This week I watched four films at the NZ international film festival: Kumiko the Treasure Hunter, Two Days, One Night, The Lunchbox and Black Coal, Thin Ice.

The impression I've been getting recently is that even to end up a hack in Hollywood actually requires you to be very smart, and (probably) quite a good writer. For example, Craig Mazin is often hilarious and fairly insightful on the Scriptnotes podcast, but few of the films he's credited with are particularly good.

I often show people the Health Inspector episode when going through TV shows, because it never fails to crack me up. All of the first two and a bit seasons are pretty great, though. I haven't watched season 4, but the word has been pretty dire.

I only watched one movie this week, Peter Brook's Lord of the Flies. I thought the cinematography and music were often quite striking, but the overall film didn't quite come together. This was partly because the acting wasn't particularly strong (not surprising given that they were kids told to improvise), but the…

This week I watched Osmosis Jones, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, and Kicking and Screaming.

This week I watched Bull Durham. Though I don't know a lot (or anything) about baseball, I thought the movie was strongest when dealing with the practicalities of playing the game and the specifics of the minor leagues. Although the voice-over used at the pitchers mound and the plate isn't necessarily the most…

Due to working on my own script, I didn't actually watch that many movies this week.

Kay Swift had a moderate career as a composer of musicals, though that is the only example that springs to mind (other than Mary Rodgers) of a female composer of musicals in the "Golden Age" (1925-1960ish).

He had a Princess Bride adaptation going for a bit, but I think he ended up in a dispute with William Goldman which scuppered the project. Some of the songs can be found online.

Don't forget that "Hank and Mary get into town tomorrow" is a reference to her and her second husband.

It's probably also worth mentioning that one of her sons is Adam Guettel, the composer-lyricist of Floyd Collins and The Light in the Piazza.

This week I watched Body Heat, What We Do in the Shadows, The Big Combo, The Twilight Zone: The Movie and The 'Burbs

I feel like Orange is the New Black is really aided by the binge-watching. I like it, but I've been fairly annoyed at the flashbacks this season (they feel way too vague compared to the season 1 ones). However, because they don't take up much time when you're watching 5-6 episodes in a sitting, it doesn't seem like as…

I re-watched it because of The Dissolve, but I didn't quite have the time to read all the articles and comments. I might go back and read some of them, though.

Over the last two weeks, I've actually watched some movies.

In a similar vein to the theorbo, I've heard a bit of music by Milan and Narvaez played on the Vihuela - a spanish lute/guitar progenitor. Some of Narvaez's music is standard repertoire for the guitar, so hearing it in the original setting was quite exciting.

I agree. I'm not really well-versed in baroque repertoire (I'm a classical guitarist, but I lean towards 20th century repertoire), but I've always liked the sounds of lutes and the complexity the theorbo can achieve is fascinating.

This week I started a new movie night involving randomly generating movies from the sizeable backlog on our hard drives (368 movies all up). The movie we generated was They Live, which was hilarious and full of some fascinating horror-comedy stuff. Though I didn't love it as much as Big Trouble in Little China,…

I generally find the idea of making a musical from a movie is more suited to older movies. This is because the structural elements are typically stronger (and divide into a musical-theatre act structure more neatly), and the action is more confined in terms of locations and full of more long sections of dialogue ripe…

This week I watched Somewhere in Time. It was a little mawkish and dour in places, as well as being clearly far better written than it was directed, but I quite liked it overall. I thought Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour played their parts well, and I liked the hook. The ending was quite effective, but I wish the…