Reunited with writing partner Sidney Gilliat, with Val Valentine also contributing to the script, Frank Launder tried to rekindle the magic of The Happiest Days of Your Life (1950) with its oblique sequel, The Belles of St. Trinian’s, where Margaret Rutherford, in charge now of an unruly all-girls school, has been morphed into Alastair Sim-in-drag. […]
Daily Archives: May 29, 2007
Sydney Pollack, who won an Oscar for directing Out of Africa (1985), has not once made a decent film, although he has acted decently in several films, including his own (for instance, Tootsie, 1982). In 1969, he had an especially bad year artistically, making two movies, the bloated, arty antiwar Castle Keep and, from Horace […]
La bûche, screenwriter Danièle Thompson’s first directorial effort, is a wonderful Christmastime comedy about a complicated family and its secrets; it is warm, humane and occasionally hilarious. The sparkling script is by Thompson and her son, Christopher Thompson, who also contributes a beautiful performance as a strange young man named Joseph, who lives rent-free in […]
Perhaps the two most dazzling and brilliant works of Victorian literature are Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1834) and Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book (1868-9). One is a convoluted piece of autobiographical prose; the other, a long, complex modernist poem about a Roman murder trial two hundred years earlier. As springboard, each work incorporates […]
There are films one wants to like more, because they’re so smashingly entertaining, but one can’t because they’re so thin in ideas or muddled in the direction in which the film moves those ideas. Numerous “liberal films” fit this description—films that “say” the right things, but whose ideological underpinnings, whose whole thrust, suggest a counter-purpose. […]
Dennis Grunes 