It has proven a lifetime impossibility for me to fall in love with Marilyn Monroe… until, quite by accident, I viewed My Week with Marilyn.     Michelle Williams’ brilliantly constructed embodiment of Ms. Monroe has me finally understanding this tragic, fairy-tale nightmare of American film stardom. Until now, the power of [...]

My tribute to Meeting Evil is not a review; it’s a brief love song. Therefore I feel utterly free to ruin much of the suspense within this exceptionally intriguing suspense film. Not really a whodunit, Meeting Evil is both a what’sgoin’on and, at the same time, it is the wonderfully provocative offering of [...]

Well… really… how can the film Moonstruck lose with Puccini as its inspiration? And Cher as its star! Which do I praise first? The film’s shamelessly endearing romanticism? Or the seemingly bottomless depth to one of the world’s greatest stars: Cher? Oh, I might as well disappoint another woman I admire, [...]

Chestnuts roasting on an open fire, Jack Frost nipping at your nose! What Christmas memories does that opening lyric not inspire in you?! These days, in my dotage, the words alone can bring me to tears. My one, longest meeting with Mel Tormé will eventually be heard http://tinyurl.com/ct5pxmx here, on [...]

As I wrote in Ottawa Life Magazine some time ago, http://www.ottawalife.com/2012/06/moriartys-musings-an-american-in-vancouver-and-the-seven-of-us/ a major part of this “Work-in-Progress” – my Easter String Quartet – has been composed and, from my point of view, thrillingly recorded. Now the challenge is to present the Easter String Quartet on YouTube as powerfully as possible without taking [...]

I was in London when the news of John F. Kennedy’s assassination hit the front pages of the British press. On November 22, 1963, I was only a few months away from what proved to be the best and worst year of my life: 1964. Why the best? I’ll save [...]

Peter O’Toole! The mad Irish genius of purely poetic obsessions whose lyricism lifted the ingredients of Lawrence of Arabia from a crassly Messianic sadomasochism into one of the grandest cris de coeur for lost souls. British? No, Never! Irish!! And never more powerfully inspiring than as Don Quixote!!! Yes!!!! Peter O’Toole as [...]