The Hall of Fire

Is it just me or is the Dune movie shaping up to be really exciting? It's got a great director and a fantastic cast so far. :wave: I've never been interested in Dune. At all. BUT. This Dune will be starring Timothée Chalamet, a wonderful young actor who broke my heart in the exquisite Call Me By Yo...

I am late to this party ... but I'll play. :) I prefer the FotR EE to the FotR TE - although I do hanker for the opening sequence of FotR TE, with the main title appearing under Frodo reading his book ... :love: That worked so well! I very much prefer RoTK TE to RotK EE. I hate nearly all the extend...

Phantom Thread ... hmmmm. Worth seeing for the gorgeous cinematography, the soundtrack ... and Lesley Manville, who is the only character I had any sympathy for. I'm delighted that American critics have discovered just how great this wonderful actress is. Vicky Kriepps is very good, but the story g...

I loved Lion. 8) Especially being an adoptee myself. The film deals with the pertinent issues in a sensitive and responsible way. Dev Patel is excellent in it - also gorgeous, lol. And as for that darling little boy playing his younger self ... :love: I normally don't care for Nicole Kidman, but she...

Not gonna see this film after the last one made the original series, let alone the prequels, utterly pointless for absolutely no believable reason (except cynical nostalgia money). And from everything I've heard, this just reinforces it. Talk about beating a dead horse, they went further and butche...

Ooooh, it's just like old days! I'll play. I remember the BBC take on Bombadil. I liked him, and Goldberry, but did NOT like Nigel Planer as Frodo. :( Come back, Ian Holm! Keep the hobbit age differences, have Frodo act his age, and keep Merry and Pippin distinct. Pippin must easily be identified as...

Well, I've now seen gay romance Call Me By Your Name twice , and I want to see it AGAIN. ;) I love, love, LOVE this film. It's a first love, rites of passage story, set in the summer of 1983 in a sun-drenched Italy, and it's gorgeous and dreamy and heartfelt and deeply moving. It all feels intensely...

I'm sorry you've been disappointed, Anduril. :( I loved Rogue One!!!!!!!!!!! I am very far from being a hardcore SW fan. But I saw it twice. Loved it. Al, I can't count the number of times I watched each and every one of those trailers, and then shared the excitement online. The early days, and the ...

I really enjoyed Arrival. :) It's wonderfully atmospheric, it all feels very real, and Amy Adams is very good indeed - and how refreshing to have a female academic as the main character! :love: (I also really like the 1998 film Contact , with Jodie Foster, which is very similar in many ways.) I have...

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 ...

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

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...