Raiders of the Lost Ark

A proud vulgarization of Fitzgerald’s novel by Baz Luhrmann

Let’s stipulate that teenage sexual energy and the sorts of things it drives the young’uns to get up to are inherently funny subjects. Shakespeare has the grumbling old shepherd in The Winter’s Tale say: “I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is…

The fairy-tale implications of title of The Princess and the Warrior (or, with German logic, Der Krieger und die Kaiserin), written and directed by Tom Tykwer, is both misleading and not. The film is set in the present day, in Wuppertal, Germany, and is told realistically—without even the fractured time scheme of Tykwer’s earlier hit,…

[See discussion under “My diary” entry for July 6, 2011] Discover more from James Bowman Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email. Type your email… Subscribe

Britain may be the only country in the world where it is still possible to make movies which glorify and romanticize and sentimentalize an old-fashioned view of masculinity—and have it come off looking progressive. Last spring we had Brassed Off which traded off its romantic notions of a stag-line of Yorkshire coal-miners down t’pit or…

Election was directed and co-written by Alexander Payne, the promising young director of Citizen Ruth. Once again, he shows that he has real talent in this often hilarious tale of life at George Washington Carver High in Omaha. Like that other recent success, Rushmore, the film looks at high school as something of a metaphor…