(Dir. Noel Black) (1968) It starts like a pilot for Psycho II…Norman…er, Dennis (Anthony Perkins), is making a new life as an inspector on an assembly line in Shanty-town, rehabilitating himself after life as a rapist/psycho/firebug. Dennis has got some mad, grand, plan, and he is innocent, I swear he is, he didn’t know his Aunt was in that house he burnt, but whilst he is clearly too old for trim blonde cutie, Sue Ann (Tuesday Weld), he is not too mad: for she is a match for him, and more! David Shipman, a highly perceptive critic, suggested that Weld (the key role…
Continue Reading →Here’s a a link (see below) to a highly entertaining and rather persuasive rant from Paul Joseph Watson, about the essential bogus nature of much modern art. It’s a fight no-one can win, of course – you can debate aesthetics till the sun blows up. But it is true that expensive modern art carries a strong whiff of elitism about it. Style is loosed from substance. Then style is discarded, as a rhetorical flourish. What is left? Modern art. In a piece entitled “The Perils of Painting Now”*, Jed Perl reports, possibly ironically:”A few years ago, the Luxembourg & Dayan gallery…
Continue Reading →Harper Lee died a few days ago. Atticus Finch died a while ago, mortally wounded by the publication of Go Set a Watchman. That is, the holier than thou Gregory-Peck-type Atticus Finch of To Kill a Mockingbird, died. The real Atticus Finch, or the draft Atticus Finch, depending on which way you look at it, lives on in infamy. He’s A Bad Man because he’s racist. Lordy lordy. Our whiter than white Atticus was nought but a whited sepulchre. A product of his time and place. Either a man with shades of grey in his past, a hypocrite, an even better lawyer and…
Continue Reading →As Tim Minchin has impressed with his witty ditty, exhorting Cardinal Pell to fly back from the Vatican to give evidence to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, perhaps he could now set this one to music? It concerns another prominent figure who refuses to break from cover..
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