Amadeus (Directors Cut): Embarrassingly, I had no idea that this film was about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – so when I mentioned it to friends on the weekend before watching it, I just said I had ‘Amadeus’ to watch, and I had no idea what it was about, so wasn’t able to expound on it. A […]
Month: April 2009
Book: Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
Crime and Punishment: I remember when I started to read this book (last year, perhaps the year before) that it seemed like it was going to be a complicated one. It wasn’t really as complicated as I had feared. The main complication for me was keeping track of the names of the people – I […]
Movie: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari): Not one of my favourite films from the IMDB top 250. I simply couldn’t get past the very bad acting, the very odd sets, and the story I didn’t like too. The story is about a town which has a spate of murders, and is a […]
Movie: Bicycle Thieves (1948)
Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette): This film follows a few days in the life of a man living in poverty who has just been given a job as a bill sticker – a job that requires him to have a bicycle. The poverty displayed in the film was really quite depressing, and the job was […]
Movie: Strangers on a Train (1951)
Strangers on a Train: A rather odd Hitchcock film, not one of my favourites. The film starts with two characters meeting on a train, where it seems fairly obvious to us that one of the people in the conversation really is rather odd, but it’s not obvious yet if he’s being serious with what he’s […]
Movie: Jumper (2008)
Jumper: A film about a guy who can teleport. That’s about it. When this character finds out he can do this, it is totally by accident, in a kind of ‘fight or flight’ situation. Which seems very much like the kind of times peoples abilities manifest in most superhero type stories. It oddly seems ‘natural’ […]
Movie: The Chorus (Les Choristes) (2004)
The Chorus: A teacher has been hired by a school that has ‘difficult’ children. Only when he comes in for the first day does he realise how difficult they can be. The film actually starts off with a French musician (the actor ‘Jacques Perrin‘, also in Cinema Paradiso) in the US being told that there […]
Movie: The Lost Weekend (1945)
The Lost Weekend: A rather different kind of film. The main character in this film is an alcoholic, and, as might be obvious from the title, you are following him on a weekend. I thought this was a mostly very well done film, with the desperation coming through the character in certain situations, but, also the […]