Film
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Sunday Night Journal — June 5, 2011 Ingmar Bergman: Interviews, edited by Raphael Shargel. University Press of Mississippi, 2007. It wasn’t until I started to write this review that I looked at the publication data of the book. Why was it published by the University Press of Mississippi instead of some bigger and more well-known…
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Talk of the English Reformation reminded me that a few days ago my web wanderings (which I really need to cut back on) brought me to this interesting post by a blogger who calls herself Neo-neocon. She's recently compared the 1970 BBC series "The Six Wives of Henry VIII" to a Showtime series about the Tudors. (Not sure…
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This 1966 adaptation of Ross Macdonald's The Moving Target is worth seeing if you like detective stories. But Macdonald fans may, or rather should, find it disappointing. The plot is adapted in a reasonable way, but the portrayal of Macdonald's detective, Lew Archer, is badly flawed. He's played by Paul Newman, who insisted on renaming the…
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I know this is not exactly appropriate for Wednesday of Holy Week, but I'm going to go ahead and write about these while they're still fresh on my mind, having watched the second of them last night. My wife and I watch a lot of movies together, but she's not necessarily interested in some of the…
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According to the fellow who introduced it on Turner Classic Movies, this 1953 Alfred Hitchcock film was not well thought of by Hitchcock. I'm not a great Hitchcock fan–I enjoy his classics (not including Psycho, which was really too much for me) , but haven't understood why some consider him a great artist. So I'm probably…
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I just finished watching this strange and powerful Swedish vampire movie, which was recommended to me some time ago by Rob G (at least I think that's who it was). I thought I vaguely remembered him, or someone, suggesting that there were Christian resonances to be found in it. And maybe there are a few,…
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I've been meaning to mention this. My wife and I finished it up (it's a 4-dvd set) last weekend, and I recommend it enthusiastically. I can simply repeat what I said a couple of years ago about the BBC's Bleak House, except that in this case I haven't read the book at all, but my…
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Sunday Night Journal – March 20, 2011 (I generally try not to give away too much of the plot of a book or movie I’m discussing, but it’s almost impossible to discuss this one without giving away something about how it ends. Since that is more or less revealed, in broad terms, in the beginning,…
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Sunday Night Journal —February 6, 2011 A Few Seconds of Panic, by Stefan Fatsis. Football season is over, so it’s a bit late for me to be mentioning this book, but maybe anyone who’s interested will be as dilatory as I am and won’t get around to reading it till late next summer. It’s one…
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This was the first 3D movie I've seen, not counting one or two really primitive ones when I was a kid in the '50s. I really was expecting the 3D business to be an annoying gimmick that would just get in the way. I was pleasantly surprised. For the first three or four minutes it…
Light On Dark Water 