Category Archives: Movies

Time To Watch Rashomon?

Today is Akira Kurosawa’s 100th birthday. I wonder how many culture bloggers will mention it. No one seems to have noticed Hugo Wolf’s 150th, which was 10 days ago.

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Just a Suggestion . . . .

Perhaps I’m just addicted to bad jokes and cultural allusions, but if I were Terry Teachout, I would have titled his latest post “Top of the world, ma!”.

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I Wonder

When Orson Welles was filming Macbeth, Othello, and Chimes at Midnight, did the crew call him Horson Welles? Behind his back, or to his face, it would have been a thoroughly Shakespearian pun.

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Quotations of the Day

“The dead weep with joy when their books are reprinted.” “Everyone can see the future, but no one remembers the past.” (The Stranger, in Russian Ark, 2002)

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Quotation of the Day

“Unhappiness is our own invention. At times I’m sad that I lack the imagination for it.” (Général André de . . ., in The Earrings of Madame de . . ., 1953)

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Little-Known Fact: BBC Shakespeares

Amazon and other retailers offer four BBC Shakespeare DVD box sets, of five plays each: Comedies, Histories, Tragedies, and Tragedies II. The list price is $149.99 per box, and Amazon doesn’t discount them nearly as much as most of their … Continue reading

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A Must-Have For Latinists?

Next Tuesday, the Criterion Collection will be coming out with a five-DVD collection of Ingmar Bergman’s earliest movies. Here’s the IMDB plot summary of the earliest of all, Hets or Torment (1944): Jan-Erik Widgren is a high-school senior. His Latin … Continue reading

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Looking Back

Over the last year, I haven’t had time to read a lot of books, but have finally started to catch up on some of the movies I’ve missed out on over the years. Some were checked out of the U.N.C. … Continue reading

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Is This a Joke?

Three early Fellini movies (Le Notti di Cabiria, La Strada, and I Vitelloni) list one of the workers as ‘Narciso Vicario’. This must be a pseudonym. According to IMDB, he is also named Vicario Narciso, Narciso Vicari, and Narcisio Vicario, … Continue reading

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An Unnecessary Gloss?

In Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932), the subtitles quote the maid as telling the title character, Priape Boudu, “You behave like a Neanderthal”, but the last word is clearly audible as ‘troglodyte’. Was the gloss really necessary? Surely anyone likely … Continue reading

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