My Man Godfrey

Harold Ramis is a fine comic writer-director, and his Groundhog Day will go down in cinematic history as one of the great American classic films. But with his adaptation of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore’s Bedazzled of 1967 (directed by Stanley Donen), he has bitten off more than he can chew. Together with Larry Gelbart…

Here are the good things about The Legend of Bagger Vance, written by Jeremy Leven from the novel by Steven Pressfield and directed by Robert Redford. It tells a story set in Savannah, Georgia, in about 1930 and never once mentions Jim Crow or Southern white racism. So familiar by now is the iconography of…

In The Hurricane, Norman Jewison is going through the motions. His film takes an ostensibly true story which also conforms to a classic movie situation—a man condemned for a crime he did not commit—and allows our expectations to do all the work. Rubin “Hurricane” Carter (Denzel Washington) was a top middleweight contender in the mid-1960s…

[See discussion under “My Diary” for July 10, 2013] Discover more from James Bowman Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email. Type your email… Subscribe

A new Forrest Gump meets Memento, though this is worse than either. Of course it is festooned with Academy Award nominations

Devil’s Island, directed by Fridrik Thor Fridriksson and written by Einar Karason is set in the 1950s in a former American army base in Iceland called Camp Thule. Into the army’s wartime Quonset huts there have now moved a collection of poor Icelanders who can afford no better place to live and who are looked…