Guess I'm feeling my age these days, but it was a bit of shock to read that Monty Python and the Holy Grail turns 40 this year. I'm not sure when exactly I saw it, but I remember it was at the Lancaster Mall in Salem, Oregon and that my sister drove me and my friend Don "the Glove" Palmer to the theater. We didn't sit with her, because, I guess, we ( Read more... )

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A couple of weeks ago I posted my annual list of movies that I saw more than once in the theater. One thing that's changed since then is that I saw Into the Woods a third time, so it joins Grand Budapest Hotel and Snowpiercer as the 2014 films I saw three times in the theater. (I've also watched the American Playhouse production of the stage ( Read more... )

Science fiction fans might be interested in the film Predestination, which is a very faithful adaptation of Heinlein's "--All You Zombies--". It's well worth checking out.

I've started re-reading Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore's novel, Fury, which originally appeared under their Lawrence O'Donnell byline, and I've been reminded that it's something of a sequel to a novella called "Clash by Night," which I've never read. It seems to be the case that they've never been published together in a single volume, but I just ( Read more... )

Somehow I missed this Telegraph interview with Viggo Mortensen from May 2014 in which he speaks the truth about the LOTR movies (apologies if everybody else posted about it back then):

Mortensen thinks - rightly - that The Fellowship of the Ring turned out the best of the three, perhaps largely because it was shot in one go. “It was very confusing ( Read more... )

The Iain Banks novel was published in 1992, and this four part, four hour mini-series was produced in 1996. The adaptation is pretty faithful to the book, although one of the changes is that it moves the "now" to circa 1994 from circa 1990. This is mostly noticeable in that the background war is in Bosnia rather than Kuwait, but some of the other ( Read more... )

'What do you want a girl for, mate, when you got a pipe and dreams?' (Confessions of an Opium Eater, 1962)

I've posted some thoughts about the movies I watched in 2013 in the theater and at home. Not a Best Of so much as a Most Of.

A while back on my blog I posted a review of a Chinese film called My Lucky Star, which stars (and was produced by) Zhang Ziyi and which I described as "romantic comedy meets James Bond". One of the things that fascinated me about what turned out to be a fairly humdrum movie was that it was directed by an American television director named Dennie ( Read more... )