The Hall of Fire

Di, I was hoping that you would weigh in here! :sunny: :sunny: :sunny: :sunny: Interestingly, during the Irish moot, I got into conversation over breakfast in my guesthouse with a polite, but rather dour, Irish gentleman who had very decided opinions on the EU Referendum. He told me that Britain sh...

I was reading a little more about Boris Johnson's comments in favor of the pull out. They are pretty extreme, comparing the EU to the Third Reich and saying that while the means might be different, the goal is basically the same as that of Hitler and Napoleon. Needless to say, these comments have n...

There've been some great crime dramas on UK TV this autumn and winter. 8) Icelandic drama 'Trapped'. Currently on BBC1, 'Undercover', about racism and betrayal in high places, with the distinction of having all the principal characters played by British black actors, which is surely a first. :) Adri...

Rickman actually studied Dev's accent very carefully, and as Dev was a bit of a West Brit, its pretty accurate. . I would have expected no less of him. :love: I never got round to seeing Michael Collins . :( Bad girl. :rage: Particularly as I love all things Liam Neeson. ;) Well, I saw Eye in the S...

Nin - thank you so much for posting that up. Here in Ireland some of us on the Irish Moot read the FB message last night and have been holding Jewel in our thoughts and prayers. One of our company looked up the symptoms and they seemed to point to Transient Global Amnesia - which is a real thing, ve...

I know. Somehow Lahore has just tipped me into despair. What can be done? Really. What can we do, apart from not repeating the mistake of the Iraq War in the future? And how likely is it that we will not repeat that? The Taliban have promised more Lahore-type horrors to come. *shudder* Persecution ...

All I can say is that Donald Trump offends everything I respect and admire about the USA.

Last autumn I thought Trump was a joke.

I'm not laughing now.

This is a first-class Harry Potter fan film, 'Severus Snape and the Marauders', set just after the First Generation have left Hogwarts and the First War is imminent. I loved it! I'm a big Snape fan, and this does him justice ... and the other characters. Good production values, well written and acte...

The past two chapters have been about how the sermon was not the focus of the meeting, and there wasn't even anything like that in the early church meetings. (They contend that it's a practice adopted from the Greek sophists.) How, exactly, would Viola and Barna know this? :scratch: (I'm not a chur...

I'm so glad I got to see him (in a gloomy Ibsen play, LOL) in Dublin, October 2010, with another fandom friend. I liked him and respected his work very much. His films include some of my favourites: Truly, Madly, Deeply and Sense and Sensibility and Galaxy Quest . And Die Hard ! And, of course, the ...

The Blackstar album is incredible. A requiem he wrote for himself, it seems.


Street party in Brixton (where he was born), in memoriam.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJTBAwVmDUU

A United Kingdom we are not.

The Tories got England, the SNP swept in and claimed Scotland, Labour got Wales, and the DUP got Northern Ireland.

David Cameron can talk up being 'one nation' as much as he likes, but he will have a rocky second term.

I voted for Labour this morning, in a Tory stronghold. In another universe, I could have been a Conservative, if that party really did stand for fiscal responsibility and had not this present coalition so mercilessly targeted the poor, the disabled and those with mental health issues. This will be a...

Sword at Sunset can be read as a stand-alone, IMO. :) It's a much longer novel than the others, and takes a somewhat different perspective. But I highly recommend the Roman trilogy: The Eagle of the Ninth, The Silver Branch and The Lantern Bearers, which cover the same Roman family over a 300 year p...

I'm a big fan of Sutcliff, in particular her wonderful Roman Britain trilogy, and recently finished her great Arthurian classic Sword at Sunset . The book acts as a chronological bridge between The Lantern Bearers and Dawn Wind , but is a much more adult work, and far darker. Sex (quite explicit for...

Neither. 8) :D There are hardly any 'purist' adaptations anyway. The only two exceptions I can think of right now are Hitchcock's 1940 film version of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca (a fabulous film of a fabulous book), and the 1981 Granada TV series of Brideshead Revisited, which is fiendishly faithfu...

I'm not crazy about that either and would certainly have preferred Frodo show a bit more nerve but I get what they were going for - Frodo, as the ringbearer, felt their preference and the fear of it much more intensely than the others did. I do think that's what PJ was trying to convey. :) I once p...

Voronwë the Faithful wrote:(Is it terrible that my first response to your question was to just quote Aragorn from the FOTR film responding to Frodo's question about what happened to Lúthien and just say "they died"?)

No.

The main thing I dislike about the Weathertop scene is that while Merry and Pippin and Sam try to resist, Frodo just collapses in a heap of terrorized goo. YES. In the book, it's the three younger hobbits who resort to wimp-mode, whereas Frodo is the one who hits out at the Witch-King. Now, I have ...

I get what Passdagas is saying, that Canon Weathertop cries out for more of a 'horror' film treatment than action film treatment. At least at first ... because V-man is quite right in saying that this scene in the book (which chilled my blood, the Nazgûl are so creepy!) does have a logical problem, ...