Archive for the ‘Movies’ Category

In my last post I reviewed the classic 1967 movie Cool Hand Luke (https://www.billisley.com/2017/06/cool-hand-luke-reviewing-a-classic/) and highlighted its religious symbolism in which Luke is portrayed as a suffering messiah struggling against oppressive forces.  A little while later, I was preparing a lesson on anger and read an excerpt from Martin Luther King’s Strength to Love.  The contrast between King’s resistance to oppression and Luke’s is extremely important and especially relevant in contemporary America’s disastrous cultural and political divisions. Read the rest of this entry »

Great movies, like great books, are worth returning to time and again because they deal with transcendent themes.  Last night I watched the 1967 movie Cool Hand Luke.  When I saw it as a teenager, I loved it.  I could quote my favorite lines.  My friends and I talked about our favorite scenes.  It was cool.  Yes, the ending was not happy (Do I need to warn about spoiler alerts for such an old movie?), but Paul Newman, who played Luke superbly, and the movie were cool.  Fifty years later, I’m not so sure. Read the rest of this entry »

Last night my wife and I watched the 1995 film adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel, Sense and Sensibility.  Emma Thompson’s screenplay won her an Oscar.  Sense and Sensibility is the third Jane Austen novel that I have read (My wife has read them all.), and, while good, literarily, and especially stylistically, it comes in a distant second to Pride and Prejudice.

To prefer Pride and Prejudice to Sense and Sensibility is no surprise, but I would like to make the bold and daring assertion that the movie version of the latter is better than the novel. Read the rest of this entry »

I find Mrs. Bennet to be one of the most disgusting characters created by Jane Austen in her marvelous novel Pride and Prejudice, although the outrageous Reverend Collins can give her a run for her money.  Nevertheless, something must be said in her defense.  Such a defense will necessarily entail a severe criticism of Mr. Bennet. Read the rest of this entry »

It just so happens that through the wonders of DVR and Netflix in the last couple of weeks I viewed four award-winning movies on various conflicts in the Islamic world that range from the excellent to the very entertaining.  The films are: The Battle of Algiers (1966), The Hurt Locker (2008), Zero Dark Thirty (2012), and Argo (2012). Read the rest of this entry »