HOLLYWOOD: DO YOU AGREE?

HOLLYWOOD: DO YOU AGREE?

November 18, 2022 Alan Royle 4

  WOMAN IN GOLD (2015)               This is a fine historical drama about the efforts of a Los Angeles lawyer named Randy Schoenberg (played by Ryan Reynolds) and an octogenarian Jewish refugee from Austria named Maria Altmann (Dame Helen Mirren) to sue the Austrian Government in an endeavour to reclaim five […]

LET’S GO TO THE MOVIES – PT21.

LET’S GO TO THE MOVIES – PT21.

March 18, 2021 Alan Royle 4

  THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK (1998)                The 1998 version of The Man in the Iron Mask was Hollywood’s third attempt to put Dumas’ tale on the big screen. The first was a 1923 silent picture made in Germany; the second being the much better 1939 version starring […]

LET’S GO TO THE MOVIES – PT19.

LET’S GO TO THE MOVIES – PT19.

December 23, 2020 Alan Royle 2

  ONCE UPON A TIME IN…HOLLYWOOD (2019) This Quentin Tarantino film can best be described as a revisionist-fictional tale of a created Hollywood star and his best friend/stuntman/ gopher; a tale that culminates in a thoroughly preposterous, concocted climax that takes place right next door to a residence that, in […]

MOVIE TRIVIA – PT164.

MOVIE TRIVIA – PT164.

November 5, 2020 Alan Royle 3

    Barbara Stanwyck & husband Frank Fay Thirty-seven year-old comedian Frank Fay married 21 year-old chorus girl Barbara Stanwyck in August 1928, their stormy union ending in divorce in 1935. Fay was an egotist and an abusive, unpopular drunk. A standing joke around Hollywood begged the question, ‘Who has […]

LET’S GO TO THE MOVIES – PT2.

LET’S GO TO THE MOVIES – PT2.

January 21, 2020 Alan Royle 0

  Daniel Day-Lewis as ‘Bill the Butcher’ Englishman Daniel Day-Lewis is a Method actor and an eccentric one at that. He was working as a cobbler in Florence, Italy when Harvey Weinstein, director Martin Scorsese and star Leonardo DiCaprio lured him into coming back to New York, so they could […]

Hollywood philanthropists – a quick look.

July 26, 2017 Alan Royle 2

  In the last 20-30 years there has developed a philanthropic culture in Hollywood involving superstars in the movie industry. Cynics are quick to accuse these people of ‘image-making’, or of diverting media attention from potential career-damaging headlines of a personal nature. In some instances that has certainly happened, but […]

The 4 ‘Romeo & Juliets’ – enough already!

November 25, 2015 admin 6

  The chronic problem with casting Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is finding actors who are both young and experienced enough in stage acting to carry it off. After all, in Bill the Bard’s play Juliet is just fourteen years old. MGM producer Irving Thalberg unwisely chose to tackle the problem […]

Leonardo DiCaprio – sensible superstar.

November 13, 2015 admin 4

  I wonder if any of the non-entities who comprised the cast of the woeful 1991 low budget horror feature Critters 3 entertained any suspicions that the 17 year-old who made his movie debut playing the part of Josh in it would go on to become an icon in the […]