For those of you who lap up, like so many Hot Toddies, those treacly Christmas-themed films running up and down the TV dial this time of year to warm your cold, stressed heart in the toasty embers of the season, I’m going to offer up a one-time warning: this post may not be for you. Because in the CFS’s manly world, one filled with bulging pecs, sweat-stained undershirts
It’s no easy thing to successfully adapt a beloved piece of literature into an equally satisfying movie. Whereas a book can meander, a movie depends on a certain tightness of structure to keep its running time and budget manageable. Which is why audiences familiar with a particular book often leave the theater grumpy that certain scenes, plot lines and characters have been discarded. On the flip side, a movie adaptation can be too slavish to its
If you’re of a certain age, your first introduction to the great Alan Rickman wouldn’t have been as Snape in the Harry Potter films, but rather as master criminal Hans Gruber in John McTiernan’s Die Hard (1988), a film that launched into the public’s consciousness both Bruce Willis’ receding hairline and one of cinema’s great villains: