22 June 2016: My Birds of Yesteryear

I was ten years old in 1954 when I saw, in a dark air-conditioned theater in Manila, the movie adaptation of Sigmund Romberg’s operetta, The Student Prince.  I thought Edmund Purdom was remarkably good looking as the prince, and Ann Blyth passing fair as the barmaid he wooed but could not marry.  The songs from…

23 January 2016: Westerns, Easterns, and Northerns

First we had “westerns” from Hollywood, which mutated into “spaghetti westerns” from Italy.  Then came the “easterns” by way of samurai movies from Japan, which in turn mutated into the high-flying martial arts movies from Hong Kong and China.  And now we have the “northerns.” There may be earlier “northerns” than The Savage Innocents, which…

10 January 2016: The Big Short

There were half a dozen people in the theater today for the 12:05 PM showing of THE BIG SHORT.  I don’t know about the other people there, but I thought the film was brilliant, at least the 10 percent of it that I understood.  I need Bernie Sanders to explain the other 90 percent, which…

3 January 2016: Landscapes or Mindscapes?

I subscribe to the print edition of the Sunday New York Times, and it’s something I look forward to like nothing else all week because it affords many hours of informative and absorbing reading that I almost never get from the local paper. The Sunday edition always comes bundled in two sections.  I read all…