Sally Field talks about her own illegal abortion when she was 17

The two-time Academy Award winning actor talks about how she became pregnant around 1964 when she was just 17. She was desperate and didn’t know what to do but a family friend who was a doctor drove her across the border to Tijuana to get an abortion which was illegal then. It was a traumatic experience and, as she says, we are now seeing a resurgence of the same conditions that are forcing women to undergo similar harrowing experiences.

It is a powerful testimony and I hope many people see it and realize how dangerous is the threat to women’s reproductive rights posed by creepy Donald Trump, weird JD Vance, the misogynistic GOP, and a US Supreme Court that wants to take us back to those dark ages.

Film review: Rebel Ridge (2024)

I have written multiple posts about the menace in the US of what is known as ‘civil asset forfeiture’. This is where police can seize the assets of people (cash, cars, even houses) even before they are convicted of any crime and make it well nigh impossible for them to get it back even if they are completely innocent. This has become just another way for some local jurisdictions to raise money to fund their operations, particularly their police departments.

John Oliver highlighted this abuse ten years ago.

A couple of days ago, I watched a new film Rebel Ridge on Netflix that deals with precisely this issue. A young black man Terry Richmond rides his bicycle into a small rural Alabama town with $36,000 in cash, with $10,000 meant to bail out his cousin who was arrested on a misdemeanor marijuana possession charge, and the remainder for both to buy a truck and start a small hauling business.

But he is stopped by local police who find the money and confiscate it on the grounds that it might be drug-related even though they had no evidence at all. When he tries to get it back he is threatened by the sheriff. Summer McBride, a paralegal in the county courthouse, tells him that she has unearthed evidence that the police department and the judge have a scheme going where people get arrested for minor infractions, the charges get elevated, their property confiscated, and they are thrown in jail with high cash bail. She says that fighting to get their money and property back will take a long time and often cost more than what was confiscated so most people, who are poor and cannot afford a lawyer, will simply give up and walk away.
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Bob Newhart (1929-2024)

The comedian died yesterday at the age of 94.

A former accountant who began moonlighting in comedy venues, Newhart first rose to fame in the 1960s for his observational humor and droll delivery. His breakthrough album, The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, recorded over several days in Houston before Newhart had any stand-up experience, netted him Grammys for best new artist and album of the year in 1961.

“In 1959, I gave myself a year to make it in comedy; it was back to accounting if comedy didn’t work out,” he once said, according to Digney’s statement. Newhart was 30 years old and years into a career as a Chicago accountant when the album went No 1 on the sales charts, the first comedy album to do so.

The comic went on to dominate the sitcom landscape for nearly two decades with two beloved TV shows, first with The Bob Newhart Show, which aired on CBS from 1972 until 1978. The show, in which Newhart starred as a befuddled psychologist in Chicago, became one of the most popular sitcoms of all time.
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Born on 5 September 1929 in Oak Park, Illinois, George Robert Newhart ushered in a new style of comedy in the 1960s, breaking from the mold of vaudeville and Borscht Belt routines for bits based in observation and psychology. His performance style incorporated stammering, deadpan delivery and quietly subversive material that appealed widely.

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How to end (and not end) a limited TV series

Back in the day when there was only broadcast television in the US, writers tended to be confined to just one episode to tell a story, similar to a feature film. Limited series, where the writers could spread the story over many hours were relatively rare, because they disrupted the weekly TV schedule, not to mention being more expensive to produce. Yet, the examples of blockbuster hits like Roots, Shogun, and The Thorn Birds showed that there was a market for them, because the extended time enabled the telling of complex stories and better character development.

The arrival of streaming services has seen the flourishing of the limited series since there are no scheduling issues. One downside is that freed from some time constraints, some of the writing is a little bloated but on the whole, the limited series fills an important niche between feature films that tell one story and a normal weekly TV show in which each episode had to be largely self-contained within a short time and thus cannot accommodate complex and lengthy storylines.

There is one problem with the current limited-series model and that is how to end it. If the story is planned as a one-off from the very beginning, then there is no problem. You just end the story at the end and that is it. But some producers want to have the option, if the series is a hit, to bring it back a sequel with many of the same characters. But you do not know in advance when making the first series if it will be a hit so you want to end the series in such a way that viewers will look forward to a sequel series if there is one.
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The Beatles as The Four Musketeers?

In yesterday’s post about the 1973 film The Three Musketeers, I mentioned that the director Richard Lester had once had the idea of casting the Beatles in the role of the four Musketeers.

Ever since then, I have been idly thinking about which Beatle would be best to play each role and this is what I ended up with:

Paul – D’Artagnan
John – Athos
Ringo – Porthos
George – Aramis

One can extend this silly speculation even further and ask about casting the Marx brothers in the four roles. One would have to add one of the lesser known brothers such as Zeppo or another serious actor to serve as the foil for the antics of Groucho, Chico, and Harpo in order to make up the quartet.

My choice would be for the serious brother to play D’Artagnan, with Groucho playing the cynical Athos, Harpo playing the somewhat spiritual Porthos, and Chico playing the Lothario Aramis. And of course the long-suffering Margaret Dumont would play Milady.

I actually think that this idea might have worked for the Marx brothers back in the day.

The Three (or maybe Four) Musketeers and their puzzling lack of muskets

When I read the sprawling novel The Three Musketeers written in 1844 by Alexander Dumas, I was puzzled by two things, both arising from the title. The main character is D’Artagnan, a brash young man from the country who journeys to Paris in search of adventure. He is not a Musketeer himself but dreams of joining that elite squad of warriors who protect the king. He wants to prove his mettle and challenges everyone to duels over the merest slights. He first challenges Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, the three Musketeers of the book title, but the four of them become friends and go on various adventures. D’Artagnan only becomes a Musketeer towards the end of the book, in recognition of his services. I am not sure why Dumas did not call the book The Four Musketeers or D’Artagnan and The Three Musketeers, which would have been more accurate.

The other puzzle is that the Musketeers never seem to carry any actual muskets. This was addressed by Simon Kemp, Oxford University Fellow and Tutor in French.

“One of the odder things about Dumas’ novel for the modern reader is its singular lack of muskets.

“In the mid-1620s, when the story is set, the Mousquetaires are the household guard of the French king, Louis XIII, an elite force trained for the battlefield as well as for the protection of the monarch and his family in peacetime. They are named for their specialist training in the use of the musket (mousquet), an early firearm originally developed in Spain at the end of the previous century under the name moschetto or ‘sparrow-hawk’. Muskets were long-barrelled guns, quite unlike the pistols shown in the trailer, and fired by a ‘matchlock’ mechanism of holding a match or burning cord to a small hole leading to the powder chamber. By the 1620s they were not quite as cumbersome as the Spanish originals, which needed to have their barrels supported on a forked stick, but they were still pretty unwieldy devices.

“There are lots of weapons in the opening chapters of Les Trois Mousquetaires, where D’Artagnan travels to the barracks and challenges almost everyone he meets along the way to a duel (including all three of the musketeers). Lots of sword-fighting, but no muskets in sight. One of the musketeers has nicknamed his manservant mousequeton, or ‘little musket’, and that is as near as we get to a gun until page 429 of the Folio edition, when an actual mousqueton makes its first appearance. A mousqueton is not quite a musket, though, and in any case it’s not one of the musketeers who is holding it.
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Their absence from the novel up to this point is simply for the historical reason that the heavy and dangerous weapons were appropriate for the battlefield, not for the duties and skirmishes of peace-time Paris. Even when his heroes are mobilized, Dumas remains reluctant to give his musketeers their muskets.

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Film review: My Scientology Movie (2015)

I am both fascinated and disturbed by cults. Fascinated because of my interest in the psychology of the kind of people who are drawn to cults and then get indoctrinated, and disturbed because of the often tragic consequences that ensue to them and their loved ones. One of the most pernicious cults is the highly secretive Church of Scientology, notorious for the reports of how they exploit and abuse cult members and viciously attack anyone who manages to escape from their clutches, not to mention anyone that seeks to shine a light on them. As a result, even some of the people who have escaped are too frightened to talk publicly about what they went through.

This article in Vice gives the account of someone who managed to escape the church and describes the methods they use to suck people into it and what life was like once you had been recruited. The person is disguised and has their voice altered because of fear of being recognized by the church and hounded.

More comprehensive treatments can be found in the 2013 book Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright and the 2015 Alex Gibney documentary Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief based on that book. I wrote about this cult before and reviewed both the book and the film.

In an interview at the Sundance Film Festival where the film was screened, Gibney and Wright discuss how they were fascinated by the question of how it could be that people who were smart and idealistic and caring, by no means simpletons, could get sucked into an organization that was so exploitative and abusive. These people, once they left, were themselves shocked at how they did not see what was so obvious to them now.

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Film review: Past Lives (2023)

This film, that has won many awards and was nominated for best film at the latest Academy Awards, will evoke long forgotten memories in viewers who have reached or passed middle age. Who amongst us does not recall past loves from whom we drifted away for a variety of reasons, and now occasionally wonder what our lives might have been like if things had turned out differently and we had stayed together?

This film tells the story of Nora and Hae Sung, childhood sweethearts in Seoul, South Korea who get separated at the age of 12 when Nora’s family emigrates to Canada. She subsequently moves to New York to pursue a career as a writer while he remains behind in Korea to become an engineer. But he still thinks of her and at the age of 24, he reaches out to her through Facebook and they start talking via Skype where they discover that they still feel warmly towards each other. But there is little chance of them meeting in the near future and that brief period of connection also fades and they do not make contact for another twelve years, when they are in their mid-thirties. In the meantime, she attends a writing residency and ends up falling in love and marrying Arthur, a fellow writer she met there, while Hae Sung also gets engaged.
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TV review: 3 Body Problem (2024)

My recent two posts on UFOs and the possible existence of life emerging on other planets in the universe generated quite a bit of interest. Those interested in this topic may enjoy the new series just released on Netflix that deals with this. I recently finished watching all eight episodes (each roughly an hour long) of this show.

It deals with a group of five friends who were together at Oxford University and were all the proteges of a physicist Vera Ye who herself was the daughter of an accomplished Chinese physicist Ye Wenjie, whose father, also a physics professor, was murdered by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution for teaching Einstein’s theories. While remaining good friends, the careers of the five have diverged. Two of them (Jin Cheng and Saul Durand) are hotshot physicists, one (Auggie Salazar) is the chief scientific officer of a nanotechnology company. One (Jack Rooney) dropped out to start a snack company that has made him very wealthy, while the fifth (Will Downing) became a physics teacher, feeling that he did not have what it takes to be top-rank research scientist.
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Film review: The Lost King (2023)

I do not share the admiration that some people have for British royalty, instead seeing them as a long line of greedy and murderous individuals who connived their way to the throne and sucked wealth from the people. But I am a sucker for mysteries and the story of Richard III has many unresolved puzzles and so I watched this film that is based on the true story of one woman’s quest to find out the truth about the man who died in 1485 at the young age of 32. He has long been portrayed as exceedingly malevolent, scheming, vicious, and murderous, whose personality was twisted by the rejection he felt due to his physical deformity of being a hunchback and who usurped the throne after the death of his brother the king and imprisoned his two nephews in the Tower of London and later had them murdered because he saw them as potential rivals to the throne.

But later scholarship suggests that he may not have been nearly as evil as has been traditionally portrayed and also that his physical deformity may have been not as severe and that the evidence is scant that he murdered his nephews. These revisionists argue that the ‘official’ story was put out by his successors in order to discredit him and build support for their own rule.
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