E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

We live in the Renaissance of the Dramatic Television Series - everyone knows the list to trot out: The Sopranos, The West Wing, The Wire, Damages , even Game of Thrones, Homeland, House of Cards (American version), The Killing, The Bridge , and, of course, the badass Shakespeare of our time, Breaking Bad . This is not news. This is the given world of our time - television drama is as good or better than any novel or play a contemporary master can throw at us. There is no book by Philip Roth , or Martin Amis , or Atwood , or play by Stoppard , or Wilson , any better than The Wire or Breaking Bad .  Maybe as good.  Not better. I therefore did not expect the crowning achievement of this whole excess of excellence to be an 8-part series starring two actors who I rather disliked until a year ago - Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey . Then came True Detective . There will be no spoilers here.  I am not going to say much - it has all been said.  But let me say ...

One hopes that Heaven will be letting in Ingrid Pitt - surely the right one - who has sadly died today, the Queen of Hammer Horror, and the Countess Dracula.  Pitt, whose buxom figure emphasised the diabolic sensuality on offer to her victims, was synonymous visually with the tantalising transgressions of a certain tendency in semi-erotic horror films - a far cry from today's dismal and dehumanised "torture porn".  Pitt, who was Polish, appeared in several of the classic films of all time - such as The Wicker Man , and Where Eagles Dare ,   and also acted in television, appearing in Dr Who , and Smiley's People .  Her three most famous roles are likely in The Vampire Lovers , Countess Dracula , and The House That Dripped Blood , at the start of the 1970s.  Indeed, her major period is brief, 1968-1973.  She had earlier taken small or uncredited roles in Welles ' Chimes at Midnight , and Lean 's Dr. Zhivago .  She will be missed.

Director Matt Reeves was tasked impossibly with remaking a universally acclaimed horror masterpiece, Let The Right One In , for the American market.  The original is sombre, pensive, sensitive, and artful - perhaps the most profound meditation on love, desire, ageing, adolescence, and evil, in all of the horror film canon - so the idea that a new version would have anything to add was obscene.  Instead, Reeves has turned in an unusually sensitive reappraisal, which subtly readjusts the setting, and some of the scenes, without altering the themes, the mood, or the mise-en-scene. The new version, Let Me In , has not been embraced by audiences - though it has made ten times as much as the art-house precedent.  This is too bad, but perhaps inevitable - Let Me In is not just a horror movie, but a character study, and a potential love story (as signalled by the introduction of the Romeo and Juliet theme here) - and it unfolds at a solemn, almost funereal pace.  Reeves...