Liam Neeson Books

Excellent cast, excellent SFX, excellent acting. I've been an avid Batman comic fan for years and this movie does the dark knight the most justice. Batman in the comic books is a dark character and more of an anti-hero. No sugar-coated stuff in this movie, it's back to basics with "Batman Begins". Love the ending of the film...Commisioner Gordon tells Batman "I never did thank you"...Batman cuts him short and retorts "and you'll never have to"...Priceless.

No, I didn't buy the DVD but rented it from Netflix. The first Batman movie with Michael Keaton was good, the rest I did not like. But this one I liked--a lot. I was never a Batman fan, too dark and sinister for my taste. But this one, which "explained" how Batman came to be, was very good. I've always liked movies that attempted to explain how certain characters came to be, especially when the character as originally created sort of pops up out of nowhere and you are asked to accept they are what they are with little or no background. Such as Sherlock Holmes--great stories, seen many of the movies that have been made, but "Young Sherlock Holmes" provided some background that helped put a lot of the stories into perspective. I'm sure there were those who hated that movie because someone other than Conan-Doyle wrote the story.

I have seen all of the Batman movies. I am not a child but a retired baby-boomer who will always be a kid at heart. -- This movie is undoubtedly THE BEST Batman movie ever, putting ALL others in a secondary "junk" category !!! -- All of the actors in this production do an excellent job portraying "real people" in a comic book setting !!! - This movie IS NOT for the INFANTILE "brain-dead" who DEMAND EXPLOSIVE NOISE, BLOOD & GUTS, SKANK FEMALES EXPOSING THEMSELVES [cow-teats] and an infantile trite & trivial STORY LINE !!!

And I must say ,,, NOT having female exposed private parts i.e. cow-teats, cleavage, whatever ,,, is REFRESHING !!! -- With todays garbage [cows exposing themselves] passing for movies :-( ,,, it's not often I can say I THOROUGHLY enjoyed this production !!!

Thank You, Thank You, Thank You ,,, to the Production Team !!! -- I hated for it to end :-)

Sincerely,
Matthew

BATMAN BEGINS suceeds on almost all levels. The acting is wonderfully perfect. The special effects are seamless. The scipt is pretty darn good. Even better than the originals, BATMAN BEGINS revives the story of our beloved caped (or winged) crusader from the very beginning, when his parents are killed. It goes from there to a wonderful semi cliff-hanger that leaves you eaglerly awaiting a sequel (due out in theaters July 18, 2008).
Great acting and script. Seeing the marvelous Bale in the Batman suit is truly a thrill. On a Batman scale alone, this would've been a 5. But, to be honest, though it's great, it's not as good as Spider-man or Iron Man. That's the reason for the deducted star. Highly recommended.

This is a great movie. Best Batman by far. Excellent picture quality on HD DVD. Should be in everybodys collection. Period.

I am a fan of Chris Van Alsburg and I believe that this is one of the most spectacular things he has ever written. What makes this a timeless work of art is not only the peaceful, dusk-cover pictures that evoke romantic images of the North but the precious concept of pure faith demonstrated through such a simple holiday symbol as the bell.

This is a beautiful classic children's book. It is the perfect gift for any age.

You are better off purchasing the limited edition, which comes with the cassette and cd. I found the limited edition set in Marshalls (after I made this purchase), for less than what I paid for just the book. I ended up giving my nephew this book and the casette tape which came with the limited edition. I kept the cd and other book for my son, who still reads along with the cd, a month after Christmas.

Please get this book if you have kids. Must read before you watch the movie, and a true treasure to add to your home library. One of the best picture books ever printed.

This is a great book!!! I have loved it since I was a child!

Sharp is described by the publisher as "a collection the likes of which have never been seen before", a book with such "brilliant lenswork" that it allows one "repeated viewings that never tire or bore."

If you are a photo editor that wants to run images of celebrities that depict every pore, with contrast on the image so intense that the subjects look like coal miners on their way home after a day in the pits, then this is your man and he's in the phone book under Creative Photographers, Inc.

In short, while Sharp represents an impressive roll call of celebrity faces, Parry's style is quickly revealed to be visually monotonous in the form of a collection.

Nigel Parry's Book sharp is a visual delight. His portraits are beautifully composed and capture that exacting moment as a photograph should....

Sharp is an impressive, 144-page, coffee table book showcasing Nigel Parry's black and white celebrity portraits. Parry uses his camera framing and lighting to present private images of movie stars, film directors, musicians, politicians, and entertainment celebrities in a totally new perspective that is both memorable and thought provoking. Highly recommended as a significant and welcome addition to any personal, photography school, professional, or community library collection, these outstanding portrait photos are enhanced for the photography study and connoisseur by an informative essay on Nigel Perry's life and work by Liam Neeson.

I always flip through photography books but until now, I have never bought one. It's a great book to have on the coffee table because it provokes conversations. Never seen celebs shot like this before.

As an up and coming photographer, I have piles of books, but this one is on top. Nigel Parry has always been one of my favorites, but I had no idea of the scope of his work. I have a lot to learn but now I have a new teacher.

This movie is more about taking a journey somewhere and meeting people along the way. If you have no patience for that, then this movie may be a bit of a disappointment. The effects and music are certainly good. But this was made in the time around "Star Wars" and you can see the influence. If I was to change anything I would have taken the ray guns and space ship away from the bad guys. It doesn't fit with the rest the medieval theme. Reasonably entertaining if you enjoy the lesser adventure movies of the 1980s like "Sword and Sorcerer" and "Dragonslayer". I truly like the characters, but even I found the journey to slay the beast a bit tedious at times. It didn't seem as though they had a clear idea one way or another. You may not be overly drawn to the Prince and Princess either as although decent, they don't exactly draw you to them with personality. Still a decent movie in the genre that will entertain most family members if thrown in the player on a rainy day. Good quality DVD with a nice collection of extras.

The movie arrived in great shape. It's has a clear visual and the audio is satisfactory as well.

In a magical world called Krull, a mysterious dark magic fortress from space called "The Black Fortress" lands on the planet. A powerful Beast and his minions attack the planet, Prince Colwyn (Ken Marshall) and the beautiful Princess Lyssa (Lysette Anthony) as they marry so that two rival kingdoms can be united in peace, that is until the warriors of the Beast kidnap her during the ceremony. Colwyn joins up with an unlikely band of heroes named Ynyr (Freddie Jones), Ergo the magician (David Battley), Cyclopic Rell (Bernard Bresslaw), Convict Rhun (Robbie Coltrane from "Harry Potter"), Kegan (Liam Neeson), Oswyn (Todd Carthy), blind prophet Sneer (John Welsh) and young boy Titch (Graham Mcgrath) go on a quest to find the missing princess and Colwyn is armed with a special magical five-bladed disc weapon called "The Glave" which he must use it to battle the evil alien armies and the powerful Beast.

Exciting and enjoyably campy Sci-fi fantasy romp is one of the cleverist and most stylish Sci-fi and fantasy combo movies around even in the 80's. It is basically an unusual fairy tale that plays like a cross between "Star Wars", "Flash Gordon" and even J.R.R. Tolkein, the film has became to become a cult favorite with some fantasy/Sci-fi fans and people who grew up in the 80's. James Horner's music score is quite majestic here, there's decent acting, good special effects, cool looking monsters and plenty of action. If you like a good old fashioned campy Sci-fi fantasy epic with plain fun then this could be it.

This special edition DVD has quality picture and good sound with cool extras like two audio commentaries, an interactive full length virtual comic book with soundtrack and dialog from the film, Trailers to this and other Columbia titles, featurette, and bios.

Also recommended: "Clash of the Titans", "The Dark Crystal", "Star Wars Saga", "Flash Gordon", "Willow", "The Neverending Story", "Dragonheart", "Excalibur", "Fire and Ice", "Lord of the Rings Trilogy", "The Spiderwick Chronicles", "Heavy Metal", "Wizards", "The Fifth Element", "Army of Darkness", "The Princess Bride", "Big Trouble in Little China", "Princess Mononoke", "Star Trek Series" and "Starchaser: Legend of Orin".

This little chuppa of a film is one of the myriad of "sword and sorcery" films of the early eighties, a lot that produced VERY few satisfactory examples....one exception was called, oddly enough, "The Sword and the Sorcerer", a film I reviewed here earlier; one of the others was this thing, "Krull". This film starred Ken Marshall, Freddie Jones, PBS perennial Lysette Anthony, BBC perennial and David Lynch's Jessica Atreides...Francesca Annis, Liam Neeson, Robbie Coltrane and other recognizable faces in a movie that, though a tad tacky around the edges, has an awful lot of charm!

Though their marriage ceremony is kind of wince-inducing, ("I give fire to water...' etc., etc.,) the young couple at the center of the film is likeable enough, though the girl doesn't get much screen time. THAT is given to Marshall and a slew of good-natured thieves, along with Jones, that he hooks up with after they attempt to corner him in a box canyon. His show of cheek and bravery wins them over, and they join him in his quest to save his intended from a monster called "The Beast", who has just about wiped out his and his bride's kingdoms in a move to take over their world.

Also involved in this whole mess is the search for a sort of ninja star device that acts like a magic boomerang. Colwyn's, (Marshall's character,) acquisition and possession of this device cements his ascent to the throne of his kingdom. Along the way to rescue his lady and to confront the Beast, Colwyn and his friends meet an amateur magician named Ergo and a seer who is promptly killed so that a changeling can take his place to entrap Colwyn.

The cinematography of this movie has a funky quality that is hard to describe...the scene, in fact, with the changeling has to be one of the best looking in the film, with all the fallow plant life and lighting, but the one scene that I've also always liked is the one where the rescuers are all riding the "Firemares", coursing through the air as flame streams from the hooves of these creatures. Fans of Ray Harryhausen will like the "Widow of the Web" sequence as well, (this is the part that stars Annis.)

The art direction is an odd mixture of "Barbarella" meets "The Hidden" meets "Excalibur", meets "Henson's Creature Shop", and though its low budget is woefully obvious, it's still a charmer. Just remember, both Coltrane and Neeson have gone on to become prestige performers in a business where it's hard to ACQUIRE that kind of reputation. Considering that this was probably the first film for both...Peter Yates, the director, must have been doing SOMETHING right...

(Believe me, in this genre, you could do LOTS worse....!)

At one point called The Dragons of Krull until someone noticed that they'd written the dragons out in one of the early draft screenplays, this 1983 underachiever was the end result of Columbia's desire for a big fantasy film - any fantasy film - to compete in the Star Wars stakes: the story came later, and came made to measure.

The result is a pic'n'mix of several genres, from swashbuckler to sci-fi as Ken Marshall's Prince must rescue his Princess (Lysette Anthony, dubbed, although on past form this is no great hardship) from the alien Slayers who have invaded his world. The notion of a medieval society literally fighting an enemy armed with scientific weapons with swords and sorcery is intriguing, but nothing here does it justice - where Lucas established an entire credible universe for Star Wars, we know nothing about this world: it exists purely for the purposes of the story.

This is more of a Christmas panto than anything else, with dialogue to match, although at least the latter improves when Marshall teams up with Alun Armstrong's outlaw band that includes Liam Neeson, a cockney Robbie Coltrane (looking all cloned up for a night in a gaybar) and even Eastenders Todd Carty.

Stephen Grimes' production design comes into its own with the organically designed Black Fortress, although his sets always look like sets (everything is peachy clean - even the swamps), leaving the paradox of an obviously very expensive film that still manages to look a bit cheap, for which Peter Suschitzky's photography must take much of the blame. Perfect on the exteriors, he consistently proves unable to match them with the interiors. Even worse, the camera feels like it is often in the wrong place (courtesy of director Peter Yates), and the editor seems more interested in what's going on in the sidelines than in the action itself, particularly in the fight in the swamp where the last Slayers are despatched in the background with the minimum of interest.

Not all is lost, however. There is one terrific sequence when Freddie Jones' Obi-Wan substitute must venture into a giant spider web to find out the location of the Slayer's Black Fortress from his long abandoned lover, Francesca Annis' Widow of the Web. There's heart, soul and a painful sense of lost opportunity to the scene that shines through, a magical moment that defies the lack of inspiration in the surrounding scenes and Freddie Jones' unrestrained ham (elsewhere his performance is pure "Can you hear me at the back, mother?" grandstanding) to create something quite touching. Similarly, Bernard Bresslaw's Cyclops, doomed to know the moment of his death from birth, benefits from a dignified, sincere performance that makes more of his scenes than they deserve. James Horner's, too, score is one of the film's greatest strengths, but the mix tends to lose much of it - a shame, because it is possibly his best work to date.

Columbia's DVD boasts a goodwidescreen transfer and a good selection of extras.

_Hollywood Irish_ is a fantastic collection of interviews and photographs of six handsome and talented actors: Gabriel Byrne, Liam Neeson, Stephen Rea, Pierce Brosnan, Aidan Quinn and Patrick Bergin. The simple introduction provided by Áine O'Connor sets the mood for the rest of the book well. As she mentions, the interviews do reveal insightful, private information: "Liam Neeson reveals how he considered leaving acting and how he found the confidence to continue; Pierce Brosnan, simply and openly, shares the painful story of his wife Cassie's death; Stephen Rea discusses the relationship between acting and politics; Aidan Quinn talks about the Irish identity and its many paradoxes; Patrick Bergin reveals the temptations of an actor's life and the difficulties of doing love scenes; Gabriel Byrne tells us about the risks and illusions that surround fame." In a nutshell, that's the book. Each actor discusses his beginnings, both in life and as an actor. Each discusses, in some capacity, how being Irish has impacted him. Each actor's profile comes with several b/w photos from childhood, movies and family collections. At the end, one can find each actor's filmography. The only complaint I would have regarding the book is that the material is dated (only current to 1997) and I wish an updated version could be compiled. That criticism aside, though, this is certainly a title worth owning.

Aine O'Conner manage to capture the cadences of the various actors very well. While reading the text, I could almost hear the men speaking their words. I suspect that she didn't edit the tapes very much, save for verbal pauses (the usual "uhs" and "you knows") and for length. Ms. O'Conner also included several photographs (many were candid) that were sprinkled throughout the various sections.

While Ms. O'Conner asked many insightful questions, she didn't follow through on many. Indeed, at times I was a little disappointed that she failed to follow up on specific points; however, that point is trivial compared to the overall effort of the book.

If you are a fan of any or all of the actors listed, or simply are curious to see how contemporary Irish actors are dealing with the joys and disappointments of Hollywood, then you should enjoy this book.

This book provides a facinating, indepth journey into the lives of six very capable and successful actors. Many humourous and sometimes tradgic tales of life in Ireland and struggles to make a name for themselves there and in America. Each actor tells of personal hardships that they have battled throughout their lives and how they have created such prominent status in today's Hollywood scene. Each story is spoken first hand which adds to the richness of these beautiful retold memories. This book provides a greater sense of who these men are by recalling tales from childhood, adolecence and adulthood which explain their journeys to becoming the great actors they are.

Excellent service. Prompt delivery. A used book but in even better condition than described

This book accomplishes what it sets out to do, in my mind. It opens a whole new perspective on a distinct subject in history that would be otherwise unknown or inaccessible to many, including myself. I think the author understands his audience quite well, and keeps things bearable, interesting and understandable. I don't think it's pretentious or sloppy or any of the other slams it's receiving here. It's simply a well written, informative, compact, concise, entertaining window into a...."hinge" of history most of us never considered. Cahill is articulate, energetic and passionate. He has breathed life into this slice of history and has done so in a richly informative manner. it this work contained all that some feel it needs, it would be nothing more than a rambling and boring list of facts, which it's not.

If I were looking for extensive commentary so I too can become an expert on the vast sweep of recorded written history I think I might need more material than this little book can offer. This is the kind of work that gets a person, especially a young person, interested in such things in the first place.

Walking away, I now have the base of knowledge and interest to look into some of the many interesting people, places, cultures and societies that I never really contemplated or realized existed. That's what I take away from this work, and in that, I found it an excellent choice.

i just think some of the reviews of this book are absolutely ridiculous. if anyone can point me to a better history covering all the ground this book does, in this few pages, i'll delete this review.

The title gives a good feel for the tone of the book. It's clever, informative, and very entertaining. You learn without feeling like you hit the history books, and you're left thinking about lessons for the future -- the most important reason to look back at the past.

Very much enjoyed it.

I read this book because my ammy Steve Guardala so passionately despises it and I wanted to see why. Now I know.

This is some of the worst celtophile propaganda I ever read. It's pure romanticism. Cahill proves nothing, and is unable to one item of history, science, literature SAVED by Irish monks.

Cahill makes unprofessional claims like the Germans destroyed everything.
Cahill is another Irish, Irish-American author pushing Celtophile historical reviionism claiming that it was the Irish and not the Romans or the Byzantines or the Franks or the Muslims who saved so much intellectual, religious or literary heritage.

Avoid this book.

I was intrigued when I first heard of this book and immediately added it to my wishlist - I have not read very much about Irish history and looked forward to the chance to read about grand things the Irish did to "save" civilization. I was quite surprised, then, to find that this book is just shy of 250 pages. Shouldn't there be more?

Some of the tidbits throughout the book are interesting, but I quickly realized that this book isn't an objective delivery of history but a most subjective focus on the Christianizing of Ireland. Basically, the Irish, according to Cahill, saved civilization by meticulously and beautifully copying ancient texts and keeping that literature alive. Once this bit of information is delivered, Cahill keeps his focus on religion, namely Christianity and even more succinctly, Catholicism. In fact, the book began to feel like How Catholicism Saved the Irish. That's not meant as an insult toward any particular religion; I just think that a book with this title should be focused more on what the Irish did to contribute to the world community rather than how the barbarians were delivered from their little mud huts into the glorious world of organized monotheism...and then copied a lot of pretty books.

Perhaps I missed the point, but I just finished reading this book, and I am no more enlightened regarding the rich history of the Irish than I was before I read the book.

In an interview I read, Mr. Neeson states that the author didn't talk to family members and he is less then happy about this book. Not that it was "bad" but that it was misleading.