Daily Archives: February 23, 2026

THREE THOUSAND YEARS OF LONGING

A.S. Byatt’s novella “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, adapted by Australian filmmaker George Miller (Babe: Pig in the City, Happy Feet, Mad Max: Fury Road) with his daughter Augusta Gore, is a contemporary fantasy  about a solitary academic narratologist (Tilda Swinton) who encounters a genie (Idris Elba) while attending a conference in Turkey, Many fairy tales-within-tales follow as flashbacks, cross-referencing A Thousand and One Nights, the myth of Cybele, and The Epic of Gilgamesh as well as Chaucer and Shakespeare. This not only juxtaposes today’s world with the kind of “timeless” language we associate with ancient sorceries. It also juxtaposes the enigma of how to arrive at the three wishes granted by a genie freed from three millennia inside a bottle with the issue of what it’s like to be that genie before, during, and after his entrapment. Because the narratologist knows that the three wishes granted usually end badly, she endeavors to learn more about the granter before she proceeds. What the ambidextrous Miller brings to this material is not only his two charismatic lead actors but a banquet of thrilling digital effects, arguably far more conducive to today’s consumer tastes than Byatt’s fancy prose. Read more

Sam Fuller Spills His Guts

My first meeting with Samuel Fuller is chronicled in this interview/essay published in the July 9, 1980 issue of The Soho News and was reprinted in my recent collection Cinematic Encounters: Interviews and Dialogues. Seven years later, while concluding my academic career at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where I was placed in charge of running the film studies summer school program, I was still crazy about Fuller, and invited him to serve as our “visiting artist”, which led to our becoming friends from that summer until his death a decade later. I did my best to try to capture his singular way of talking in this article. For my title, I’m using the headline on that issue’s front page, not the title given inside (“Sam Fuller Reshoots the War”). — J.R.

SamFuller

When I enter his suite at the plaza, he’s finishing lunch, expressing his regret about missing Godard at Cannes, remarking on the absurdity of prizes at film festivals, asking me what Soho News and Soho are. (The one he knows about is in London — he fondly recalls a cigar store on Frith Street.)

It isn’t hard to figure out why Mark Hamill affectionately calls him Yosemite Sam, or why Lee Marvin simply says he’s D.W. Read more