-em-up in Terminator skin.
1 day ago
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Rewatch: Jack Smight's Midway. Apt follow-up viewing to Tora! Tora! Tora!. Patched together on the cheap but at least, unlike Emmerich's take, doesn't turn subject into Star Wars; finicky, nuts-and-bolts take on the agonies of this kind of warfare.
2 days ago
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Rewatch: John Landis' Into The Night. "When you die you don't go to a Ramada Inn." "How do you know?"
3 days ago
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Rewatch: Ken Hughes' Cromwell. As a timely reminder that even kings, eventually, can find themselves in the dock.
4 days ago
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My review of The Force Awakens from just over 10 years ago. My lukewarm-ness on this felt out of step and exposed then; now of course it feels like I was far too kind.
filmfreedonia.com/2015/12/17/s...
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Star Wars – Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
. . Director/Coscreenwriter: J. J. Abrams By Roderick Heath And so it begins. Again. After months of feverish anticipation, it finally came down to me amidst a movie theatre filled by fans, many dr…
https://filmfreedonia.com/2015/12/17/star-wars-episode-vii-the-force-awakens-2015/
5 days ago
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Rewatch: Fleischer-Masuda-Fukasaku's Tora! Tora! Tora! "There's your confirmation!"
5 days ago
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I'm kind of pulling for Rose Byrne to win the Oscar now, in part because I still remember her getting patronised by Aussie critics at the time of Two Hands, as they all foamed at the mouth for Heath Ledger and Bryan Brown.
6 days ago
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I always feel so intensely flattered and humbled when David Hudson includes me in these...
add a skeleton here at some point
6 days ago
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Too many people seem to be preoccupied with rescuing/restoring The Magnificent Ambersons and not nearly enough with actually watching The Magnificent Ambersons.
6 days ago
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Viewing: Michael Lehmann's Hudson Hawk. At times hit the wiseguys-do-Losey's Modesty Blaise vibe it seemed to be aiming for, but nobody involved had anything like the finesse required. A serious mess, but still, by '90s bomb standards it was Andrei Rublev.
6 days ago
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Viewing: George Cukor's Dinner At Eight. Shows it stage roots a little raw at points, but still works dynamite in surprisingly jagged oscillations of tragedy and comedy and a median of everyday angst.
7 days ago
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It's very telling that the crux of the argument has been manufactured as whether Ross was defending himself in some manner, and not what gave him and his fellows any right to create that situation in the first place.
8 days ago
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Finished The Terror. Generally a strong series, although some revisions of the book were baffling. Admittedly, Crozier joining a psychic shamanic cult who let Tuunbaq eat out their tongues and play them like human bagpipes would have been hard to visualise.
8 days ago
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At all times, and in all places, one basic truth must be constantly spoken and enforced: the state is the servant of the people. The people are not servants of the state. The state exists for their good and welfare, not the other way around.
10 days ago
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Started watching the TV adaptation of Dan Simmons' The Terror, 3 eps in. Beautifully mounted and generally faithful even if the direction's a bit mannered in places (bloody Edward Berger on the first two). Jared Harris customarily great.
10 days ago
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Disgusting. And all the more disgusting for its inevitability. I hope the US realises what it's looking like more and more to the rest of the world.
11 days ago
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Status update:
12 days ago
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Not to play into fond fantasies but listening to Trump recently it's truly striking how old and tired and borderline coherent he seems. It took over three years doing the job to wear Biden down that much.
12 days ago
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I hate this moment in time so deeply sometimes I can hardly breathe.
12 days ago
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I once knew a man who'd been warned by doctors to stop drinking or he'd drop dead. He didn't and, of course, died. Trump supporters remind me of him - the pleasure of the night of drunken ecstasy is all that matters, no matter how it's rotting them out.
12 days ago
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Rewatch: Mario Bava's Knives of the Avenger. Such a nifty movie, cunningly and artfully executed on a very tight budget, simple yet fascinatingly complex. Also, Cameron Mitchell was The Man. Even Space Mutiny couldn't defeat him.
12 days ago
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Rewatch: David Bruckner's The Ritual. I'd half-forgotten what a little banger this one is - creepy, intense, exceptionally well-acted.
13 days ago
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In other news, Operation Change The Subject was a brilliant success.
14 days ago
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I'll always find critiquing the plots of comic book movies like they're serious sci-fi intensely silly. It's a mode of storytelling closer to the Brothers Grimm or Ovid than to Isaac Asimov.
14 days ago
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Samuel Johnson was of course right about patriotism and scoundrels, but I doubt he knew how right...
15 days ago
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Psychotic bullshit.
16 days ago
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Rewatch: Wolfgang Petersen's Troy. So the plot's fresh in my head for when the sequel comes out later this year.
17 days ago
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Rewatch: John McTiernan's The 13th Warrior. A very flawed film I still feel real love for. It's plainly patched together, but it has a great story attached to the last of the truly old-school epic film productions.
18 days ago
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Happy new year, friends and fellows. I propose this as the anthem for 2026:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=qd6J...
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Bruce Springsteen with the Sessions Band - Eyes on the Prize (Live In Dublin)
YouTube video by BruceSpringsteenVEVO
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qd6J2QF3fJY
18 days ago
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The last sunset of 2025 here was a blazing promise peeking out from under the swirling cloud of a thunderstorm, which feels very apt and I'm taking it to be a good omen.
19 days ago
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reposted by
Roderick Heath
Confessions of a Film Freak 2025. A year of film comment in one place. 76 films. Dissent and devotion, argument and acclaim.
filmfreedonia.com/2025/12/29/c...
20 days ago
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I wrote about the book once, aeons ago:
englishoneoworst.blogspot.com/2011/06/inco...
add a skeleton here at some point
19 days ago
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Rewatch: Rob Reiner's The Princess Bride. Alas, I still find this a flatly directed and shticky take on a terrific novel, chiefly distinguished by a great cast having a blast.
19 days ago
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Time-and-dimensional-travelling soldier and zeppelin pilot. Yes, sometimes it pays to read SFF.
add a skeleton here at some point
20 days ago
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Confessions of a Film Freak 2025. A year of film comment in one place. 76 films. Dissent and devotion, argument and acclaim.
filmfreedonia.com/2025/12/29/c...
20 days ago
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Viewing: Clint Eastwood's Absolute Power. One of those classed-up B-movies Clint did a few of late-90s-early-00s, and a good one, although the denouement's a bit weak. Seriously stacked cast.
20 days ago
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...Vale Brigitte Bardot. No more words needed there. In memoriam, my look at her last starring role, Roger Vadim's fascinating Don Juan, or If Don Juan Were A Woman:
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Don Juan or If Don Juan Were A Woman... (Don Juan ou Si Don Juan était une femme..., 1973)
The arc of Roger Vadim’s consecration of the screen to Brigitte Bardot – from God created Woman to “times have come for you to...
https://thisislandrod.blogspot.com/2022/08/don-juan-or-if-don-juan-were-woman-don.html
21 days ago
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Here it is: Confessions of a Film Freak 2025, the biggest yet, featuring comments on 76 films and my Favourite Films of the Year list:
filmfreedonia.com/2025/12/29/c...
loading . . .
Confessions of a Film Freak 2025
By Roderick Heath Jump to review index Jump to Favourite Films of 2025 List Both personally and in cinematic terms, 2025 has been a very rough road, and perhaps the end of the line in general. As s…
https://filmfreedonia.com/2025/12/29/confessions-of-a-film-freak-2025/
21 days ago
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Rewatch: Zoltan Korda's Sahara. "You dare to insult the Fuhrer?" "That would take an artist. I am only a mechanic."
22 days ago
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Discussion of Stephen Lang's range elsewhere reminded me that my first point of reference for him, oddly perhaps, is Uli Edel's Last Exit To Brooklyn, as the doomed, closeted union hero.
22 days ago
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This holiday season, freely indulge one of the greatest pleasures known to humankind - telling other people how and why they're wrong.
23 days ago
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I think that just about does me for movies of 2025. I'm resigned to not catching The Secret Agent or Marty Supreme, the only likely award big-hitters I haven't caught.
23 days ago
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Viewing: James Vanderbilt's Nuremberg. Gimmicky and overblown, but quite watchable, and has quite a bit of history's most heartwarming sight: arrogant Nazis shoved into small cells.
23 days ago
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Is it just me or are those new Avengers trailers kinda shit?
24 days ago
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Viewing: Jia Zhang-ke’s Caught by the Tides. Both a bad Christmas movie and an ideal Christmas movie.
24 days ago
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Christmas mood:
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The Katering Show – CHRISTMAS
YouTube video by The Kates
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwoR3fkcJ9g&list=PLZFXeozdia12APH8n9xsVNhd5qallmrz2&index=7
25 days ago
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Viewing: Scott Cooper's Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere. Nice try, but becomes a death march of earnestness.
25 days ago
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