Sentence first » films

In her terrific 2022 book Camera Man: Buster Keaton, The Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century, Dana Stevens reports an interesting account of an attempted collaboration bet...

https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2023/10/18/buster-keaton-silently-writing-silent-film/

At Strong Language, the sweary blog about swearing, I have a new post up about the idiom swear like a . After seeing the phrase swear like a trooper (maybe in Beryl Bainbridge’s A Quiet Life), ...

https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2022/12/13/swearing-like-a-trooper-a-trucker-a-sailor-and-a-starling/

People invent languages for different reasons. It’s always a creative act, but artistic expression is not always the main motive, as it was for Tolkien. It may be a political undertaking, as wi...

https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2022/01/29/david-cronenberg-on-inventing-a-language/

Pauline Kael in Going Steady (1970), a collection of her film reviews for the New Yorker, writes about something of perennial interest to book-readers and film-watchers:* If you’re going to see...

https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2019/09/29/reading-the-book-before-seeing-the-film/

Terrence Malick’s film Days of Heaven was in large part created as it went along, its makers open to creative possibility and rediscovering it in editing and post-production. One major change i...

https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2019/07/11/character-names-in-days-of-heaven/

Last weekend, driving to the Burren in County Clare (just south of Galway, where I live, and an endlessly interesting place to explore), a friend and I picked up the relevant Ordinance Survey map...

https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2018/08/19/how-cape-fear-got-its-name/

In idle half-hours I’ve been watching Danger Mouse on a DVD I picked up for the price of a croissant. As well as being enjoyably daft and wryly amusing, it’s a trip down memory lane; my siste...

https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2015/10/24/danger-mouse-linguistic-prodigy/