because life is too short
I make no apology for it: I love breathtakingly gorgeous movies. I love swooning, rapturous, intoxicatingly beautiful films. While that usually means a concert of photogenic actors, lush music, and exotic locations, the key soloist is often the guy behind the camera, the “I” with the “eye.” An early ambition of mine was to be [...]
by John Murphy The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is self-indulgent in the best and worst sense. Peter Jackson, the hobbity Kiwi who transformed J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, into an Oscar-winning box-office behemoth, has earned his right to luxuriate in the cinematic world he began building over a decade ago. And [...]
Starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Winona Ryder appreciated by John Murphy Martin Scorsese directing a Merchant-Ivory film? Don’t be fooled. Period trappings aside, this is a Marty movie through and through — beautifully filmed, expertly acted, and thematically obsessed with guilt, passion, and moral failings. I’m in an admitted minority in finding The Age [...]
My middle child is “high-functioning” autistic. One of the (many) interesting things about him is that he gets little “obsessions”—fierce interests in certain, often obscure, subjects that can last for months, even years. Around the time of his eighteenth birthday, my son’s obsession-du-jour was 1990s Westerns, a subgenre of a classic genre (Westerns) which has [...]
[See also this post on the movie soundtrack by Patrick Doyle and We Few, We Happy Few] by Debra Murphy Seeing as how the Shakespeare bug has bitten almost every member of Clan Murphy, I am frequently asked by friends (and readers of Bardolatry) how best to 1) introduce oneself to the Bard, particularly in the [...]
Directed by Stanley Kubrick Starring Ryan O’Neal and Marisa Berenson appreciated by John Murphy The Northwest Film Center in Portland, Oregon hosted a Stanley Kubrick retrospective at the Portland Art Museum a few years back. The series offered eager fans (like your intrepid reporter) a unique opportunity to chart Kubrick’s development as a director, as [...]
directed by Alfonso Arau, starring Keanu Reeves, Giancarlo Giannini and Anthony Quinn Three Honorable Men But, Victoria, look at the positive side. It’s a new life coming into the world. That’s a miracle in itself, right? —Paul Sutton to Victoria Aragon These lines are from the 1995 romantic drama, A Walk in the Clouds. Walk [...]
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