Of the two Scott brothers, I’ve always had a preference for Ridley. No doubt the writers of Cinema Scope would attribute this to my innate middle-brow pretensions, but I’ve never managed to grasp their argument for Tony’s superiority (editor Mark Peranson on Unstoppable: “it is the key Hollywood film of this typically weak quarter, thanks […]
Given the vast differences between the written word and the moving image, it’s not surprising that the translation from text to screen can sometimes produce strange results. David Selznick treated source text as gospel, using Margaret Mitchell’s novel as a virtual script for his massive and very popular 1939 adaptation of Gone With the Wind […]
Many of us who live in relative urban comfort enjoy experiencing a vicarious struggle for survival through books and movies. This goes back at least as far as 1719 and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (how many times has that been filmed?). Crusoe, like many wilderness narratives, focuses on an individual separated from society, having to […]
Last summer I had the excellent experience of being sent to Paris for six weeks as assistant editor on the Milla Jovovich movie Faces In the Crowd, which was shooting here in Winnipeg. This was purely a matter of luck and coincidence: because of the tax credit rules here and the divvying up of personnel […]
Peter Yates died in London on January 9, aged 81. His two best-known films were Bullitt (1968) and Breaking Away (1979), and that perhaps indicates why he was not as widely known as many of his contemporaries. He directed a wide range of movies in many different genres, and for that reason never established a […]
The series of ten Martin Beck novels written by Swedish husband and wife Per Wahlöö and Maj Sjöwall between 1965 and 1975 are not entirely conventional mysteries. They are police procedurals which focus on the tedious sifting of facts and clues which may or may not lead anywhere, in which accident and coincidence often abruptly […]
A friend recently sent me a link to Turner Classic Movies’ annual tribute to people from the film industry who died this past year. It’s an elegantly assembled montage (far superior to the similar annual Oscar tributes): (Unfortunately, TCM doesn’t appear to archive these videos, so the link no longer functions.) I was surprised to […]