Tag: movies

Sunday, a few notes


Watched The Rewrite with Hugh Grant, great comedy.  Finished watching The Baker with Damian Lewis, a second great comedy. Both on Netflix.ca.

Diagnostic news: angiogram last week showed new lesion, 90-95 blocked artery. Therefore now triple not double bypass along with aortic valve replacement. No surgery date set.

Dialysis last week was smooth.

Will and 2 POAs: Saw a lawyer to make up a will and 2 power of attorneys. Long overdue.

My Funky Hands: I have lost some flexibility and dexterity in both hands. Handlin a computer mouse and handwriting with a pen more difficult, but I can still manage both in an awkward fashion. A bit tiring.  My novel now looking more likely to be a novella, sliding down to a short story.  Perhaps a haiku.

Local weather went from sickly and steaming, to a little cooler and wonderful. I love looking at the green trees.

Began reading a bio of James Dickey and his collected poems.  Writer Pat Conroy, a student of Dickey, said that Dickey made Hemingway seem in comparison like a florist from the mid-west.  You might remember him as the author of the novel, Deliverance. The movie with Jon Voight and Burt Reynolds. Dickey played a small part in the movie, a small town, menacing sheriff.

Justified is quite a ride


I mistakenly purchased season 2 of Justified, I will have to reset my brain and go back for season 1, but this series is stark, entertaining and quite unlike anything I have seen before.  Timothy Olyphant ( he formerly of Deadwood) is the lead, US Marshal Raylan Givens in the world of today, the world being his old home zone of Harlan County.  Bad people are there.  Margo Martindale plays the matriarch of a crime family who will I am certain be popping up in my nightmares for years to come. Walton Goggins as Boyd Crowder, reforming criminal (or is he really just returning to form), is a wonder and I hope to keep on the track of following his work for years.

Graham Yost (son of Elwy, if you live in Ontario you know who I mean)  is the brains behind this TV work.

Elmore Leonard (Get Shorty and so many more like Valdez is Coming and Cat Chaser) created the characters.

A Dutch Leonard quote: “If work was a good thing, the rich would have it all and not let you do it.”

Related articles

Newman


I have been sampling the various remembrances of Paul Newman on the web media over the past few days. I have lost count of the number of times I have heard Redford ask him if he used enough dynamite.  Mr. Newman was a model artist and philanthropist. I admired his movies. I will miss him a great deal. From Harper and Hud, John Russell to Harry Frigg, Judge Roy Bean to Butch Cassidy and all the rest especially Fast Eddie.

Inger Stevens


Caught the 1969 thriller movie, House of Cards, starring George Peppard and Inger Stevens. A movie i had seen many years before on TV. She looked stunningly, achingly beautiful in it. I have fond memories of her from her successful TV show, The Farmer’s Daughter. I found a collective biography of actresses who died young and read about Stevens. She was beautiful, talented, worked to help others and died senselessly at the age of 37.

Peter Bogdanovich, Who the Devil Made It: Conversations with Legendary Film Directors


I started rereading this fascinating book tonight.  Bogdanovich is to be thanked for making the determined effort to question film directors about their art and preserving their answers.  Allan Dwan is the first director in the book. He was born in Toronto in 1885. Dwan was among the earliest of directors, a contemporary of D.W. Griffith. He explains the techniques developed during the days of one reelers as well as his work on features with Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and Gloria Swanson. He was one of those who invented the language of movies. Other directors: Robert Aldrich, George Cukor, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Chuck Jones, Fritz Lang, Joseph H. Lewis, Sidney Lumet, Leo McCarey, Otto Preminger, Don Siegel, Josef von Sternberg, Frank Tashlin, Edgar G. Ulmer, and Raoul Walsh.

A great book. Highly recommended.