Category: FILMS&TV

Deadwood and Order

gordsellar0 Comments

As our baby has grown a bit, his needs and demands have shifted, so I’m trying to ease off watching TV and focus on him more, but for the first couple of months I found myself casting about for something to do while burping and feeding him, since he didn’t really engage much and “Aww, cute!” is less effective when you’re dead tired. Since reading was tough with both hands full, I set about catching up on TV series I’d missed over the years. More recently, I finished Mad Men, which… well, I’ll save that for another post, but before that it was Deadwood. After …

Continue Reading

Mr. Turner

gordsellar0 Comments

It’s rare I see a film as full of human ugliness as Mr. Turner, and rarer still when it’s a biopic. It’s also rare to see a film as beautiful as Mr. Turner… and rarer still when it’s a biopic. But most of all, it’s rare to see a film as astute about history—inaccuracies and all— as Mr. Turner. The title character—a representation of J.M.W. Turner—is, on a personal level, a monster almost half of the time: he uses his maid as a sperm receptacle, he stomps on people when he disagrees with them, he is ugly and weird, and when he …

Continue Reading

Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story

gordsellar0 Comments

Well, I’m still at about page fifty of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, which is an entertaining book so far, but which is nonetheless a bit slow going: the sentence structures take some getting used to, to say the least. I’ve temporarily abandoned ship to reread Gulliver’s Travels (for the first time since childhood), another popular Georgian novel and one with much less tangled prose. Still, I do intend to continue with Tristram Shandy–and for that matter Moll Flanders–once Gulliver’s finished his travels. I only made an effort to see Michael Winterbottom’s film adaptation of the former, titled A Cock and Bull …

Continue Reading