Everything That Dies, Some Day Comes Back

Having failed to get to the end of the Bret Easton Ellis novel I’m very glad that this excellent adaptation got made, despite Ellis thinking his satire was unfilmable. I'm also glad that Christian Bale eventually was cast in the main role of Patrick Bateman; it's really hard to imagine anyone else playing the part. Bateman is a classic case of an unreliable narrator.  He's a New York investment banker who seems also to be a serial killer although as the violence escalates and becomes more surreal it's unclear how much on the screen is real or is just in Patrick's head.  The film is open to various interpretations, mine being that the killings start off as being real before Bateman suffers a major meltdown.  Ultimately maybe it doesn't matter too much.  Whatever the truth Bateman is a severely disturbed individual.  Appropriately for someone for whom appearances are all that matters, there's nothing inside.  When at the end he breaks down and confesses his c...

This 1949 film, set in nineteenth century New York and directed by William Wyler, is an adaptation of a play which itself was an adaptation of a Henry James novel, 'Washington Square'.   I've never read anything by James but my impression is that his writing is complex and rather cold, in which case this film is true to the spirit of the novel, even if the plot has been much condensed and made more direct.  So  I'm not surprised that it was a commercial failure because it's a bleak and cruel film in many ways, but one of undeniable quality which the critics loved and which led to several major Oscar nominations. The heiress in question is Catherine (played by Olivia de Haviland, despite being a few years too old for the part), who despite the best education that money can buy is socially gauche and lacking in self-confidence.  The latter is hardly surprising given that her father Dr Stoper (Ralph Richardson) makes it clear that she falls a long way short of the ...

On paper this 1959 adaptation of Graham Greene’s novel couldn’t fail. It reunites Greene with director Carol Reed some years after ‘The Third Man’ and it has the perfect casting of Alec Guinness in the lead role, a couple of years after he won an Oscar for ‘The Bridge on the River Kwai’. Guinness plays Jim Wormold, a humble seller of vacuum cleaners in Havana, who improbably is recruited by Noël Coward for British Intelligence.  Of course Wormold hasn’t a clue how to recruit agents or how to uncover secret information.  But a friend Dr Hasselbacher gives him the idea to simply make up stuff.   It turns out that Wormold has a flair for this, so much so that the bosses back in Whitehall get very excited about the drawings of secret weapons he sends them little realising that they are based on vacuum cleaners.  This is all good comedic entertainment, and any scene featuring either Coward or Ralph Richardson as his boss is a delight. But when the story takes a darker tur...