Matt Damon has played his eponymous hero, Jason Bourne, since 2002’s ‘Bourne Identity’, finishing the third of the films, the ‘Bourne Ultimatum’, in 2007. Mr. Damon apparently intended never again to reprise the role, which he thought he had exhausted, claiming that any future film could only be title the ‘Bourne Redundancy’. Well, I […]
Feel free to peruse an article I just finished on Shuasku Endo’s controversial novel Silence, pusblished in 1966, and now soon to be released as a major Hollywood production. The book follows a Jesuit missionary, Sebastian Rodrigues, forced to choose between apostasy, and saving a whole group of people being tortured. The tale analyzes the […]
Alas, in earth-shattering news, the couple known as ‘HiddleSwift’ has broken up. Yes, to you legions of fans (there have to be some out there to make its mountains of cash) of the Avengers’ nemesis Loki, and of the teen-angst ballads of Taylor Swift, the photogenic young-ish couple has called it quits, barely two months […]
I have been asked to write about what is euphemistically, and rather incorrectly, known as ‘swearing’. We have all perhaps heard our younger siblings yell, “Muuuum! Jimmy swore!”. Yet Jimmy did not really ‘swear’, unless he is beyond his years, or brought into a court of law. Swearing literally is taking a solemn oath, […]
I thought the Star Wars franchise, so successful and cinema-transforming in the late seventies and early eighties, was ruined by the three prequels in the early years of this millennium, all of which were phenomenally bad, the last one on a galactic scale. The blond Canadian Anakin deserved an anti-Oscar for his bathos. I had […]
Alas for Captain America. I know he is a fictional character, but, even so, he has had a rough time of it of late. First, and the least of his problems, is the second-to-last film, Winter Soldier, about which I was going to write a review, until I heard the other two bits of […]
Modern television (or do we say internet?) programs, particularly on Netflix, and other media, have become radically explicit, both in violence and in sex. Reading this article, even my somewhat jaded soul was surprised that such things could remotely pass for ‘entertainment’, to say nothing of actually being shown to a mass, and indiscriminate, audience. […]
(As a bit of light-hearted reading before the issuance of the Holy Father’s Apostolic Letter later today, here are some thoughts on two superheroes, such as they are.) Yes, I must admit, I did watch Ant-Man, in two instalments, for a I had to sort of motivate myself to finish it. The campy film […]
I finally got around recently to watching the fifth instalment of the Mission Impossible franchise. As expected, it was slick and high-budget, with impressive real-life stunts. Besides hanging on to moving planes and swerving motorcycles, Tom Cruise is showing his age a little, a rigid expression setting into his normally expressive face, a rictus grin […]
I just took in the new American-everyman Tom Hank’s movie, Captain Philips which, surprisingly from its limited quality, has made over $218 million so far, and won six Academy awards. Directed in shaky-realistic-video by Paul Greengrass, who also oversaw two of the Bourne movies, the film has a stark realism. The problem, I think, is […]