Archive for the ‘Cultural issues’ Category
A review of the recent film “Allied”
May 31st, 2020 by Roger Darlington
Brad Pitt plays French-speaking Canadian pilot Max Vatan and Marion Cotillard is the French resistance fighter Marianne Beauséjour who team up for an audacious mission in Vichy-controlled Casablanca in 1942. The action then moves to London and occupied France. Apparently inspired loosely by actual events, this film – scripted by the British Steven Knight and […]
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A review of the recent film “The Gentlemen”
May 29th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
You know what you’re getting with Guy Ritchie and this is a quintessentially Guy Ritchie movie: he co-created the story, co-wrote the script, and both produced and directed. So unsurprisingly this crime story, set in London, has a convoluted plot with plenty of violence and bad language plus a fair bit of humour. What makes […]
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Word of the day: anosmia
May 19th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
The word means a loss of the sense of smell. This is often accompanied with loss of a sense of taste. One of my grandmothers had this on a permanent basis which meant that she could not smell if she had left on the gas cooker and she did not really enjoy her food. The […]
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A review of the recent film “Jojo Rabbit”
May 17th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
When “Jojo Rabbit” was released at the cinema, I had no wish to see it – for me the idea of a Hitler comedy is an oxymoron. But the film received some excellent reviews and proved popular with viewers. Then I found myself in lockdown during the coronavirus crisis and, with little else new to […]
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A review of the recent movie “Knives Out”
May 15th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
When “Knives Out’ was released at the cinema, it was both a commercial and a critical success, but I was not sure that it was the film for me. However, when I was subject to lockdown in the coronavirus crisis, I wanted something light and entertaining and decided to have a stab at this old-fashioned […]
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A review the 1948 classic western “Red River”
May 10th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
Directed by the legendary Howard Hawks, this classic western – shot in black and white – is the story of a cattle drive up the Chisholm Trail and includes a series of memorable scenes created with Hawks’ famous eye-level shooting including the river crossing, the stampede, and the Indian attack. More than 5,000 head of […]
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A review of the 2012 film “The Company You Keep”
May 8th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
The Weather Underground was a radical left militant organisation active in the United States in the late 1960s and 1970s. It was a revolutionary body that was responsible for a series of riots, bombings and jailbreaks. As a subject for a mainstream film, therefore, it is not obvious that this is a sympathetic proposition for […]
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A review of the 2018 film “The Guernsey Literary And Potato Peel Pie Society”
May 4th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
I literally knew nothing about this film except its quirky title when I sat down to watch it during the lockdown period of the coronavirus crisis. I imagined that it was some sort of romantic comedy, but found that, while there was romance, it was a much more substantive story about life on the Channel […]
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A review of the 2006 movie “The Departed”
May 1st, 2020 by Roger Darlington
In 2002, Hong Kong had a hit with a Catonese-language stylish crime drama called “Infernal Affairs” which I enjoyed at the time and which soon spawned two sequels. In 2006, Hollywood remade the film as “The Departed” and it was so successful that it won four Academy Awards (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay […]
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A review of “The Mirror And The Light” by Hilary Mantel
April 25th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
I owe a special debt of gratitude to award-winning author Hilary Mantel for her superb trilogy of novels providing a fictional account of the life of Thomas Cromwell, chief counsellor to England’s 16th century King Henry VIII. I read the first part, the 650 page “Wolf Hall”, during a trip to China; I consumed the […]
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