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The Fall of the Roman Empire
DVD Savant has an extensive review of the Miriam Collection special edition of the Samuel Bronston production, from the days when American dollars plus a European army gave you an epic. I have an earlier no-frills DVD of the title, but this new release gives it the restored-to-glory treatment. It’s a film that planted two…
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On Happy Endings
Well, there’s happy endings and happy endings. When Robin Williams was making Mrs Doubtfire there was studio pressure to conclude the story with a reconciliation of the divorced parents and a restoration of the broken family unit. Which probably would have prevailed (as the same reconciliation fantasy did in both versions of The Parent Trap)…
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Tarzan the Silent
A heads-up regarding the dirt-cheap DVDs available from Alpha Video, a company whose output I can best describe as ‘glorious tat’; a lot of public domain stuff and many titles that would be below most commercial distributors’ radar, but I wish they’d been around when my dad was alive so I could have bought him…
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Anthony Minghella
I turned on the radio for the lunchtime news a few minutes ago, and was dismayed to hear the announcement of the death of Anthony Minghella at the age of 54. I swore out loud, and scared the dog. Anthony and I were fellow students in Hull University’s Drama Department, back in the mid-seventies. I’m…
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Writer Killers
There’s no actual list yet, but perhaps there ought to be. Wherever screenwriters gather and swap stories there are always certain directors whose names are passed around with an attached health warning. The writer killers. They rarely complete a project with the writer who began it. Many of the projects they join don’t get completed…
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The Turn of the Tide
Looks like the high-definition format war is as good as over and that the next time I upgrade my Jason and the Argonauts, it’ll be to a Blu-Ray disc. I mean, I haven’t got a Blu-Ray player or anything. I haven’t even got a hi-def TV. But at some point I will. I was an…
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Whistle Down the Wind
I thought it worth giving more prominence to this comment by Stan in response to the Where I’m At post: I looked after the remastering of Whistle Down The Wind about 5 years ago and usually we have to transfer full frame in 16:9 for broadcasters but because this was specifically for a DVD release,…
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Yo Bafta
So, the Bafta results are out. Read ’em here. But don’t expect to see Sweeney Todd much represented, and don’t take that as an critique of its quality. Despite being (in my humble opinion) one of the top of this year’s crop, a dark masterpiece with a superbly sweet and sad turn from Helena Bonham…
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Where I’m At
I’m fortunate. I work in a London-centred business but I don’t have to live in London. I love the place, and I’ve lived there in the past; in Notting Hill Gate in the mid-seventies, when it was cheap, and for a while in Bayswater in the late 90s, when it wasn’t. I always think of…
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Myths of the Movies
Much-namechecked mate Steve Laws tells me that as children, he and his brother once dismantled all their fireworks to create a movie-style gunpowder trail. They lit the end of it, and… phfft. Instead of the combustion burning its way steadily and dramatically down the trail, the entire line of powder went up in the same…
Hauling Like A Brooligan
Stephen Gallagher
