The only film directed by Oscar winning sound designer/editor Walter Murch, Disney's Return to Oz was a semi-sequel to the MGM film. Based in part on the second and third Oz books, The Marvelous Land of Oz and Ozma of Oz , the film was considered to be a box office disappointment. In order to keep some continuity, Disney paid MGM to license the ruby slippers, an invention of the 1939 film. The film...
Dear Mr. Inman: My daughter is reading John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” as I did at her age in high school. I vividly remember seeing on TV in the late 1960s or early ’70s a production of it that followed the novel to the letter, including all the profanity the book contained. I [...]
Lady Macbeth receives letter relating Macbeth's encounter with the three weird sisters. I watched the Royal Shakespeare Company Production of Macbeth from the 1979 TV production yesterday. This Trever Nunn production starring Ian McKellen as Macbeth and Judi Dench as Lady Macbeth is on DVD and I had it checked out of the library as part of my NaNo prep along with much other Shakespeare related materials....
DVD Video Review: Gary Couzens completes his look at Optimum's Tony Richardson Collection with 1977's Joseph Andrews, a comedy based on Henry Fielding's novel, starring Ann-Margret and Peter Firth.
While I was driving around doing errands today I listened to a very entertaining Downstage Center interview with playwright Paul Rudnick . He relates, in vivid detail, the story behind his romantic comedy I Hate Hamlet , which ran at the Walter Kerr Theatre for three months in 1991. It's certainly one of the more bizarre stories of a star-crossed Broadway production that I've heard. And while I've...
crapulous \KRAP-yuh-lus\, adjective: Given to or characterized by gross excess in drinking or eating. Suffering from or due to such excess. Crapulous is from Late Latin crapulosus, from Latin crapula, from Greek kraipale, drunkenness and its consequences, nausea, sickness, and headache. kind of a big deal A term for a person who is facetiously joking about how important/cool/awesome they are. "Yeah,...
Hollywood today puzzles me, not because of the amount of crap that comes out every year--after all, Hollywood has always produced mountains of crap with only a couple of gems as long as it has existed--but because of this ridiculous desire to remake those gems. In my links for The Rumpus this morning, I pointed to two examples of movie remakes reported to be in the works: Robert Zemeckis wants to remake...
Fleming states that Warners owns some of the Excalibur rights already so maybe it was cheaper to just get whatever percentage Boorman owned. I don't know... What I do know is that if you change the title and play with some of the focus you will avoid the comparison to the original, right? Can they get hotter than Helen Mirren? Can they get a crazier, funnier and creepily scary Merlin than Nicol Williamson?...
As it stands in my favorite movies list, John Boorman's Excalibur is my all-time favorite fantasy film; yes, more so than Lord of the Rings. My love for this film has nothing to do with the scale or production value as no film can compete with LOTR, however, Excalibur brings fond memories from when I was young and when I was introduced to epic fantasy. It was so influential to me as a kid that no other...
Synopsis Dorothy Gale (Fairuza Balk) lies in bed unable to sleep. Aunt Em (Piper Laurie) confides to Uncle Henry (Matt Clark) that it’s been six months since the tornado, and all the girl does is talk about some place that doesn’t exist. On their farm in turn of the century Kansas, Dorothy finds a key [...]
Synopsis Dorothy Gale (Fairuza Balk) lies in bed unable to sleep. Aunt Em (Piper Laurie) confides to Uncle Henry (Matt Clark) that its been six months since the tornado, and all the girl does is talk...
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