Tag Archive: the third man


HITCHCOCK PRESENTS : NIGHTMARES IN SUBURBIA

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June 2, 2013

SHADOW OF A DOUBT directed by Alfred Hitchcock (USA, 1943)

After recently re-watching The Third Man, I was reminded of another of my favourite movies starring Joseph Cotten.

Shadow Of A Doubt  is one of Hitchcock’s most underrated thrillers and, by all accounts his own personal favourite.

Watching it now shows how it has a number of parallels with David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.

In both films a safe, boring, suburban routine is disrupted by sinister forces from outside. In each, the law-abiding ‘ordinary’ citizens cannot comprehend why there should be such evil in the world. Continue reading →

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CINEPHILES PUT ART ABOVE ENTERTAINMENT

Filed under: Blogging, Gender, Modern Art, Movies — Leave a comment
August 18, 2012
Hitchcock

The BFI poll gets James Stewart in a spin.

Every ten years since 1962 the British Film Institute (BFI) via Sight & Sound magazine has published a list of the fifty greatest movies ever made. This is based on the votes of critics, programmers, academics and distributors.

This decade’s poll sees Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo in the top spot, the first time that Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane has not been number one.

When any list like this is published, the first thing I look for is how many of these films I have  seen.

As I write, this totals just 23 so I have set myself a personal goal of seeking out the other 27 over the next few months to see what I have been missing and be in a better position to criticise the critics.

Watch this space. Continue reading →

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BORING AND UNREAD BOOKS

Filed under: Books, Humour — Leave a comment
March 1, 2008

How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard
(translated from the French by Jeffrey Mehlman – Granta, 2007)
Boring Books by Louis Theroux (The Idler-Issue 10 -July/August 1995)

Pierre Bayard’s book is a columnists dream. Here we have the paradox of a professor of literature in Paris proposing non-reading as a legitimate academic strategy.This isn’t as whacky as it first sounds.
It’s an undeniable fact that even the most erudite scholar can only scratch the surface of the world’s literature. In our short lifetimes there are only so many books it is possible to read.It follows that we will often find ourselves in situations when we are called upon to express an opinion on works we have only a scant knowledge of, or in extreme circumstances haven’t even heard of. Continue reading →

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