A New Book: Dear More Dear Movies, Peter Malone MSC

Back in Covid lockdown days, the cinemas were closed, 2020, from mid-March to mid-November (and some weeks in 2021).

What was a film reviewer to do? Well, for many, Netflix and/or Foxtel was a major answer. The other thing to do was to keep writing on movies. 2020 quietly saw the publication of Dear Movies by Coventry Press – 101 letters to the movies themselves, sharing autobiography with them, the impact they had in their time, later, the issues they raised, Australian themes, religious and spirituality themes.

So lockdown led to more watching and more writing: Dear More Dear Movies, 85 letters this time, the same process: life, issues, themes, spirituality… And Coventry Press again said yes.

This is an endorsement by John Mulrooney MSC: I once wrote to Peter Malone - “you have spent at least one third of your waking hours living in the dark!” “Ah,” said Peter, “but I have had a bright screen in front of me filled with images of life and humanity”. And this is what he writes about in his letters to movies.

I sometimes come out of a movie theatre deeply moved by what I have watched and often have to ask myself: “why was I so moved by this film?”

Peter ties many films to various periods of his own life and personalises his responses to the films. He uses his extraordinary gifts of memory and detail to explore themes that emerge through films: forgiveness, redemption, reparation and so on. (Clint Eastwood’s films) Films such as The Nightingale and The Drovers Wife and other Australian movies evoke the “need to feel and be (and learn to express): sorry.” Films like Six Degrees of Separation remind us “when we connect, we touch the hand of God”.

Peter writes letters to movies that show human life in all its richness, beauty, colour, light, darkness and brokenness. If you love movies, this book is for you.