None of the movies I saw this week thrilled as much as the conclusion to the first part of T. H. White’s The Once and Future King. After 200 pages of young Wart’s education, we finally get to the part about the sword in the stone. It’s Merlyn’s final lesson, presented in a hallucinatory [...]
Posts Tagged ‘england’
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier
I shelve my Alan Moore books next to Thomas Pynchon, Umberto Eco, and Jorge Luis Borges, and I am sure all three postmodern masters would get a healthy kick out of this wildly imaginative third book to Moore’s Gentlemen series, which draws on a vast storehouse of influences and blends them into an ecstatic new [...]
Atonement
A booby-trapped tale of wartime love and guilt, adapted from the great Ian McEwan, who has been mining the darker recesses of desire since First Love, Last Rites (1975). Joe Wright directs an excellent cast — Keira Knightley, James McAvoy, Romola Garai, Vanessa Redgrave, and newcomer Saoirse Ronan — in what begins like a standard [...]
Elizabeth: The Golden Age
In anticipation of the sequel, Marcy and I rewatched the original 1998 movie, a solid historical drama with a healthy Godfather finish and an astounding performance by Cate Blanchett. The new film, also directed by Shekhar Kapur, picks up the story where it left off and sees the Virgin Queen through to the defeat of [...]
