Epinions Recent Reviews for Stephen_Murray

Rod Steiger brought low in a thriller that becomes increasingly Kafkaesque

Thu, 9 Oct 2008 16:31:39 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author Stephen_Murray - I knew that the 1957 thriller "Across the Bridge" was the favorite from among Rod Steiger's performances (second only to the 1964 "Pawnbroker," ahead of the Oscar-rewarded Southern sheriff in "In the Heat of the Night") and that it was in...

A genuinely dark and fatalistic cinema noir

Wed, 8 Oct 2008 22:44:01 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author Stephen_Murray - A lot of urban crime melodramas are IMO mislabeled "noirs." Jean-Pierre Melville's "Les Doulos" is the real thing: dark in look (deep black compositions), dark in vision (pessimistic with considerable brutality and betrayals within betrayals). I don't...

The "best thrillers ever written"? Well, an absorbing, outlandish tale at least.

Tue, 7 Oct 2008 16:42:35 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author Stephen_Murray - The December 2007 issue of Men's Journal< i> included a list of the 15 best thrillers ever written*. I was somewhat chagrined that I had only read four of them (I've seen movie versions of six...), and more so that I had never heard of the one in the...

Some ordinary folks affected by US government-sponsored terrorism

Mon, 6 Oct 2008 16:56:15 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author Stephen_Murray - Having been curious about British film-maker Ken Loach since 1967 (when "Poor Cow" did not play anywhere near me), I have seen three of his movies in the last few months (Kes, The
Wind that Shakes the Barley,...

While waiting for the barbarians, listening to a love story

Sun, 5 Oct 2008 21:45:10 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author Stephen_Murray - Mario Vargas Llosa (1936-) is very skilled at mixing together narrative lines (Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, for instance) and one of the most celebrated writers in Spanish (winner of the Cervantes Prize in 1995, a year after being elected to...

Haunted by a South American civil war

Sat, 4 Oct 2008 18:22:26 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author Stephen_Murray - Daniel Alarcón was born 1977 in Lima, Peru. He grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, earned a BA in anthropology from Columbia University and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His collection of short fiction, War by Candlelight, was a...

A documentary making claims for "the king of B-pictures" not supported by the following-feature

Fri, 3 Oct 2008 18:03:49 GMT

rating: 3/5 by: Epinions Author Stephen_Murray - Edgar G[eorg] Ulmer was born in 1900, 1902, or 1904 in Moravia (now part of the Czech Republic, then part of the Hapsburg Empire) and died in LA (Woodland Hills). He claimed to have worked with the Berlin stage impresario Max Reinhardt and was an...

A Brooklyn detective with Tourette's Syndrome (and lots of loyalty)

Thu, 2 Oct 2008 14:26:34 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author Stephen_Murray - Considering that I have enjoyed stories in the New Yorker by Jonathan Lethem, it is surprising that I did not get around to reading Motherless Brooklyn, his novel won the 1999 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, as well as the 2000...

Alarming slices of life from Mubarak's Egypt

Wed, 1 Oct 2008 17:14:11 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author Stephen_Murray - The three-hour-long screen adaptation of Alaa' Al-Aswany's mega-best-selling (in Arabic) novel, Omaret yakobean (Yacoubian
Building), directed by Marwan Hamed, adapted by his father Waheed Hamed, is...

The most-read, most-encompassing novel of life in the most-populous Arab country

Wed, 1 Oct 2008 14:54:19 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author Stephen_Murray - "Soap opera" is a pejorative label for works of fiction focusing on sex outside marriage with large casts of characters and in which History is experienced by these characters mostly in domestic spaces. Generally, greed vies with romance as the motor of...

Greatest hits of the "King of Soul"

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 18:44:04 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author Stephen_Murray - Watching/listening to the DVD "Dreams
to Remember: The Legacy of Otis Redding" into practically no songs not on the CD "The Very Best of Otis Redding. There was footage of him singing Smokey Robinson's "My Girl" in...

The Music (not Life and Times) of Otis Redding, the "King of Soul"

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 15:24:15 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author Stephen_Murray - Growing up in rural southern Minnesota, I did not hear any Otis Redding recordings until after he died in a plane crash en route from Cleveland to Madison, Wisconsin on the 10th of December 1967. "Dock of the Bay" made it onto the whitebread rock...

One of the better Stephen Chow period martial arts comedies

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 16:30:33 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author Stephen_Murray - I am a big fan of Hong Kong kung-fu comedian Stephen Chow (Chiau Sing-Chi), as well as of Jackie Chan (Chan Yuen-Lung). Chan's action feats are more spectacular, but I think that Chow is a more creative comedian. (Both directed and produced as well as...

Amoral French Adolescents in Their Own World

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 19:32:11 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author Stephen_Murray - Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) directed nine films, many of them based on his own stage plays. Oddly, he did not direct the films of either of his major novels, Thomas, the Impostor (directed by Georges Franju in 1964) or Les Enfants Terribles...

A genial spaghetti-western comedy

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 18:19:19 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author Stephen_Murray - Until reading Petra's
review of "Lo chiamavano Trinità," (My Name Is Trinity, 1970, directed by Enzo Barboni with the pseudonymn of E.B. Clucher in 1970) I had not realized that Terrence Hill was the...

Thomas Mann's subtle 1929 novella about fascist mass hypnosis

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 15:15:04 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author Stephen_Murray - Mario und der Zauberer (Mario and the Magician) is Thomas Mann's prescient (1929) warning against mass hypnosis by fascists not taken seriously by cosmopolitan humanists. I guess that the novella could be read as a straightforward narrative of...

Doctor Faustus : The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkuhn As Told by a Friend: A translation that does not make Thomas Mann's modern Faust more difficult_to_read

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 17:56:07 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author Stephen_Murray - The two twentieth-century writers in German best known (and even read!) in North America, Franz Kafka (1883-1924) and Thomas Mann (1875-1955), were edited as much as being translated. In the case of Thomas Mann, Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter (1877-1963), who...

The translation not to get

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 17:41:53 GMT

rating: 1/5 by: Epinions Author Stephen_Murray - It is dismaying that the only edition of Thomas Mann's monumental Doctor Faustus that apears in the epinions search is the musty 1948 translation by Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter (1877-1963), who translated seems to have had a shaky command of German...

Going where I'd be very reluctant to go

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 16:43:51 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author Stephen_Murray - I must be a slow learner: after enjoying five of his previous books, I should have learned that if Mark Salzman writes a book, I'm going to be interested in it, however unenticing the subject matter seems. I was hesitant to undertake the previous one,...

A lot of transformations for one day/night

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 18:29:46 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author Stephen_Murray - 2008 is the centenary of the birth of Richard Wright as well as that of Olivier
Messiaen. I doubt that the two ever met, though both died in Paris (Wright in 1960, Messiaen in 1992. The work of Messiaen's last years...

A two-disc sampler of mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 15:26:09 GMT

rating: 5/5 by: Epinions Author Stephen_Murray - Although too genial to be a diva — divas are highstrung and high-pitched, not mezzos -- Marilyn Horne was the dominant mezzo-soprano of the second half of the twentieth century. "Golden" is not an adjective I'd have used for her voice. Her...

Hijinks in the baroque market for baroque art

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 13:14:34 GMT

rating: 3/5 by: Epinions Author Stephen_Murray - Although she is not its title character,"The Painted Lady" (1997) is very much a H
elen
Mirren vehicle. In effect, she gets to play three characters in it: (1) a former (bluesy) rock star who has emerged from a drug...

1999 retrospects and performances by the legendary Marianne Faithfull

Sun, 14 Sep 2008 13:38:59 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author Stephen_Murray - "Marianne Faithfull: Dreaming My Dreams" (1999) combines a documentary of roughly an hour with roughly half an hour of Faithfull performing six songs (with some very good backup musicians) from "Sessions at West 54th." The sweet young thing (17 years...

The 1977 degradation-of-hockey comedy and job-loss tragedy has new relevance

Sat, 6 Sep 2008 20:18:42 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author Stephen_Murray - My fellow Minnesota native George Roy Hill (born across the Mississippi River from where I was born and where the Republican Convention was held) is best remembered for two movies he directed that costarred Paul Newman and Robert Redford, "Butch Cassidy...

Still elfin, still wry

Fri, 5 Sep 2008 21:47:15 GMT

rating: 4/5 by: Epinions Author Stephen_Murray - Sometimes I wonder about what many people find funny ("Napoleon Dynamite," for instance) -- and at what they don't find funny (the boldfaces lies of George W. Bush, for instance). It is reassuring that David Sedaris's unpretentious essays often make me...