Are you ready for a taste of sin? Perhaps you’re a goody two shoes who fear your straight life makes your a bore. Or perhaps you suffer repressed urges that makes you tense and irritable. Or perhaps you’ve hidden away decadent traits so long that you know they’re about the burst free, at the...
This is not a review. This is not a critical essay. This is a rant. And since this is a rant, please do not expect it to be organized. Please do not expect it to be logical. And least of all, please do not expect it to spoiler free. I’m ranting against something that...
I first saw The Dreamers (2003) a few years ago. I had just seen Eva Green play Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale (2006), and since she played a different type of Bond girl and gave a good performance, I wanted to see her in another role. At the time, there was not much to...
I first saw Roman Polanski’s Tess (1979) in December of 1981. It was my final quarter at Western Washington University. My roommate, Eugene, and I needed a break from studying, and the movie was playing at a campus auditorium. At the time, I had never heard of Thomas Hardy or of his infamous novel,...
A good gangster movie does two contradictory things at once. First, it must show how the gangster is just like everyone else. Second, it must show how he is like no one else. Black Mass (2015), a biopic about real-life gangster James “Whitey” Bulger, achieved both. It’s the best gangster movie I’ve seen in...
Lest anyone believe I was naive, when I went to The Legend of Hercules, I wasn't expecting a great movie. I doubt that I was expecting a good movie. From the trailers I saw, I could tell that Renny Harlin suffered from mixed ideas about how to film this legendary story. Should a...
I wanted to hate this movie! In fact, I expected to hate it. When I heard they intended to give the Hollywood treatment to The Great Gatsby, I cringed. Chills chased down my back. I went into paranoid denial: No! No! Please say it ain’t so! My doubts increased when I heard that Leonardo...
When I learned that Jack Kerouac’s On the Road had finally been adopted into a movie, I felt excited to see it. I had read the novel when I was young man, and I loved the sense of freedom depicted in its pages. A few years later, I tried to write my own movie...
François Truffaut had had a wonderful career. This self-educated film buff directed The 400 Blows, along with twenty-some other movies, founded the French New Wave movement, developed the auteur theory, and acted in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He wrote movie reviews, books, and screenplays. But in any ambitious career, there...
The conventional wisdom of scriptwriters, as I understand it, is that when you adopt a novel into a screenplay for a movie, you are creating something different from the novel. In this way, Hollywood justifies bastardizing the best novels ever written. Now I learned that they are planning to adopt one of my favorite...
