Harry’s Place Arts

This is a guest post by ami
A few weeks ago I saw War Horse at the National. The play is based on a children’s book by Michael Morpugo which sees WW1 through the eyes of a horse. Now, I have no prior affinity with horses at all, and no special sentimentality about animals in general.
The [...]

The video to promote Bob Dylan’s latest release - Tell Tale Signs: the Bootleg Series Vol. 8 - is just superb. Perhaps it’s because it stars Harry Dean Stanton, but it has that ‘Paris, Texas‘ ambiance about it… well, I think so.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=917NgUORqyI

I saw it at Amazon.com, but they don’t allow you to embed video on external [...]

It’s one of the most chilling movie scenes I know, that one in Cabaret, when Michael Yorke and his rich friend are sitting in a restaurant out in the countryside and on the soundtrack comes the pure young voice, then we see the handsome lad singing with all his youthful and serious heart:-
The sun on [...]

Having read Hitchens on the film adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, I then had another go at the novel, which I used to think over-written and absurd. I was especially uncharmed by the winsome Sebastian and his teddy bear.  Evelyn Waugh’s prose is economic as a rule, sometimes to the point of sketchiness; in Brideshead Revisited [...]

Paul Newman has died at the age of 83. Cool Hand Luke, Cat on a Hit Tin Roof, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and even The Towering Inferno are films that immediately spring to mind. However, even his later, and sparser, work showed his effortless acting, such as The Colour of Money and 2001’s [...]

Retro thing, an independent vintage gadget website “run by a team of renegade elves based in Calgary and Chicago” has a very interesting 8 minute documentary videoon their site about a chap called Paul Mawhinney who owns the largest collection of vintage vinyl in the world - more than three million records.
As a young man, Paul [...]

This week I went to see Face Addict at the ICA.  Don’t be fooled by the picture of Warhol on the ICA page, this is not another raking over of his history or legacy - far from it: he is barely mentioned and when he is it’s tangentially.  It’s actually a the very personal story [...]

Ronald Bergan is not impressed by popular films.
“Whenever people agree with me, I feel that I must be wrong,” said Oscar Wilde. As I feel the same way, I was pleased that when I came out of Burn After Reading, the Coen brothers’ feeble comedy-thriller which opened this year’s Venice film festival, I was surrounded [...]

I have decidedly mixed feelings about Oliver Stone. On the one hand his sucking up to the likes of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez is nauseating, and his endorsement of conspiracy theories in “JFK” was ridiculous at best and irresponsible at worst. On the other hand, I think “Wall Street” was the emblematic film of [...]

The second Nolan Batman film, The Dark Knight, has muscled its way onto the top of the IMDB’s top 250 films:
1. 9.3 The Dark Knight (2008)
2. 9.1 The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
3. 9.1 The Godfather (1972)
4. 9.0 The Godfather: Part II (1974)
5. 8.9 Buono, il brutto, il cattivo., Il (1966)
6. 8.9 Pulp Fiction (1994)
7. 8.8 Schindler’s List (1993)
8. 8.8 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)
9. 8.8 Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire [...]