I watched the two remaining episodes of the first season of the new modern-day interpretation of the Sherlock Holmes stories. After the glowing review I gave of the very first episode A Study in Pink, episode 2 The Blind Banker was a huge disappointment. [Read more…]
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…]
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…]
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.
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I was familiar with the popular line “Badges? We don’t need no stinkin’ badges!” long before I had seen the film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre that it purportedly came from. But when I got around to actually seeing the film, I was surprised to find that the words were not quite the same. [Read more…]
In a previous post, I mused about the incessant swearing in the premier episode in the new HBO comedy Veep and wondered how normal it was. The comments from people familiar with that world suggested that it was quite common for people in high levels of government to swear all the time. [Read more…]
I saw the Ben Stiller film Greenberg (2010) recently. It is not your typical Stiller comedy. In fact, it is not a comedy at all, more a drama as he plays a neurotic and self-centered person recovering from a nervous breakdown returning from New York to his roots in California and trying to connect with his old friends and society and having a rough time doing so. [Read more…]
In his latest film The Descendants, George Clooney plays the father of two daughters, one of whom is grown, coping with the consequences of his wife being in a coma as a result of an accident. He is suddenly thrust into a parenting role that he had abdicated up to that point and for which he is not prepared. The film begins with a familiar trope that I detest but one that American filmmakers seem to be enamored by, that of rude and obnoxious children who mouth off to their parents. But fortunately that phase passes fairly soon and the rest of the film deals with the three of them coming to terms with each other and their situation. [Read more…]