DARRYL DE CINE

 (EN CASTELLANO DEBAJO)  I once heard that the two best moments when you buy a yacht are, first, when you purchase it, and second, and  indeed the best of all moments, when you get rid of it… Well, in my case , I have experienced something similar with our so-called “Stone House”: we have sold it last week and, at present, I can´t help a feeling of liberation at having gotten rid of it. Yes, it was a place that somehow helped to strengthen our family ties as a lot of rellies came to stay there & also some good friends of ours had grown used to come and visit us for a weekend every year. To all of you who came to visit us, I thank you wholeheartedly.  But, all in all, I can't help thinking that it was too much of a place, with three flights of stairs,  for a couple without children. As I turned sixty last year, I have begun thinking that life can be too difficult if we burden it with a lot of duties (in Spanish we say if we carry a “heavy rucksack” ) and...

   (EN CASTELLANO DEBAJO) For those of you who think that the present pandemic of COVID-19 was generated in a secret lab in Wuhan, where an experiment went awry and an elaborated cover up has been set up since then, this is the kind of movie you will enjoy. It was a thriller turned in 1976 with an all-star cast, that included some famous Hollywood names with Richard Harris and Sophia Loren at the top billing. Though it looked like an American or Hollywood blockbuster, in fact it was a European movie produced by Carlo Ponti, Sophia Loren´s husband. Some people in the web have qualified it as a “disaster movie”, but I’m against this definition because usually “disaster movies” (like, for instance, “The Poseidon adventure”, 1972, “Earthquake”, 1974, “The Towering Inferno”, 1974) introduced some characters whose lives were turned upside down due to a natural disaster. With hindsight, one would think that Hitchcock’s masterpiece, “The Birds” (1963), set the pattern for “disaster mo...

  VERTIGO (Xavier SiS)  (THE ORIGINAL TEXT BELOW)  My Word, Darryl, you squeezed a lot of juice out of that movie!  I have enjoyed the way you develop the different subjects that appear in that film. Needless to say, Hitch was at the same time both a genius  and a cheater as a director. It`s known  his misogyny and his obsession for blond actresses, even though you say  he was not too keen on Kim Novak…  I am not so sure J. https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=Kfyh52UiqbQ In contrast to what you think, perhaps Vera Miles would have given a good performance and would have helped to focus the plot on its psychological issues. Novak portrayed a rather sophisticated woman and she literally “devoured” the first half of the movie. Miles ( “The Wrong Man”, “Psycho”…), on the other side,  was pretty enough but perhaps she acted more like an ordinary woman. https://www.fotogramas.es/ noticias-cine/a22807400/vera- miles-hitchcock-psicosis/ Hitch’s Muses: I...