Skip to content

MostlyFilm

“A Blog Mostly About Film”

Category Archives: Books and Movies

April 6, 2012 The Passionate Christ

By Philip Concannon Martin Scorsese has famously described cinema as simply being “a matter of what’s in the frame and what’s out,” but when The Last Temptation of Christ was released in 1988, very few were willing to consider the film on those terms. This adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis’ novel remains one of the most [...]

Tags: , , , , , ,

March 7, 2012 Trishna

by Philip Concannon Michael Winterbottom’s eclectic career has made him a hard filmmaker to pin down, but a recurring touchstone for the director has been the work of Thomas Hardy. In 1996, Winterbottom had his first high-profile success with an adaptation of Jude the Obscure and four years later he made The Claim, a loose [...]

March 6, 2012 John Carter

by Uncle Frank Since first writing about the film John Carter for Mostly Film nearly a year ago, I’ve done my best to avoid news of it. I’ve seen the trailers, but deliberately decided not to watch any clips – I wanted to come to the finished product as unspoilt as possible.  That didn’t mean [...]

February 8, 2012 Actor! Actor!

Niall Anderson looks at the history of actors writing fiction You can’t imagine Popeye Doyle writing a novel. Buck Barrow barely lived long enough to read one. Royal Tenenbaum wouldn’t write a novel, but he might pass off someone else’s as his own. Harry Caul, on the other hand, looks to have the necessary focus, [...]

February 7, 2012 Curtain Call

With the announcement that the final Hercule Poirot stories will be filmed for ITV this year, confessed detective fiction bore and tedious cataloguer of ways in which the book was better than the film Laura Morgan wonders what we should expect. I have never been asked to appear on Desert Island Discs, but I have [...]

September 15, 2011 A mole at the heart of the Circus

Josephine Grahl finds a little too much unspoken in Tomas Alfredson’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy Reviewing a cinema adaptation of a book you know and love is hard. Am I judging the film fairly as a work of art in itself; or am I criticising it, unfairly, for failing to live up to my own [...]

August 15, 2011 The Passion of the Kinski

Philip Concannon The title of Klaus Kinski’s memoir is Kinski Uncut, but that’s not strictly accurate. When the actor first attempted to publish his autobiography in 1988, under the title All I Need is Love, a lawsuit from Marlene Dietrich (who had taken offence to his depiction of her as a lesbian) ensured the book [...]

August 8, 2011 Sauce for the Gander

Niall Anderson looks at the knotty history of sex and nudity on television Note: This article contains spoilers for The Wire and The Sopranos In an earlier life, I used to catalogue DVDs. My duties were to look at the contents of the box, view the contents of the disc, and make sure the details [...]

August 1, 2011 Mostly Film Book Club: Shepperton Babylon by Matthew Sweet

By Paul Duane I have a soft spot for undertakings that involve an intrepid writer or filmmaker recording at the last minute memories that would otherwise go forever unchronicled, whether they involve Mississippi juke joints or the trenches of the Somme. The most heroic of these undertakings, I feel, are the ones where nobody else [...]

July 29, 2011 CAMERA OBSCURER: The Return of the Mostly Film Book Club

By Niall Anderson “Next time you see a Spitfire in a museum, run your fingers over its skin… you might be touching a vanished masterpiece.” When producer Cecil Hepworth went bankrupt in 1924, his entire stock of film negatives was melted down and turned into waterproof resin for military aircraft. Many of these negatives were [...]

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 63 other followers