My life in sex: the 32 year-old man who only fancies older women.
I know he says that 'To me, young women all look the same; but older women are distinctive and uniquely beautiful' - but he also says that he has 'always been exclusively attracted to mature women', which feels to me just slightly contradictory?
I also have questions about what ( Read more... )

A rather curious letter in The Guardian today about the recent adaptation of Black Narcissus: Black Narcissus and the white British lens:'Somehow we still ended up being told a story entirely from the perspective of the white European characters'.
However, I'm not sure, if you're adapting an original text, you could make the pretty drastic changes ( Read more... )

Partner and I were watching An Old Movie the other day.
Talking it over later, I remarked that I had first seen Old Movie in question in the second-run/revival cinema in my hometown, and that we had gone in at a relatively late point in the narrative and had - as was the custom in those days - sat sitting there, through the ads and the trailers and ( Read more... )

(The allusion is to Sam Goldwyn wanting to make a movie of Lilian Hellmann's play The Children's Hour. On being told that they couldn't because it was about lesbians, he said, 'What the hell, we'll make them Albanians'. ?Apocryphal Goldwynism?)
Anyway, over the weekend partner and I watched a DVD* of the 1941 movie of Kitty Foyle, for which Ginger ( Read more... )

As I daresay my dearios are aware, it has long been an on-dit that Cary Grant and Randolph Scott were more than good friends. They shared a beach house at Santa Monica for substantial portions of the 1930s, from up-and-coming to major stardom.
However, somebody has just written a book to say, no, no, they really were 'just good friends', and ( Read more... )

Movie we watched at the weekend (one of a batch of DVDs partner recently ordered online):
The Cider House Rules (1999).
Not, I think, a movie I would have spontaneously chosen to watch of my own accord.
Have not read the novel upon which it is based, and which, from a brief visit to Goodreads, appears to be much longer and have lots of ( Read more... )

Article in the Guardian 'The Guide' section, which is not online (at least as yet) - it's in the series 'Solved! your crucial cultural questions answered', on the question 'Do uncertain times always result in great art?'

(Historian, remembering an undergraduate lecture during which lecturer on ye medeevles remarked that 'all ages were ages of ( Read more... )

What between this:
The inimitable Nancy Banks-Smith on The night I watched Vera Lynn with Marlene Dietrich [T]hat image has stayed with me for more than half a century because I don’t quite understand it. Marlene Dietrich listening so intently to Vera Lynn and whipping herself.
It's like a scene from one of the movies she did with von Sternberg, no ( Read more... )

Went to see The Limehouse Golem last night.
Okay, I can see why the British Museum Reading Room, approached via the well-known Great Russell Street facade, looked nothing whatsoever like the famed Round Room, no longer in existence in its former glory. But I am still a bit 'huh?' about the layout and the rare volumes available on open shelves. (Not ( Read more... )

- that the plot of My Cousin Rachel is based on a very dubious understanding of English testamentary law.
According to the plot summary of the original novel here, Ambrose had never changed the will he made before marrying Rachel, which left everything to Philip.
Ahem: marrying voids existing testamentary dispositions, so, unless he had made ( Read more... )