King’s Row (1942)

Pity poor Pat Tillman, fated to be a posthumous propaganda tool for one side or the other in our increasingly graceless public dialogue on matters of war and peace

Well, here goes. The following, I know, is an invitation to hate-mail, but I have to say that Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace, written and directed by George Lucas, demonstrates a remarkable paucity of imagination. The thought first came to me in the scene where Senator Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) explains to Queen Amidala…

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…

[See discussion under “My Diary” for June 27, 2013] Discover more from James Bowman Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email. Type your email… Subscribe

What I liked about Pollock, directed by and starring Ed Harris, is that it really does convey an impression of what a nasty man Jackson Pollock must have been—not, that is, nasty in the mealy-mouthed, surreptitious, hypocritical way that people are generally nasty these days but nasty in that old-fashioned, full-bore, unashamed way that people…

A too-busy but still enjoyable account of part of the life of the author of The Adventures of Peter Rabbit