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2 weeks ago | 
steynonline.com | Rick McGinnis |Mark Steyn
As a place on a map, Bohemia is roughly half of what we call the Czech Republic today. As a neighbourhood or a state of mind it can be found all over the world, in big cities, where it suddenly coalesces in insalubrious districts, flourishes briefly, raises the value of the real estate and then dies off in a flurry of media coverage regretting how these things never last.
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3 weeks ago | 
steynonline.com | Rick McGinnis |Mark Steyn
A really influential film, seen decades after its influence has percolated into dozens (if not hundreds) of films and redefined a whole genre, can elicit a feeling of déjà vu. Who knew that an ultra low budget horror b-movie would spawn a subgenre that persists to this day (Night of the Living Dead) or a gang picture originally imagined as a western, marketed to dopey teens (The Warriors) would be copied over and over with immensely larger budgets for decades.
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4 weeks ago | 
steynonline.com | Rick McGinnis |Mark Steyn
The news of this week was summed up in a phrase: Habemus papam. The election of a new Pope was major news for the world's 1.4 billion Catholics, of course, but the internal workings of the Vatican hold a strange, almost universal appeal, and even after two millennia the papacy is appreciated as a political institution as much as a religious one.
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1 month ago | 
steynonline.com | Rick McGinnis |Mark Steyn
John "Paddy" Hemingway, the last surviving pilot who flew in the Battle of Britain, died in March of this year. He was 105. Hemingway was forced to bail out of his aircraft four times – three times in England and a fourth over enemy territory in Italy, where locals helped him get back to Allied lines.
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1 month ago | 
steynonline.com | Rick McGinnis |Mark Steyn
If I know one thing about British comedian and actor Steve Coogan it's that nobody is lukewarm about him. Earlier this year Coogan played journalist and Labour MP Brian Walden in a Channel 4 drama about Walden's interview with Margaret Thatcher near the end of her reign as prime minister.
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1 month ago | 
steynonline.com | Rick McGinnis |Mark Steyn
Last week I wrote about Cary Grant's Mr. Blandings and his dream house, in a film released in 1948 during an international housing crisis, and just before the effects of the postwar economic boom started to be felt in the United States. This week we're fast forwarding fourteen years, to another middle-class American everyman played by another Hollywood icon, at the peak of that boom, trying to enjoy a whole hard-earned month of summer holidays.
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1 month ago | 
steynonline.com | Rick McGinnis |Mark Steyn
Mr. Blandings Builds his Dream House is remembered as a hit even though it lost money at the box office during its initial theatrical run. It's more accurate to say that the 1948 picture (and the book it was based on) was a cultural sensation, hitting a nerve with the American public during that anxious moment when World War II was over but nobody was confidently predicting a postwar economic boom that would last two decades.
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2 months ago | 
steynonline.com | Rick McGinnis |Mark Steyn
Last week's column talked about a movie with an unlikeable main character. This week I'm afraid it's more of the same, only this time our main feature is a film with not one but two unsavory protagonists, one of them a moral delinquent, the other a monster of immense self regard and power. The only relief is that Sweet Smell of Success is in glorious black and white, and set in wonderful, terrible mid-century Manhattan.
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2 months ago | 
steynonline.com | Rick McGinnis |Mark Steyn
How hard is it to recommend one of your favorite films when the adjectives most used to describe it are "grim", "depressing", "bleak" and "harrowing"? Mike Leigh's Naked (1993) is described as a cult film, won several awards when it was released (including best actor and director at Cannes) and is inevitably called one of Leigh's essential films. But still – how do you feel good about telling people to watch a "feel bad" movie?
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2 months ago | 
steynonline.com | Rick McGinnis |Mark Steyn
Everyone can agree that films have become more violent, but nobody can say with certainty when this happened, or by how much. Similarly, there's a general (but by no means total) agreement that this is probably a bad thing, but there's no consensus as to how bad, or what should be done, if anything. There was a time when nobody talked about violence in movies, but lately there seem to be fewer people alive who can actually remember what that time was like.
