Collected Dailies 6

In the Name of the King (2007) – If I were king of the movies and you wanted to make one of those tales in which the guy’s wife and/or kid are foully murdered or kidnapped, to set the guy up for,  and loose him on, a 90-minute quest of  enraged vengeance-taking audience-pleasin violence, I’d [...]

Robin Hood (2010)

I’ve been reading Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings, Amy Kelly (1950), for, well, for years, a few lines at a time. I keep the book in a spot where I usually only have time for, say, a half page or less, not being one to dawdle. And now, in Robin Hood (2010), it’s [...]

Pitch the LAMB – Mystery

SCENE FROM MY SCREENPLAY-IN-PROGRESS, “THE DEATH OF AMY LAMB” [A foggy night in London. Carriages clatter past. A large Edwardian house in affluent Hedgerow. A brass plate beside the door reads "Sir R. A. Wolfe." A cloaked figure hammers the door-knocker, which is shaped like a ram's head with huge curling horns. BAM! BAM! BAM! [...]

Right at Your Door (2006)

Right at Your Door (2006) – I thought this was a recent release, but I guess not… My theory is that it was funded by one of the major big-box stores, to get us to go out and stock up on emergency supplies: a series of dirty, virus-infested bombs are detonated in L.A (I had [...]

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943)

Watched Gunga Din (1939) the other night. It’s a Hollywood movie, made for fun, with Hollywood Englishmen and Hollywood Indians. Nothing wrong with that. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), though, reminds us that there are real Englishmen and that some of them, the upper upper class,  aren’t like you and me, unless [...]

Collected Dailies 5

What’s missing most in movies today? Sharp dialog? I keep hearing about Mamet, perhaps because he’s fundamentally a dramatist, with dialog his stock in trade. Last night I just sat luxuriating in the interchanges betwixt Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller in Pygmalion (1938)… At one point in the movie, at the start of a grand [...]

Gunga Din (1939)

William Goldman has named Gunga Din (1939), multitudinously and vociferously, as the greatest movie ever made, and his favorite, of course. He was eight years old when the movie came out. Obviously it made a big impression on him, one that has not faded with time. The movie is old-fashioned cowboy-and-indians in spirit, with Bengal [...]