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Back to term, part two

I too went back to the same learning centre as Alice for an opera course. Of all the musical arts I came to opera the latest. I was put off by its rich corporate image – an opera bore is the worst bore of all – and there seemed little ground between those that are passionate and those [...]

January 18, 2019 // 0 Comments

Back to school

This week spring term began in our local adult learning centre and I signed up for the art course on British modernism. I like our teacher immensely. She has become a friend, coming over for dinner with her husband, a jazz drummer. I could scarcely believe she was 76. With her blonde hair, [...]

January 17, 2019 // 0 Comments

Basic Instinct

I was curious as to why Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct (1992) did not make the list of 10 great sex movies I cited recently and watched it again in case I missed something. The scene where Sharon Stone as writer Katherine Tremell, whilst interrogated at the San Francisco Police Dept, crosses and [...]

January 17, 2019 // 0 Comments

Stan & Ollie

The various trailers before the main film I had to sit through all bore the notice Based on a true story/inspired by a true story and a biopic fits into that category. The film features Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy’s final UK tour in which Ollie was to sustain a heart attack. After that neither [...]

January 16, 2019 // 0 Comments

Normal people/ Sally Rooney

Irish writer Sally Rooney is very much ‘literary flavour of the month’ with two successful and critically-acclaimed novels now published. Her second Normal People I approached with some wariness. It won the Costa Prize and there was some concern that it failed to land the Man Booker. [...]

January 11, 2019 // 0 Comments

Mulholland Drive

Interested to see whether the sex scene in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive justified its top billing, I watched the movie again yesterday. There are three sex scenes – two between the main actresses, Naomi Watts as Betty and Laura Harring as Rita – and one of Naomi Watts masturbating [...]

January 8, 2019 // 0 Comments

An iconic couple and a List

Here follow two more links to movie-related items that may be of interest to Rusters, both of them appearing today upon the website of The Independent: On the back of a new-and-soon-to-be-released-in-the-UK movie Stan & Ollie (starring Steve Cooghan and John C. Reilly) Martin Chilton writes on [...]

January 5, 2019 // 0 Comments

History as bunk (or maybe not)

It inevitably comes with the territory that dramatic depictions of historical figures and events have a tenuous relationship with the actualité. On several levels there is nothing particularly bizarre in that statement if you think about it. Let’s begin with the fact that virtually all dramatic [...]

January 4, 2019 // 0 Comments

Two Way Stretch and Warner Crime Movies

Like Nancy Bright Thompson I decide to reorganise and categorise in my case my DVDs. I sorted them out into Hollywood, World, British comedy and my personal favourites. It also meant that I had a “survival stack’ as none of the Xmas TV movies attracted me. I watched first Two Way Stretch, a [...]

January 3, 2019 // 0 Comments

Family times

They say that simple things please simple minds. Over time the Byfords, who love playing parlour games such as Name In The Hat, a variation of it – sometimes known as Who Am I? – in which everyone is issued with a ‘sticky’ on their forehead on which is written the name of a [...]

January 3, 2019 // 0 Comments

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