I just do not understand the desire that some people have to be the first to get or do something that seems so trivial, and even if that lead is so fleeting and intangible. For example, the people lining up for days in advance, or paying others to do so, just for the privilege of getting a new iPhone on the day it is released, when you could wait a few days and get it at your leisure. But it seems to matter greatly to some to be the first.
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In writing about the film Gaslight, I mentioned that actor Joseph Cotten also appeared in The Third Man (1949). Anyone who has seen that film will undoubtedly recall the mesmerizing theme and the soundtrack. In his retrospective look at great films, critic Roger Ebert’s rave review begins:
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Last night I watched this old film that won an Academy Award for Ingrid Bergman. She played Paula Alquist, an orphan who was raised by her aunt, a famous opera singer who was strangled in her London home by a killer in pursuit of expensive jewelry that had been gifted to her as a reward for her performance. The case was never solved and the jewels never found. Paula was just 14 at the time and she was immediately sent away to Italy to study music under her aunt’s tutor, and the London house was mothballed but not sold or rented.
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When US audiences think of parodies of TV police shows, the first name that comes to mind is Leslie Nielsen in his role as Frank Drebin in the short-lived six-episode 1982 series Police Squad! that later was made into the hit trilogy of Naked Gun films beginning in 1988.
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A couple of days ago I watched once again this classic western. It is one of the few films that I have watched more than once and it still grips me. It is a western but has little action, its fascination lying in the human drama. For those few who have not seen the film, the entire action takes place in almost real time. It stars Gary Cooper as marshal Will Kane who has cleaned up a western town. At 10:30 am one morning he gets married to Amy Fowler (played by Grace Kelly), a Quaker, and following he ceremony he gives up his badge in order to accommodate his pacifist wife and leave town and start a new life elsewhere as a shopkeeper.
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I enjoy comedies so I was interested in this list of the 101 funniest screenplays of all time. The list ranks them in order but while such rank ordering is good for getting people to click and argue about which films are better than others, I tend to ignore the rankings and use such lists merely as general guides to identify good films that I might have missed.
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This is a Disney nature documentary in which Tina Fey narrates the story of a troop of macaque monkeys, focusing on just two of them, Maya and her infant Kip. It appears that macaque troops have a strict social hierarchy in which the people at the top get first crack at all the good food and shelter while those at the very bottom, like Maya, have to make do with what is left over. Not much different from many human societies, really.
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Nicholas Barclay was a 13-year old boy living in a small town outside San Antonio, Texas who suddenly disappeared in June 1994. Three years later, after having pretty much given up hope of ever seeing him again, the family gets a call from Spain saying that authorities have found him. His sister goes to Spain and brings him back where he begins his life again as a high school student.
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