Last night I watched this film from acclaimed director Alfonso Cuarónt that has received rave reviews all over. It received a 96% critics rating from both Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. It is being strongly tipped to receive the Academy Award for best picture, plus awards for acting, directing, and others.
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Some time ago, I wrote about the The Negro Motorist Green Book , which was a travel guide written by Victor Hugo Green. It was first published in 1936 and regularly updated to inform black Americans during the Jim Crow days what places they could shop, eat, and stay the night during road trips across the US, and what towns were “Sundown Towns” where black people were banned from being outside after dark.
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I just watched this film, based on a true story, that is set in the town of Colorado Springs in 1978. John David Washington plays Ron Stallworth, the town’s first black police officer who, pretending to be a white man, responds by phone to a newspaper advertisement placed by the Ku Klux Klan for new recruits. For actual meetings with the local KKK branch members, he sends in his colleague Flip Zimmerman (played by Adam Driver) who is Jewish. The two of them continue to play their parts as Stallworth, once the KKK people were satisfied that did not “have any Jew in him”, rises in the organization and he even becomes friends over the phone with David Duke, then the Grand Wizard of the KKK (played by Topher Grace).
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The BBC has produced a very absorbing 22-minute documentary titled Fake Me: Living For Likes (below) about the life of people who live for likes on Instagram and other social media platforms. They follow an extremely thoughtful young woman named Joey who is a college student and aspiring fashion designer in Nairobi, Kenya. Joey hated social media and did not have any presence on it at all because of what she saw it doing to her friends who had become so addicted to that online world that they would ignore the real people around them.
Anyone who has watched the film 2001: A Space Odyssey will never forget the voice of HAL 9000, the computer that was the real star of that film. Douglas Rain, the Shakespearean actor who provided the voice, died on November 11 at the age of 90. That somber, flat, atonal, imperturbable voice, concerned and yet somehow menacing, is etched in the memory and I can recall it easily and immediately. For those who cannot, here is one key scene. (Keir Dullea’s performance is often overlooked. He deserves a lot of credit for his reaction shots to a disembodied voice.)
I just watched the first two episodes of Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj on Netflix and was blown away by them. Each show focuses largely on one issue, somewhat like John Oliver does, but whereas Oliver mixes hard news and analysis in the form of a news show with him as the anchor seated behind a desk, Minhaj uses a high-energy stand-up comedy format to mix hard news with analysis, with him moving around on a stage with large screens behind and below him and talking in a fast pace. He, like Oliver, provides lots of facts and background information that one does not often hear even on news shows but interspersed with plenty of comedic analyses. It really kept me glued to the show. The fact that I agreed with everything he said on both shows may had aided my enjoyment.
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Sesame Street announced that actor Caroll Spinney, who played the parts of Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch from its inception in 1969, is retiring at the age of 84. Big Bird became one of the most recognized personalities on the planet. It was not easy to do him, requiring Spinney to hold his hand up above his head in order to manipulate the head and eyes, while looking down at a tiny screen inside the stifling costume that showed him what the camera was showing, all the while reading the script as well.
Sesame Street Season 1 Caroll Spinney and Big Bird
If you subscribe to Netflix, you know that as soon as you turn it on, your home page will show still images for various shows that they are promoting for you specifically to watch. I knew of course that they use some kind of algorithm to determine your likes and dislikes, presumably based on your past viewing history. What I had not realized was that they are also trying to deduce whether I am a person of color or not and if they felt that I was, they would show a different still image featuring actors of color, even if they had just minor roles in the film or TV show. Here is an example.
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This is a documentary about three identical triplets who, in 1979 at the age of 19, found each other by chance. The events depicted are already known and some older readers might recall the case that made such a big splash in the media. The filmmaker has presented it in such a way that it is like a film in three acts, starting out in one way before somewhat abruptly revealing facts in the second act that takes the film in a different direction. The film raises some disturbing ethical issues but I cannot discuss them without revealing what the film is all about which I will do after the trailer.
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I am not by any means an expert on Russian theater and so seized the chance to see a film adaptation of Anton Chekov’s acclaimed play The Seagull starring Annette Bening. It was an enjoyable film, but as I watched it I could not help noticing that it conformed to the popular view of Russian plays where no one is happy and everyone complains to one another about their unhappiness.
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