Taxes: Bureaucrats want higher taxes to increase their salaries, pensions, and turf. Politicians want higher taxes so they’ll have more largesse to bestow and trade. Most citizens want tax money for education, research, welfare, etc., etc., etc. The few who pay more in taxes than they gain in benefits join the above or perish. This is why we can expect a fate like Rome’s.
Both the genteel British version (Ian Richardson) and crude American version (Kevin Spacey) are excellent, but crudity repels me. Scriptwriter Andrew Davies raised British verbal evasiveness to an art form, and wrote with a scalpel, whereas the American dialogue was written with a raised middle finger. And I was taken with Ian Richardson.
The Eureka Factor: Aha Moments, Creative Insight, and the Brain, by John Kounios and Mark Beeman. NY, Random House, ©2015. The latest brain science corroborates what some of us have already discovered for ourselves about the creative process. The authors have many good suggestions. A book worth owning.
1. When a character walks out to his car, pulling the camera back to take in a wide angle tips us off, making the explosion anticlimactic. 2. When two characters talk in a car and you show road conditions, I am too nervous and worried ––keep your eyes on the road!––that what the characters say doesn’t register. 3. A criminal’s memory of his crime (Ian Richardson in House of Cards) or a victim’s flashback (Christina… read more →
An engaging movie about a sweet, shy girl, played by Christina Mauro, who is injured, and her effectst hereafter on each of the persons in her life. Well-orchestrated casting. Excellent acting and direction. It was irrelevant that I didn’t buy the premise because I understood and cared about each of the diverse, likable characters.
I didn’t expect to like this TV series because plots involving drugs bore me. However, the characters instantly engaged me, and the plot gripped me. Excellent casting, acting, direction, and photography. The most memorable moment: a roll of toilet paper is scooted across the floor. Congratulations to the show’s creator, Vince Gilligan.
1948, produced and directed by Carol Reed, story and screenplay by Graham Greene, starring Michèle Morgan, Ralph Richardson, and Sonia Dresdel. Cover blurb: ”Elegantly balancing suspense and farce, this tale of the fraught relationship between a boy and the beloved butler he suspects of murder is a delightfully macabre thriller of the first order and a visually and verbally dazzling knockout.”
2008-present. Worth subscribing to and keeping. When Lewis Lapham was editor of Harper’s, it was a great magazine. Now he has turned his scholarly depth and eclectic interests to Lapham’s Quarterly, which “embodies the belief that history is the root of all education, scientific and literary as well as political and economic. Each issue addresses a topic of current interest and concern––war, religion, money, medicine, nature, crime––by bringing up to the microphone of the present… read more →
One of the funniest, cleverest movies I have seen. 1986 Danny DeVito, Bette Midler. The title-role lovable kidnappers are Judge Reinhold and Helen Slater. Cleverly written by Dale Launer. Meticulous construction; every scene counts, good pace.
Ballet and opera 1951 “Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger create a phantasmagoric marriage of cinema and opera in this one-of-a-kind take on a classic story. In Jacques Offenbach’s fantasy opera The Tales of Hoffman, a poet dreams of three women––a mechanical performing doll, a bejeweled siren, and the consumptive daughter of a famous composer––all of whom break his heart in different ways. Powell and Pressburger’s feverishly romantic adaptation is a feast of music, dance, and… read more →