One of the greatest actors has died at the age of 81. At home in both dramatic roles and in wacky comedies, I wrote an appreciation of his career when he retired last year so I won’t repeat myself. Peter Bradshaw provides a much fuller appreciation of a mercurial film and stage career in which he received eight Oscar nominations but failed to win any. [Read more…]
I love the Muppets, and the Sesame Street parodies using them are often hilarious. Parodies tend to be better appreciated if you are familiar with the items being made fun of but I found this parody of the newly released The Hunger Games: Catching Fire to be enjoyable because even though I have not seen the original films, I had read enough about them to be aware of the story. [Read more…]
Sesame Street parodies are fun to watch and I liked this James Bond one. Note how the music is evocative of the originals without infringing on the copyright, though I doubt anyone would be so crass as to sue Sesame Street
Interestingly, this parody featured a woman as the villain and it got me to wondering if any of the villains in the Bond films had been women. I have seen many but not all of the films, and all the evildoers have been men. [Read more…]
Kevin Spacey is one of the best actors around these days. In this appearance on the TV show Inside the Actors Studio hosted by James Lipton, he also reveals a talent for impersonating other actors that goes beyond just mimicking the voice but also extends to gestures, mannerisms, and tics. [Read more…]
Rick Santorum is one of the most overtly religious, anti-gay politicians around. He will undoubtedly run for the presidency in 2016 but right now has started a film company to make Christian-themed films and they have just released their first one. Titled The Christmas Candle, it has angels and miracles, apparently, which seems hardly original. [Read more…]
I grew up voraciously reading mystery novels, with Agatha Christie being my author of choice, with other mystery writers thrown in from time to time. She was a prolific writer and I suspect that I have read at least 90% of her output. Hence my ideas about the conventions of that genre have largely been shaped by her books. [Read more…]
It looks like 2014 is going to be big year from religious mush in films. In addition to the Noah film I wrote about yesterday, Heaven Is For Real will be released around Easter, supposedly based on a true story about a little boy who had a near death experience and then gave a remarkably detailed and accurate account of all the people and things that he had seen in heaven, including things that he could not have known about. [Read more…]
The story of Noah in the Bible poses a serious challenge to religious believers. Taken literally and looked at without using a religious lens, this is a monstrous story of the worst genocide in the history of humankind, and committed by a supposedly loving god no less. Religions have for a long time managed to gloss over this story to obscure the most ghastly aspects of it. They spend time on quite a detailed description of all the preparation work on building and stocking the Ark, quickly go over the actual slaughter, and then spend time on what came afterwards, with rainbows and sunshine and birds and flowers heralding the dawn of a wonderful new world. [Read more…]
I recently watched two films The Prestige (2006) and Now You See Me (2013). The former was recommended to me as one of Hugh Jackman’s better films to observe his acting capabilities and he does give a good performance. In fact, both films have excellent actors (the great Michael Caine appears in both) and one is never bored while watching. But what I want to focus on these two films is how otherwise pretty good films get ruined for me by the desire of the filmmakers to spring surprise endings on the viewer, even if those endings ruin the credibility of what came before. (There will be major spoilers for The Prestige after the jump. In fact, I pretty much give away the whole story.) [Read more…]
