Blog
These stories have been around a long time. Some of them I have updated. Many of them I haven’t. This started out when blogs were like, new!
“Scotland, PA”: Like A Comic Chabrol
In Scotland, PA (2001), director-screenwriter Billy Morrisette parodies, and transfers to 1975, Macbeth. By adapting a violent classic for a series of well-photographed scenes, Morrisette proves sort of a comic Claude Chabrol, out for fun. His film is hilarious, and...
“A Little Night Music” Is A Little Musical Except For Sondheim (A Theatre Review)
If there are decent sets and costumes for A Little Night Music, these and the pop pleasure of Stephen Sondheim's songs make this 1970s musical comedy recommendable. The book by Hugh Wheeler is worthless. Granted, few books for musicals are what they ought to be, but...
On “My Night at Maud’s”—The Story, Not The Movie
Years ago, Eric Rohmer wrote the story, "My Night at Maud's," one of his Six Moral Tales, before he filmed it. In my opinion, the film gets boring; the written story, for all its dialogue, does not. Seldom in his oeuvre did Rohmer make as many references to Catholic,...
An Empty Room In Italy (“La Stanza del figlio”)
Nanni Moretti is a fine artist whose Italian film, The Son's Room (2001), is a largely well done, sometimes brilliant, work about intense grief over the death of a couple's adolescent son. The parents---Giovanni (a psychiatrist) and Paola---and their surviving...
“La Bandera”‘s Legionnaires
Military pride and victory, battlefield suffering, religious conviction, and death in all its pervasiveness all meet in the Julien Duvivier film, La Bandera (The Flag, 1935), whose gritty screenplay Duvivier and co-scenarist Charles Spaak adapted from a novel. The...
On Ozick’s Lengthy Story, “The Shawl”
There are politically correct people who would yammer about the Jewish woman, Rosa Lublin---in Cynthia Ozick's novella, The Shawl---yelling "Sodom!" when she sees two male lovers lying naked on the beach. They would foolishly suspect Ozick of being "homophobic." But...
Automation And Other Things In “A Nous la Liberte”
Rene Clair's 1931 film, A Nous la Liberte, ends (almost) with a comically ironic look at the replacement of man with machine in the factory---before it was known that society would weather this storm---and it induces us to wonder how relevant this matter is to our own...
“The Affair” Of Another Season
So far I have seen six episodes of the TV series, The Affair, Season 2, on DVD, and I'm considerably impressed by it. Noah (Dominic West) has left his wife Helen (Maura Tierney) for a former nurse, Alison (Ruth Wilson), and has also been arrested---the plot just has...
Sad Cases In Vegas: “Leaving Las Vegas”
Presenting debauchery and distress apropos of booze and sex, Leaving Las Vegas (1995) is Mike Figgis's candid but pretentious story of short-term love between a drunk (Nicolas Cage) and a hooker (Elizabeth Shue). Cage no longer has a wife or a job and wants to drink...
