Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer, the three guitar players in the 1984 cult film that featured the loudest rock band ever (it went up to 11), are actual musicians and a few days ago, the trio performed live with Elvis Costello at the Tribeca Film Festival at a screening for the 35 anniversary of the film. (The drummers in the band had a habit of dying mysteriously.)
Here’s the trailer for the original film from back in 1984.
I have written many times before about the Satanic Temple and their efforts to keep the public square secular and open to all beliefs and not have it become the domain of those who favor one religion over other religions or religion in general over non-religion. Their demand that their statue of Baphomet be allowed in any public space that allows religious symbols has proven to be a potent political and legal argument against religious exclusivity but their broader goals are to promote social justice and equality.
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Yesterday saw the release of the film Avengers: Endgame, the latest in the franchise of superhero films based on the Marvel comic books. These films have been roaring commercial successes. I myself am not a fan of the genre and have watched just a couple (The Avengers and Spiderman: Homecoming) to see what all the fuss was about. I had not planned on seeing the latest film.
But last evening I got an email from someone I do not know in which the subject line, all in upper case, revealed what is apparently a major plot twist in this film. The person who had sent out the spoiler had gone to great lengths to make sure that every single person who might in any way be connected to my university (including alumni) was made aware of the spoiler. The address line contained the addresses of about 250 email address lists (not individual addresses) that seemed to cover pretty much everyone. I think my address was in the list of physics faculty, staff, students, and emeriti. This person had gone to great lengths to obtain all these email address lists, presumably by hacking into the university server that has the database that contains all of them.
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The original Netflix business model was clever. You would queue up the films you wanted. They would mail you a DVD of a film that you would mail back after watching. It was easy. There were no due dates and no overdue fees. All it required for them was to purchase DVDs and stock a warehouse with them, with little other overhead since once you purchase a DVD, you can rent it out as many times as you like. It is little wonder that these low overhead costs drove the brick-and-mortar Blockbuster out of business.
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I have not seen this film or even heard about it but after watching this hilarious review of it by the comedian, I don’t think I need to. Like most natural disaster films, there is an attempt to give a scientific explanation for the catastrophe but O’Briain says that this ludicrously over-the-top apocalyptic film offered one that was so utterly outlandish that he used it to insert a useful lesson about neutrinos.
Unless you are living under a rock, you are likely to have been bombarded with stories about the final season of this series that seems to have grabbed the passionate devotion of so many people. Hearing that it has large amounts of gruesome and gratuitous violence, I steered clear of this show and have not seen a single episode and feel like cartoonist Stephen Pastis.
On a whim, I decided to watch the second film in the James Bond franchise From Russia With Love starring Sean Connery. I had seen it as a boy a long time ago when it first came out and remembered my adolescent self being highly taken up with the film and really enjoying it so I decided to give it another go. It is usually a mistake to revisit books and films aimed at one’s teenage self and that one enjoyed as a very young person because the second time around as an adult is usually disappointing, so I was ready to feel a little let down.
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I wrote recently that I prefer TV series that have very limited runs and avoid those that go on and on. So I was startled to read that the British soap opera Coronation Street had, for the first time, added a black family to the residents of the street. What shocked me was not that it took so long to add this element of diversity but that the show was still on. I recall as a young boy in England seeing an episode or two. It was not to my liking and the only thing I remember is that there was a tough-looking, sharp-tongued, woman named Ena Sharples who always had a hairnet on her head. Apparently the show has been showing three times a week on prime time for nearly sixty years which is an incredibly long run even by soap-opera standards.
This shows great loyalty on the part of the British public. I recall an interview that either P. G. Wodehouse or George Bernard Shaw (I forget whom) gave in which he was asked the secret of his success and longevity as a public favorite. He replied that with the British public you just have to hang in there and keep producing new material. After a while you become seen as an ‘institution’ and the public sticks with you forever after that even if the quality of your work declines. He was being modest because his output was usually of high quality but there is a germ of truth there. The British public can be very loyal to their veteran artists and performers and their vintage shows like Coronation Street and Dr. Who, and are loathe to see them end.
I recently watched two television series produced and set in Australia. One was Secret City and the other was Rake. The former is a political espionage drama while the latter is a comedy-farce. How they both portray the Australian political-legal-police-internal security systems in less than flattering, to put it mildly, showing them as utterly corrupt and venal. Both shows portray the Australia-China relationship as a highly fraught one, and in Secret City, the US is shown manipulating Australia to serve its own foreign policy ends.
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I watched these two films this past week. They share certain similarities. They are both based on actual events and characters. Both films have received praise and were heavily promoted by their respective studios for Academy Awards and succeeded, with The Favourite nominated for ten awards and Olivia Colman winning for Best Actress, while Green Book was nominated for five awards and won three including Best Film, Mahershala Ali for Best Supporting Actor, and for Best Original Screenplay.
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