Film review: My Man Godfrey

I saw the 1936 black-and-white comedy My Man Godfrey over the weekend and really liked it. I hadn’t expected to because it seemed to be about the high life of a very rich but eccentric family indulging in endless rounds of vapid partying in the post-1929 crash period. I watched it out of solidarity with my visiting daughter who has developed a taste for classic films and discovered that the film was not only funny, it had a pretty good social message too. [Read more…]

Christmas film recommendation: The Ref

Every year I recommend that people forget the standard Christmas films and check out instead the 1994 film The Ref. With great performances by Denis Leary, Kevin Spacey, and particularly Judy Davis, it is a hilarious story of a burglar on the run from the law who takes a seriously dysfunctional family hostage on Christmas eve and then has to keep them from fighting with each other while trying to make his escape. I discovered that the full film is available in one stream on YouTube in good quality. [Read more…]

The famous crocodile jump in Live and Let Die

One of the recurring features of James Bond films is how the villains devise increasingly outlandish schemes to kill him. If you have seen the 1973 film Live and Let Die which I reviewed here, you will recall the scene in which he is left standing on a tiny island surrounded by a moat containing crocodiles who can easily climb onto the island. The villains then leave him, presumably because they have other pressing things to do like iron their socks or something, and so miss Bond escaping by using three crocodiles as stepping stones, running over them to get to the safety of the other bank. [Read more…]

Copyright and fair use

The rules about what you can legally use of other people’s creative work are not very well defined. ‘Fair use’ guidelines depend on judgments about what fraction of the work is used and whether it is being used for commercial purposes, with educational use getting more leeway, but there are no formulas that can be used and each time must be judged on a case-by-case basis. [Read more…]

Film review: The Avengers

I watched this film a couple of days ago. I am frankly not a big fan of action films in general and the super-hero genre in particular and this film has both in abundance. Furthermore, growing up in Sri Lanka we had limited access to American comic books and I don’t recall any other than Superman and Batman. The entire stable of Marvel comics superheroes that appear in this film (Captain America, Iron Man, Hawkeye, Black Widow, Incredible Hulk, Thor) were almost all foreign to me, so there was no nostalgic tug either. The only Hawkeye I had heard of previously was Chingachgook’s buddy and this was clearly not him. [Read more…]