It's surprising to me that I've never written about Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now before now. I first saw it nearly 20 years ago and have seen it two or three times since, including while I was actively writing about movies so I've had several opportunities to write about it without pulling the trigger.
Here goes.
I really enjoyed Niels Arden Oplev's adaptation of Stieg Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. It's a streamlined, focused film that captures the essence of the page-turner novel while avoiding a slavish adherence to the source material.
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I've seen more westerns in the past year or so than I'd seen in my entire life up until this point. There are a few on the AFI 100 Years, 100 Movies list, which I'm trying to (slowly) see everything on, so I've had them on my queue for a while. Interestingly, most of the films I hadn't seen were westerns. Of those, High Noon was one of the best. I'm not a huge fan of the genre, so it takes a really special movie to get me even halfway interested, so the fact that High Noon didn't feel like a chore is testament to the quality of the film.
Plus… Grace Kelly
I saw The Expendables in the theater and I finally am reviewing it now on the day it was released on DVD.
How screwed up is that?
I watched The Friends of Eddie Coyle shortly after reading the book. It holds up really well, even with the immediacy of having read it. One reason for that is its faithfulness. It sticks closely to the source material which, in this situation, works really well. George V. Higgins' book is famous for its dialog, so the movie does well to stick to that, and the novel is short, so there's not much left out in the transition to film.
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