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…]
I have recently been on a Sherlock Holmes kick, watching episodes of the old British TV series starring Jeremy Brett and then reading the stories again since some years have passed since I last did so. The latest one was the 1994 episode The Last Vampyre based on Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire in which a case is brought to Baker Street about a possible vampire in the county of Sussex. Holmes, the epitome of rationality and scientific deduction, dismisses out of hand the idea of vampires and has no doubt that there is a perfectly ordinary explanation for the reports. [Read more…]
That great actor Peter O’Toole has retired. He was always a pleasure to watch, even in films that were not that great, and it is astonishing that he never won an Oscar, although he was nominated eight times. There was a gleam in his eye that gave you the sense that at any moment he would do something totally unexpected and even crazy and this made him eminently watchable. [Read more…]
Over the weekend I watched this film that won five Oscars (including best picture, best director, and best actor). It tells a story of love and redemption, the kind that used to be a staple of the early days of black and white silent films, and it tells it in the form of a black and white silent film, with a music soundtrack only. The story is about actors and filmmaking set in the period around the 1930s during the transition from silent films to talkies, so it is an interesting exercise in self-referential filmmaking at various levels. [Read more…]