The legendary B-movie writer-director Samuel Fuller once told me about a script he had written called The Bag Man. The title character is a bag man for the mob, a functionary whose job is to deliver packages but never to look inside them. One day he makes the fatal mistake of looking inside. He takes the money and runs. Explaining the real novelty of his story, Fuller said … [Read more...] about Sins of the Fathers: On the Road to Perdition
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Film Forum: The Importance of Being Earnest
Hyping up Wilde in Earnest won't win Parker and Oscars. "Life is too important to be taken seriously," Oscar Wilde observed. He demonstrated that principle most dazzlingly in The Importance of Being Earnest, his 1895 play satirizing, among other things, the uselessness of British upper-class twits, the hypocrisy of would-be moral arbiters, the shallowness of social standing, … [Read more...] about Film Forum: The Importance of Being Earnest
Film Forum: James Joyce in Love
For many years, the conventional wisdom about Nora Barnacle, James Joyce's longtime companion and eventually his wife, was that she was an ignorant but "country cute" peasant from Galway with an unaccountable hold on the great writer, whose work she disdained. How could Joyce have lived all those years with a woman who refused to read Ulysses? Her very name was an excuse for … [Read more...] about Film Forum: James Joyce in Love
Film Forum: Land of the Second Chance
Once the most popular form of American filmmaking, the Western has not fully recovered from the commercial and critical debacle of Michael Cimino's 1980 epic Heaven's Gate. Although a far better film than conventional wisdom would indicate, Heaven's Gate provoked widespread derision because Cimino dared to use the disreputable Western form for a serious purpose, to question the … [Read more...] about Film Forum: Land of the Second Chance
Film Forum: When Brendan Met Trudy
The first original screenplay by Irish novelist Roddy Doyle is automatically a cinematic and literary event. When Brendan Met Trudy offers many quirky delights, but it is an uneven and ultimately disappointing film. Doyle's oddball yarn about a movie-obsessed Dublin schoolteacher (Peter McDonald) who falls in love with a thief (Flora Montgomery) is dragged down on screen by its … [Read more...] about Film Forum: When Brendan Met Trudy