“I just want to be somebody.” Harry Fabian is an American hustler, a petty con man always looking for the angle that might make him, at least in his own eyes, a big shot. In London, perhaps Greco-Roman wrestling promotion will be his ticket to a life of ease for himself and his loyal, long-suffering […]
Daily Archives: March 10, 2007
Not The House of Mirth, her first success, or, fifteen years later, her Pulitzer Prize-winning The Age of Innocence (botched by Martin Scorsese in his 1993 film), but Ethan Frome, written in between and published in 1911, was Edith Wharton’s own favorite among her novels. There, she traded in her sharply satiric take on high […]
Made on a frayed shoestring, during and in between the making of other films of his, Werner Herzog’s Fata Morgana is an early entry in New German Cinema or German New Wave, the movement begun in the 1960s by Leftists wishing to establish a West German culture in repudiation of the nation’s Nazi past and […]
After President Franklin D. Roosevelt promoted it as showing the new kind of war, one on civilians, that Germany was waging in World War II, nearly every adult American saw Mrs. Miniver. Films aren’t so popular anymore in the U.S. that such a high percentage of the nation’s population goes to see anything; films become […]
Some films are so stupefyingly bad, so fatuous and stupid, that, watching them, you find your lower jaw dropping to new depths. By an amazing coincidence, the year 2000 saw two such movies about American football. But at least Howard Deutsch’s strike-breaking The Replacements had Keanu Reeves, perhaps at the peak of his gentle humors, […]
Dennis Grunes 