I had come across a good review of Mr. Wilder and me by Jonathan Coe and decided to read it. It's a short, gentle novel about guess whom, both funny and moving, and a love declaration to the movies of Billy W. and his scriptwriting partnership with IAL Diamond.

The basic premise: our narator, Calista, half Greek, half English, as a young girl ( Read more... )

I've been meaning to link this for a while: a brilliant and lengthy essay about one of Billy Wilder's lesser known movies, A Foreign Affair, which is brilliant. (Both the essay and the movie.) It's here. It calls the movie the most devastating and personal film of Billy Wilder’s extraordinary career in American cinema which, in a career that ( Read more... )

Smart, wonderful review of Cleopatra, 1963 version, too often dismissed as campy extravaganza. (
( Read more... )

The success of the Marta evening was even more enhanced when the next day, we heard Bob Dylan was in town and had given a concert that same night. And still people came to the lecture instead! (BTW Marta liked Dylan ( Read more... )

Back last autumn when I did my Sunset Boulevard rewatching for my Yuletide story, I also checked out various bits and pieces of the musical based on the film because I was interested in how other actresses and actors interpreted the part. It's also interesting in what it says about adaption to another medium. I don't think I could stand a Sunset ( Read more... )

As someone who loves silent films as well as those occasions when film goes meta on its history and manages to wrap that up in a good story, I was thoroughly charmed, but also very frustrated, by The Artist. The charmed part is easily explained: the film actually pulls off being, if not a completley silent film, then a silent film the way Chaplin ( Read more... )

Recently, a friend of mine wondered in an aside what a Watchmen adaption by Orson Welles would have been like. Clearly, this was an idea of pure genius. Because Welles had both the absolute fearlessness and cheek, and while managing to infuriate half the fanbase before ruthlessly jettisoning some of the main characters along with subplots and ( Read more... )

Still in a nostalgic "Youtube is great for paying homage to your favourites in movie history" mood. This time, you get some highlights of the films of the late great Billy Wilder, scriptwriter and director extraordinaire, creator of one liners, icons and and some of the most memorable movies in film history. Born in Austria (when it was still ( Read more... )

Still in a nostalgic "Youtube is great for paying homage to your favourites in movie history" mood. This time, you get some highlights of the films of the late great Billy Wilder, scriptwriter and director extraordinaire, creator of one liners, icons and and some of the most memorable movies in film history. Born in Austria (when it was still ( Read more... )

Being sleepless again thanks to my current cold, I'd love to watch Just Rewards, the Angel episode Bimo kindly brought, but alas, it turned out my laptop hasn't got the necessary codecs. It'll have to wait until I'm reunited with my normal computer. So I'll muse on two movies I love instead.

Hollywood on Hollywood is a fascinating subgenre in the ( Read more... )