On the commentary track to Magnum Force (1973), the second of the five Dirty Harry movies starring Clint Eastwood, the co-screenwriter, John Milius (who also co-wrote, uncredited, the screenplay for the first movie in the series, Dirty Harry [1971]), said that the scenes of the two women throwing themselves (separately, mind you) at Harry Callahan ( Read more... )

From Friday, 9 March to Saturday, 10 March, I read Lynn Barber's memoir, An Education (NY: Atlas & Co. Publishers [distributed by W.W. Norton & Company], 2009 [first published in the UK by the Penguin Group]; 173 pps.); this was an expansion of the article she'd had published in Granta, which was the basis of the eponymous 2009 film (which I've yet ( Read more... )

From Friday, 13 January 2012 (how apropos...) to Monday, 16 January 2012 (Martin Luther King, Jr. Day), I read Stephen King's The Dark Half (NY: Signet [a division of the Penguin Group], 1990 [copyright 1989; previously published in hardcover by Viking Press, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc.]; ISBN: 0-451-16731-7; 468 pps. [includes a 16-paged ( Read more... )

Not sure how I overlooked this one, unless it was because (a) I read it fairly early in 2011; (b) I didn't write a review of it, either here or in LibraryThing; or (c) I read it when I was home sick with the flu.

Anyhow, just wanted to update my "books read" highlights of 2011 with a mention of a pretty decent book that I read last March: Darryl ( Read more... )

Is it just me, or has Katy Perry jumped the shark?

Her two big hits from her "official" first album, One of the Boys -- "I Kissed a Girl" and "Hot n Cold" -- were fun, snappy, snarky dance-pop numbers; the singles from her latest album, Teenage Dream -- the title track and "California Gurls" -- are dull, rote, over-sexualized affairs that have ( Read more... )

Finally saw His Girl Friday (1940) the other night; this is of course the Howard Hawks-directed (and Charles Lederer-scripted) remake of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's 1928 play The Front Page (filmed in 1931 under the same title), starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. A couple of things surprised me:

1) The missus hated it. How anyone ( Read more... )

The missus finally weighed in on one of the weightier topics of the day: the attractiveness and desirability of Megan Fox.

Megan Fox was the female lead in the two Transformers movies, and is rumored to be sought by Marvel Comics' film division to play She-Hulk in an upcoming movie.

My better half doesn't think that Megan Fox is all that and a ( Read more... )

The link's going to go down at 1000 GMT tomorrow -- that's a bit less than 24 hours from now, if I've figured it right -- but I thought I'd recommend it just the same: last week BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week featured "adapted for radio" excerpts from the fourth volume of Clive James' autobiography (the books in toto are apparently referred to by ( Read more... )

In light of the fact that I received the December 2006 issue (No. 556; it's the one with a photo of Brad Pitt's tryout for the Blue Man Group on the cover) of Vanity Fair in the mail last week, I thought I'd mention what caught my eye in the November issue ( Read more... )

Just got the new Vanity Fair (October 2006; No. 554) a couple of days ago -- the one with the first official pictures of Suri, the L. Ron Hubbard-approved love-child of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes

Suri looks a lot more like her mom than she does her dad.  Okay, like her mom with a Tom Cruise wig on.

But that's not the celebrity photo that I found ( Read more... )