Atheist films

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…]

Can someone please explain this to me?

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…]

Review: Sherlock, Season 2

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…]

Vampires and zombies

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…]

Peter O’Toole retires

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…]

Film review: The Artist (2011)

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…]

Scathing but funny review of Prometheus

Here is a review of the new science fiction film that is supposed to be a prequel to the successful Alien series, which I did not see.

The review is long but funny as it dissects all the gaping plot holes. It pretty much gives away the whole story so don’t read it if you have not seen the film yet but plan to. I was never going to see it so I did not care and enjoyed reading it. [Read more…]

Film review: The Conspirator (no spoilers)

As an immigrant who never studied US history formally as part of a curriculum, my knowledge of it has large holes. So although I knew that Abraham Lincoln was killed by John Wilkes Booth in a theater in 1865 at the beginning of his second term of office during the waning days of the Civil War, I was not aware of the precise motive or that the murder was part of a larger conspiracy that sought to also kill the vice-president and the Secretary of State. [Read more…]

Review: Sherlock

I got around to watching the new BBC series Sherlock, showing in the US as part of PBS’s Masterpiece Theater.

There have been many reconceptualizations of the iconic character of Sherlock Holmes, not all of them successful. The recent film version with Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude was a buddy action movie and I found the hyperactivity just barely tolerable. The 1980s and 90s BBC series with Jeremy Brett as Holmes and two different actors as Watson were perhaps the best of the lot so far, with Brett in particular capturing the edginess and nervous energy of Holmes.
[Read more…]