Keegan & Cary’s Movie Swap returns with two movies that take the concept of beloved childhood puppet memories, and trashes them – join us as we discuss Peter Jackson’s (yes, that one) Meet the Feebles and The Happytime Murders.
Join me, the chaps at Really, 007 and some other guests as we look back over Timothy Dalton’s all too short tenure as James Bond. Episode One, below, focusses on his casting.
I’ve teemed up with ex-student, and fellow movie buff, Keegan Nuttell-Cartwright, to record a podcast based around swapping movie – basically we find movies we think are interesting and throw them at each other (not always literally). Sometimes we like the movies, sometimes we don’t, but either way please join us as we dive into a range of films.
Episode One covers Walk Hard and Lifeforce…
A while ago a new review landed for New Wave, New Hollywood: Recovery, Reassessment and Legacy, edited by Nathan Abrams and Gregory Frame in Film Matters, a journal from Intellect that resides behind a paywall, but can be accessed via some institutional log-ins. By Maria Caravousanos, it’s a generally positive overview of the work, describing it as ‘an engaging and fresh approach to the preexisting scholarship that opens a myriad of critical potential’. In terms of my own chapter, ‘Formal Radicalism vs. Radical Representation: Reassessing The French Connection (William Friedkin, 1971) and Dirty Harry (Don Siegel, 1971)’, Maria has this to say, ‘Cary Edwards synthesizes a comprehensive reassessment of the films The French Connection (William Friedkin, 1971) and Dirty Harry (Don Siegel, 1971) through the combination of reception studies and textual analysis to question what distinctions qualify a film as part of the New Wave canon,’ which is pretty fair description. New Wave, New Hollywood is available direct from Bloomsbury, or anywhere good books are sold.
It’s Boston Independent Film Festival time again, and to help promote it I had the pleasure of appearing on Boston’s own 107 Endeavour FM with colleagues Dan Thompson and Keegan Nuttall-Cartwright. It was great to chat to the host Dylan and promote both the student films and our special showing of Satu: Year of the Rabbit (Joshua Tripp, 2024) which will be followed by a Q&A with the film’s executive producer Noel Goodwin (which I will be hosting).
Find the chat here: https://www.mixcloud.com/Endeavour_Radio/cary-dan-and-keegan-drop-in-to-chat-about-the-boston-college-film-festival-2025/
Update: Here’s me and Noel Goodwin having a lively chat about the movie
Delighted to find a review of New Wave, New Hollywood: Reassessment, Recovery and Legacy in the July 2024 issue of The American Journal of Popular Culture; particularly pleased to have my chapter on The French Connection and Dirty Harry mentioned in some detail by reviewer Laura L. Beadling thus:
“The first part consists of three chapters that engage with films that are typically considered as part of the New Wave canon—including The Graduate (1967), Chinatown (1974), The French Connection (1971), and others—but try to challenge the received wisdom about them and provide new angles from which to view them productively. Cary Edwards’s enlightening essay comparing The French Connection (1971) and Dirty Harry (1971) shows the power of this work by examining the similarities between the two in terms of typical New Hollywood themes and techniques in order to ask questions about why one is considered a canonical New Hollywood film, and the other was often dismissed as a fascistic throwback.”
Overall a really positive review from a prestigious journal! New Wave, New Hollywood is available now in all formats wherever books are sold!
Well, blow me down. Here’s The Vigilante Thriller on a list of Best Thriller Film Books, in some pretty good company. Lord knows if it’s that good (all time…?!), but it’s nice to be included by Book Authority at number 14!.
Had the chance to pick over the wonder that is The Living Daylights with the chaps at Really, OO7! As always it was a delight chatting to them, and some other guests, turning over some of the fine details of Timothy Dalton’s first Bond film.
As a more fun part of my duties as Higher Education Quality Manager at Boston College, I get to introduce the Graduation Ceremony in the incredible, and slightly intimidating, environs of St. Botolph’s Church (also known as Boston Stump). If you want to listen to me read out a lot of names, watch below!
Every now and then I get asked about Timothy Dalton’s James Bond (and despite my expression in the above picture, I like this) having written He Disagreed with Something that Ate Him (released in 2018! Where the hell has that time gone?) and generally being willing to bend anyone’s ears about the topic. Recently, as part of the film’s 35 year anniversary, David Lowbridge-Ellis MBE (better known to some of you as Licence to Queer) and the 007GB Fan Club invited me down to London for a screening at the Prince Charles Cinema and a get-together afterwards at the Hippodrome round the corner. It was a really nice event; it’s always great to meet other Dalton enthusiasts and to pick the brains of other Bond aficionados and scholars (pictured above left to right are David himself, Llewella Chapman author of Fashioning James Bond, Alan Church who did optical effect on this and other Bond films (and is a lovely man whose brain I am desperate to pick), James Chapman, author of Licence to Thrill, and Steve Clamp, TV news presenter and, possibly, the biggest Dalton fan in the world.
There I was happily chatting when, out of the blue, a well dressed gentleman asked for a quick video interview – turns out this was Chris Swalmius-Dato who has a Youtube channel devoted to discussing movie and tv franchises. Despite the noise of a televised football match in the background we had a fun chat about Dalton and his impact on the Bond series.
This was a terrific event, and it was great to meet so many Dalton fans – also nice to hear how the Fan Club runs as many of these as it can for free – go check them out for more of the same.