Because I Said So

[See “Entry from July 30, 2008” under “My Diary”] Discover more from James Bowman Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email. Type your email… Subscribe

Suicide Kings directed by Peter O’Fallon attempts without very much success to present a kidnap caper in the manner of the brothers Coen, featuring a lot of crazy plot twists, wise-cracking and otherwise fantastical dialogue and lots of comic criminal incompetence. Christopher Walken plays what has long since become his typecast part, a sinister criminal…

Alas for Haiti! Its rulers are crooks and thugs, its religion is voodoo and its heroes are communists

Josh and Jonas Pate, co-directors of Deceiver, have all the vices of the Coen brothers—mainly pretentiousness and self-conscious artiness—without any of the virtues. Their film is not funny and not even particularly intelligent, although it tries very hard to be the latter. So much so, indeed, that the three main characters are introduced to us…

Mrs Brown written by Jeremy Brock, directed by John Madden and starring Judi Dench as Queen Victoria and Billy Connolly as her servant, John Brown, is a Masterpiece Theatre costume drama, based fairly faithfully on true events, which has found its way onto the big screen and manages, in spite of all expectations, not to…

Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil, made in1957 and now restored according to a memo of protest Welles wrote to Universal after they butchered the movie on release, may be the best B-picture ever made. Watching it today, you have to wonder if he knew what he was doing — which was anticipating the postmodern film…