Notizie

Harry Dean Stanton | Boris Johnson | Dancing about architecture | Fatberg | Ornithology of meetings | Ambridge antidote

Your obituary for Harry Dean Stanton (18 September) mispunctuates the title of the TV series Have Gun – Will Travel by substituting a comma for the dash. This had a curious effect on the list of TV horse operas Stanton acted in: “Laramie, The Gun, Have Gun, Will Travel, Bonanza and Rawhide.” Even the Oxford comma, which coincidentally played a part in Sunday’s episode of Strike, can’t come to our rescue with that one, though it could have helped with Bonanza and Rawhide.

Hugh Darwen

Warwick

• Boris Johnson must know that birds do not sing in the nest (Report, 20 September). It is a place of secrecy and security. It is the immature that call out, eager to be fed. This is especially true if an over-sized cuckoo is among them, ensuring that they are ejected and crash to the ground below.

Louisa Mellor Nov 22, 2016

Tony Robinson’s revisionist Robin Hood children’s comedy series, out now on limited edition DVD, was a hoot…

In the mid-eighties, my teenage sister amused herself by teaching me to say “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle”. Not being a six-year-old well-versed in the rhetorical techniques of social emancipation, I didn’t get it. (I’d seen a flea circus; why mightn’t fish find a use for bikes?) My feminist awakening was obviously going to have to wait.

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But not long, it turned out. One copy of Babette Cole’s Princess Smartypants picked from the Year Three reading table later and I was feeling pretty woke.

It would give me enormous pleasure to report that Colin Firth, when the cameras were off, was a rude, unpleasant bag of garbage. It would delight me to no end to report that as he walked out onto the balcony where we did our interview about his upcoming film "Kingsman: The Secret Service," he punched an orphan and denied someone their basic human rights. I would love to be able to state, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he is a terrible person. But, of course, he's not, and so the ocean of women out there who have harbored decades of longing for this guy get to continue their crushes unabated, and I have to just accept that he really is charming and sharp and funny in person, and it's not all because of Richard Curtis, damn it. There is something truly wonderful about the idea of casting him...

Ridley Scott claims his new film starring Russell Crowe will be the most historically accurate ever. But what do we actually know about the real outlaw and his merrie men?

In pictures: men in tights from Errol Flynn to Russell Crowe

'Robin Hood was almost certainly a pedestrian," David Crook, the retired former assistant keeper of public records at the Public Record Office, tells me over tea one afternoon at his home in Grantham. Robin, in other words, had no horse. This is significant, because, as I settle down to try to unravel the eight centuries of myth and legend that have accreted around the outlaw, I am looking at a still from the new Ridley Scott movie, which will open the Cannes film festival on 12 May. Russell Crowe – looking the spit of Maximus, the hero of Gladiator, with cropped hair, bloodied cheek and an expression of furious determination – is astride a horse.

(Publisher's Note: By design, the following review made extensive use of this weekend's comment diversion about your favorite curse words. I'd like to thank all those who contributed, and for helping me to make this perhaps the most profane review of a movie of this kind in the history of film critiquing. You people are some foul-mouthed motherfuckers.).

In the nearly six-year history of Pajiba, there's never been a movie that has divided our readership as violently as the one being reviewed here. For reasons that I don't understand, it's also a reference point to nearly 47 percent of all other films released since 2003. It's obscene, really, how this piece of cinematic dickrot could curry so much favor on this site, and yet also raise the ire of every other sheep-shagging asshole who reads Pajiba. Even among the writers here, it's a point of contention. Ironically, it's the angry tattooed rage-a-reach-around shitlamp,...

The good news for Shemp-o-holics is that Sony has released, as part of their ongoing Three Stooges project, their first all-Shemp set. Last March's release, Volume Five, was Shemp-heavy, but kicked off with the final ten, quite depressing shorts with a badly debilitated Curly as the Third Stooge. Now we've got Shemp from start to finish, and the set includes (and why we note it here) a number of comical fantasy and horror yarns.

Right off the bat, in fact, we're in horror territory with "The Ghost Talks;" that's the good news. The bad news is that it's one of the weaker shorts in this collection--a precursor of the coming Joe Besser/Curly-Joe DeRita "Dark Ages" with a whimsical, kid-friendly "menace" and the Stooges acting like whiny, weepy kids. The storm-swept setting is Smorgasbord Castle where furniture movers Shemp, Larry and Moe encounter a talking suit of armor--the ghost of Peeping Tom,...