Archive for the ‘Cultural issues’ Category
A review of the new action movie “Heart Of Stone”
August 14th, 2023 by Roger Darlington
Sadly, everything about this Netflix movie is contrived, starting with the title. Heart is the name of a super-powerful system of artificial intelligence, just like The Entity in the “Dead Reckoning” segment of the “Mission: Impossible” franchise. Stone is the surname of the special agent at the heart of the plot (see what I did […]
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A review of the novel “Heat And Dust” by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
August 12th, 2023 by Roger Darlington
For a long time, I assumed that the author was of Indian ethnicity because of her name and her long association with film director James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant. In fact, her parents were Polish Jews, she was born in German, and she came to England at the age of 12 when in 1939 […]
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A review of the 1983 film “Heat and Dust”
August 7th, 2023 by Roger Darlington
One of the great collaborative teams of British cinema was the trio of director James Ivory, producer Ismail Merchant and writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and “Heat And Dust” was one of their most successful enterprises. Based on the eponymous novel by Jhabvala and set largely in northern India, it tells two parallel stories located in […]
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Word of the day: anabasis
August 5th, 2023 by Roger Darlington
The word means a military expedition or advance. I came across it in a book about the Czech Legion in Siberia at the end of the First World War: “Dreams Of A Great Small Nation”.
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A review of “Mission: Impossible -Dead Reckoning Part One”
August 4th, 2023 by Roger Darlington
It’s been a long time coming – and we still don’t have the complete story. Shooting of the latest IMF escapade has been interrupted so many times by Covid that the final budget is a reported $290M, making it one of the most expensive films ever, and delaying its release until five years after the […]
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A review of the new money-making movie “Barbie”
July 30th, 2023 by Roger Darlington
This is clearly a movie aimed at a young female demographic and, as an elderly man, I am way outside the target audience. But I wanted to see it because it has already become a massive success, about which so many are talking and writing, and because I so admire many of those involved in […]
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A review of the new blockbuster film “Oppenheimer”
July 29th, 2023 by Roger Darlington
“Oppenheimer”- or “Symbol Of Pacifism” as it is called in Poland, through which I passed recently – is the 12th film made by British director Christopher Nolan and I’ve seen (and admired) all of them, except the first, very low-budget work which I’ve never caught. Nolan is a director of exceptional talent and originality, every […]
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A review of the David Lean film that you’ve never heard of: “Summertime”
July 26th, 2023 by Roger Darlington
In 1955, just two years before acclaimed British director David Lean began turning out a series of hugely successful epic movies, he made “Summertime”, a small romantic comedy-drama shot entirely in the glorious city of Venice. In spite of being a massive Lean fan since “Lawrence Of Arabia” (1962) and visiting Venice three times, I […]
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A review of “Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny”
June 30th, 2023 by Roger Darlington
In 1981, the film world was presented with a new hero, except that in fact Indiana Jones was a reprise of, and a homage to, the 1940s action men so beloved by then wunder-kids George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. Almost unbelievably, some 42 years later, Indy has donned his leather jacket and fedora and picked […]
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A review of the 1964 epic war movie “Zulu”
June 23rd, 2023 by Roger Darlington
No less than 11 Victoria Crosses were awarded to the British defenders of Rorke’s Drift at the battle in Natal which took place on 22-23 January 1879. Amazingly some 150 British soldiers, around 30 of them sick or wounded patients in a field hospital, held off a force of about 4,000 Zulu warriors. Inevitably there […]
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