Ataraxia

The Night of the Iguana by Tennessee Williams Excellent   What a great play! And there is also a movie based on the work of Tennessee Williams. All the characters are fascinating, except perhaps for the “pool boys”, who are torturing the iguana, albeit on orders from their boss. Shannon is at the center of it all. He is the rugged man, with plenty of vices and failures- perhaps we could even call him “loser” in some ways. And yet he is the coveted prize that three women want, all the major female personages, including a supporting role. Reverend Lawrence Shannon has been defrocked and ever since he had spoken out in a sermon that had offended people and got him out of the church, he works in the travel business. At the beginning of the play, we meet Shannon as he is taking a group of women to the hotel run by his friend Maxine Faulk. As a tour guide, he has managed to upset the leader, who is concerned by the relationship between Shannon and young Charlotte Goodall. The fact is tha...

  Winter Light written and directed by Ingmar Bergman – Ingmar Bergman was one of the greatest film makers of all time, nominated for nine Oscars, for directing, best film and writing, just as he was in competition at Cannes thirteen times, if I have not miscounted, winner of many awards, you can see in Winter Light this astounding talent – there are notes on his films, also on those from The New York Times’ Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made and other pages, along with reviews on magnum opera from The Greatest Books of All Time and other sites on my blog and YouTube channel https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/09/do-you-have-any-feedback.html maybe you wish to visit and leave a message     9 out of 10 Ingmar Bergman https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2026/01/wild-strawberries-by-ingmar-bergman-is.html was one of the greatest film makers of all time, I would say he has more than ten movies that would make the Top 200, from Wild Strawberries to virgin Spring, indee...

  Les Dimanches de Ville d’Avray aka Sundays and Cybele written by Bernard Eschasseriaux and Serge Bourguignon, directed by the latter is the 1963 Winner of The Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, it was also nominated for another two, including for Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium, furthermore, it is one of The New York Times’ Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made – you have thousands of notes on films from that NYT and other pages, plus other thousands of reviews on magnum opera from The Greatest Books of All Time and other sites on my blog and YouTube channel https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/09/do-you-have-any-feedback.html this is more of an inside joke, only four subscribed     8 out of 10   Sundays and Cybele has reminded me of…Lolita https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/04/lolita-by-vladimir-nabokov-well-known.html a chef d’oeuvre that sits at number six, or was it four, on The Modern Library Top 100 Best Novels of...

  Bram Stoker’s Dracula, based on the book by Bram Stoker A different version of this note and thoughts on other books are available at: -               https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEVa4_CsRStSBBDo4uJWT8BSWtTTn0N1E   and    http://realini.blogspot.ro/ For about fifteen years of my life I had to speak about this damned count almost every other week and so I am not fond of the subject. Not anymore. Having worked in what they call today ‘the Hospitality Industry”, one of the most popular products on offer was: -            The Dracula Tour There is a fortress that suffered a makeover, about ninety miles from where I live, which is called Dracula’s Castle. Notwithstanding, it has little, most likely nothing to do with a vampire count that exists only in fiction and little if anything in common with the inspiration for the famous per...

  Notes on Films: Note on What's Eating Gilbert Grape

  Topaz written by Leon Uris, directed by Alfred Hitchcock is one of The New York Times’ Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made – if you are interested, you find more than five thousand notes on films from The NYT 1,000 and other lists, together with a similar number of reviews on magnum opera from The Greatest Books of All Time and other pages on my blog and YouTube channel https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/09/do-you-have-any-feedback.html you may even have some comments     8 out of 10   Leon Uris https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/10/exodus-by-leon-uris.html is the author of Exodus, a book about the odyssey of the surviving Jews, after the holocaust of World War II, sailing towards the ancient land of Israel, which was not yet a state at that point, we are given some aspects of the struggle to create the new country   Well, new in the sense that it became a political entity – not recognized by the likes of Hezbollah, Hamas and other terroris...