Frozen
[See “Frozen in Ideological Time” in The American Spectator of January-February, 2014 under “Articles”]
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[See “Frozen in Ideological Time” in The American Spectator of January-February, 2014 under “Articles”]
Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.
Hollywood producers have always been a prey to the delusion that what makes great novels great are their stories, or their characters or their “ideas”—things whose transfer to celluloid is fairly straightforward. But as Stéphane Mallarmé once said of poems, novels are not made of ideas but of words. Without Dickens’s words, Great Expectations is…
In his previous film, Read My Lips (Sur Mes Lèvres), of 2001, the director Jacques Audiard presented us with a Sartrean hymn to criminality as the route to personal authenticity and moral and existential purity, so it is not surprising that he should have seen in a remake of James Toback’s Fingers (1978) an opportunity…
In Les Misérables, directed by Bille August, it is the film itself which turns out to be misérable: thin and poor and wretched and in need of feeding up. The one thing you don’t want to skimp on when you are filming an epic is the epic proportions. August, a fine director of intense and…
The Inheritors written and directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky, is a curious anachronism, borrowing its story (so it might seem) from some Communist propaganda tract of the 1930s—when it is ostensibly set. It tells the story of a group of Austrian peasants whose master, when he is murdered, is found to have willed his farm to…
[See “Entry from July 13, 2011” under “My Diary”] Discover more from James Bowman Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email. Type your email… Subscribe
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