Despite a few moments where it crossed over into Bugsy Malone type awareness of the fact that these are teenagers in high school, this film really pulled it off. It wasn’t a superficial stylistic thing with dark shadows. It captured not only the overwrought verbal onslaught of noir but also the confusion, the total annihlation of trust, and the uncertainty of public and private spaces. Perhaps a bit of an exercise, but it worked, especially the last two thirds.

Well, the author achieved his goal of making the story of the Templars as undramatic as possible, despite the tagline on the cover promising Drama!!! This was okay by me as what I wanted are some hardcore historical facts to couterbalance all the chivalric romances of the Templars that I’m familiar with. Also gave a good perspective on the crusades, especially in our current context. I think the author is right that post-Reformation anti catholicism has definitely skewed views about the crusades, and he does a good job of even-handedly making sense of a phenomenon that is quite frankly very difficult for contemporary minds to understand.

The book was just oh so much better, start to finish. If you’re going to do both, do the movie first. The movie lost most of the edge of the book, despite adding more violence.

What may be great about a Lars von Trier movie did not hold up so well for me in a tv show. I think I would have liked it, but I couldn’t get through it.

This one really rocked. Castrating native girls! The captain and crew are marooned not once, but twice! Great cliffhanger ending.

another fantastic one from jim thompson. a couple on the run, enduring the hardships and paranoia. then, a surreal, inexplicable final chapter set in a criminal’s shangri la.

Very drunken Consul staggers around in a mescal haze while estranged wife and ambiguous friend hover nearby. Hmmm.

These BFI Modern Classics are good quick reads. This one was readable and well researched. Gave me some new insights into the film (particularly where it fits in new german cinema) and validated my opinion that this is an artful and important movie in a continuum of reworkings of the idea of the vampire.

I found the first half of the book exhilerating, the interplay between the footnotes, the story within the story, and the mysterious slippage between internal and external worlds.

Excellent biography, reads well with Tompkins bio of Duchamp.