Yesterday (Tue., 30 Oct.), news that The Walt Disney Company signed a deal to purchase Lucasfilm Ltd. from George Lucas for U.S. $4.05 billion, hit Teh Internets almost as hard as the recently dissipated Hurricane Sandy.

This purchase includes not only the rights to the Star Wars franchise -- Disney plans to resume the original trilogy of ( Read more... )

From Tue., 24 July through Wed., 15 August, I read, thanks to inter-library loan, Michael G. Ankerich's Dangerous Curves Atop Hollywood Heels: The Lives, Careers, and Misfortunes of 14 Hard-Luck Girls of the Silent Screen (Duncan, OK: BearManor Media, 2011; ISBN: 978-1-59393-605-1; trade paperback; 405 pps.). The front and back covers are ( 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... )

I recently re-read What Makes Sammy Run? by Budd Schulberg (NY: Penguin Books, 1980 [first published in the U.S. in 1941 by Random House, Inc.; first published in the UK in 1941 by Jarrolds; first Penguin Books edition published in 1978 with a new afterword by the author; reprinted in 1980]; ISBN: 0-14-00.4795-6; 252 pps.), from Wed., 8 July 2009 ( Read more... )

I saw Zhang Yimou's House of Flying Daggers last Thursday, 20 January and Martin Scorsese's The Aviator last Friday, January 21; that's not as incongruous a pair as it may seem at first blush, since both movies have similar intentions, and similar failings.

House of Flying Daggers is a heavily romanticised look at a band of Robin Hood-like rebels ( Read more... )