Additional Posts From This Author
Release of the critically acclaimed film Wonka, an origin story based on Roald Dahl’s signature 1961 novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, shows that the author (and Roald Dahl movies) still has a grip on the public imagination over 30 years after his death. Dahl's many children’s books – among them, James and the Giant...
It’s slightly odd that movie versions of stage musicals did not follow on the heels of 1927’s The Jazz Singer, the first talkie, quite as hotly as expected, especially since The Jazz Singer was a musical film based on a stage play (although not exactly a musical). Among the first, if not the first, stage...
Filmmakers have turned the lens on themselves, figuratively and literally, since at least 1928, the year Buster Keaton made his classic comedy The Cameraman. Since then, movies about movies, filmmakers, and filmmaking have come thick and fast, running into the hundreds with no sign of let-up and spanning an exhaustive range of genres, from solipsistic...
Fledgling bands in search of a name have looked to the bookshelf for inspiration since the earliest days of rock and roll. Once the counterculture kicked in, and pop music assumed a more self-important demeanor, literary names soared in popularity: Uriah Heap, Mott the Hoople, Soft Machine, and so on. The trend continues, with a...
Is there anything harder than choosing a band name? Yes, obviously, millions. But it still poses a challenge, as anyone who has ever experienced this peculiar test of imagination and ingenuity will explain (often at length). Aiming for something original, enigmatic, instantly memorable, and richly redolent of amusical style and overarching ‘tood has no shortage...
When John le Carré died in December 2022, the world lost its finest writer of espionage fiction. Le Carré (real name David Cornwell) served in two branches of the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI5 and MI6, and began his career as a novelist in 1961 while still an active undercover agent. In 1964, he left...
Anyone could make a mistake in thinking that the “fiction” bit of science fiction absolves the genre of any responsibility to the real thing. To pick just the movie to illustrate the point, 2019’s Chinese blockbuster The Wandering Earth envisioned mankind working in harmony to blast the Earth out of its orbit and into a...
The underwhelming Netflix comedy Family Switch (“A dad joke of a movie,” according to critic Nell Minow) reminds us of two things. First, the appeal of body-swap movies for filmmakers remains undimmed even after a century or so of service and a multitude of examples in every category imaginable. And second, as evidenced below, many...
What counts as reality TV today, worlds removed from the social experiment of Seven Up!, began in earnest with the 1991 Dutch show Number 28, the first to put a group of strangers together in a closed environment and film the ensuing drama. Several factors, including advances in video editing and sensational footage from the...
Someone very wise once wrote that calculating the number of historical movies that got history wrong is easy. It’s all of them. Though funny, the sentiment also contains a grain of truth: no movie can remain one hundred percent true to the facts. Even paragons of the genre like Stephen Spielberg’s Lincoln or Martin Scorsese’s...
“The only way of discovering the limits of the possible,” wrote legendary science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, “is to venture a little way past them, into the impossible.” It’s often said that the role of science fiction is not to predict the future but to comment on the present by imagining what lies ahead....
With 34 screen adaptations to his name, Stephen King ranks as the third most filmed author in history. Only Agatha Christie and William Shakespeare outrank him. Given his legendary work rate (plus he’s still alive and going strong) King will almost certainly best Christie’s tally of 48. But even he’ll have to go some to...
Cameo appearances in movies date back at least to the 1920s, and it's obvious why they caught on. First, getting asked to do a cameo flatters to the ego. Second, it means maximum exposure for minimum effort; people often remember a star cameo long after they’ve forgotten the movie itself. Third, it’s fun to do....
Film in the silent era was a visual medium, cinema at its most pure and elemental. Without recourse to the spoken word, silent movies created a new language, elevating what began life as a cheap novelty into high art. But it was an art that was doomed from the beginning. The sound revolution was an...
Historians note that Christmas as we know it, decked with holly, and hung with mistletoe, etc. all came from Charles Dickens. When Dickens began work on his 1843 novella, A Christmas Carol, he looked to Washington Irving's writing on the American Yuletide for inspiration, weaving the more wholesome version of the festive season into the...
As the old saying goes, choosing favorite Samuel L. Jackson characters is like choosing a favorite child – dead easy! Deciding which memorable characters he has conjured into life best define him as an actor poses a much more complicated problem. In a career spanning fully five decades (he made his debut in 1972’s Together...
Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein, Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, Lon Chaney Jr.’s Wolfman: just three of the many classic movie monsters that fail to appear on the following list. Call them lucky. Check out some of the most terrible movie monsters to curse the screen. Ro-Man (Robot Monster – 1953) The quintessence of rubbish movie monsters, writer-director Phil...
If music be the food of love, as Shakespeare says, it also offers a hearty snack for a great many other things, including anxiety, suspense, and terror. For example, in the realm of horror cinema music’s capacity to manipulate an audience's emotions gets stretched to its limits. A horror movie without music feels like a...
Time takes its merciless toll on movie-going just like everything else. Where now are the red velvet curtains, the intermission, the uniformed ushers, the seat-back ashtrays? All luxuries that few people alive today ever experienced, and few ever will again, all now consigned to the landfill of history. Just like, the concept of marketing cheesy...
When it comes to literary works on film, no one touches William Shakespeare. The 38 plays he wrote between 1589 and 1616, the year of his death, account for around 1220 big- and small-screen adaptations, an extraordinary number given that his closest rival, crime novelist Agatha Christie, can boast only 48 adaptations from some 74...
Is any book genuinely unfilmable? If such uncompromising literary mind-benders as Naked Lunch, Ulysses, and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men can yield coherent – or mostly coherent – movies, then surely anything can. Or can it? Hopefully, the following list of unfilmable books will put such notions to the test. And if any intrepid filmmakers...
No one could calculate the number of historical movies that get everything wrong: it’s all of them. To take one at random, John O’Farrell, in his 2007 book An Utterly Impartial History of Britain notes that Braveheart could not have been more historically inaccurate if a Plasticine dog had been inserted and the title changed...
Imagine Casablanca without Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, or The Terminator without Arnold Schwarzenegger. It’s impossible. Like every other perfectly cast film, Bogart, Bergman, and Schwarzenegger become the characters they play, both on screen and in the popular imagination, symbiotically united by the magic of the movies. But the casting process is seldom as straightforward...
