I am a fan of Alfred Hitchcock films and so was intrigued by news of the film Hitchcock that centers around the time he made the classic Psycho. It has just been released, to mixed reviews unfortunately, despite the presence of excellent actors Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren. Here’s the trailer. [Read more…]
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…]
Over the weekend, I stumbled upon the fact that Netflix streams episodes of The Rockford Files, the TV show starring James Garner that ran from 1974 through 1980. That time period coincided with my first stint in the US while in graduate school and I recall the show fondly and so I spent several enjoyable hours watching episodes. [Read more…]
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…]
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…]
This film has just been released on DVD and I watched it last night. It is a comedy-thriller with a religious backdrop, starring Pierce Brosnan as the charismatic Pastor Dan of a megachurch who has grandiose plans to create his own self-contained city based on Christian principles. [Read more…]
This year is the 50th anniversary of the launching of the James Bond film franchise with 1962’s Dr. No, so it is timely to take another look at the world’s most famous fictional spy. Besides which, I was in bed with the flu at the end of last week (hence the lighter blogging during that period) and I needed some low-effort entertainment and what could be more mindless fun than a Bond film? I went all the way back to Roger Moore’s debut in the role in 1973’s Live and Let Die, which I had not seen before. [Read more…]
Sometimes I feel that my local newspaper The Plain Dealer‘s motto must be “All Catholic News All the Time”. It has devoted an endless number of news stories to the decision by the local bishop to shut down a number of churches and consolidate those parishes with others. We had stories about the anguish of the parishioners, their defiance, their appeals to the Vatican to overturn the rulings, their elation when many of the appeals were successful, and their work in reconstituting the parishes. Many of these stories got front page, above the fold coverage. [Read more…]
I have a simple rule about news items about celebrity gossip. I tend to ignore those things that concern people that I am too much of an old fogey to be aware of, let alone care about. So I will read something if it is about a truly famous actor or someone not so famous but who is of my generation (i.e., old). But if the header of a news item refers to people like minor celebrities like Charlie Sheen, Lindsay Lohan, and the like, I tend to skip over it and the story usually disappears fairly quickly. I save lot of time this way. [Read more…]
I finally got around to seeing the three episodes in the second season of the highly acclaimed series of the famous detective and his Boswell. I wrote about the three episodes of the first season earlier (here and here). The series is based loosely on the Conan Doyle stories, and the word ‘loosely’ is used advisedly since events are placed in contemporary London and contain only the basic plot elements of the original stories on which they are based. [Read more…]