Hidden jokes

I have written before about my enjoyment of the excellent TV comedy The Good Place and gave it a rave review. One of the things I noticed is that there are many hidden jokes that either fly by very fast or that are on the periphery of your vision. Some of those involve the complicated points system for every single action and whose final total at death is used to determine whether you are a good person, deserving to go to the Good Place or a bad person who needs to go to the Bad Place. Samples of the point system flash by on a screen too fast to see more than one or two. You have to freeze the frame to read them all and this website has grabbed a couple of them.
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TV Review: Documenting Hate: Charlottesville

This week will see the anniversary of the Unite the Right rally of white supremacists and neo-Nazis that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 11 and 12, 2017. The same people wanted to hold an anniversary rally in Charlottesville but their application for a permit was turned down. But their application to hold a rally in Washington, DC was approved by the National Park Service and they are planning what they call a ‘White Civil Rights Rally’ this weekend in front of the White House. No word yet if Donald Trump has been invited to address the groups, since they clearly see him as a supporter. But a coalition of 18 groups under the umbrella ‘DC Against Hate’ plan a massive counter-protest. This has again reignited the debate as to the best way to deal with hate groups: whether to ignore them and that, starved of attention, they will disappear, or that letting them to do their thing with impunity just emboldens them.
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What does a zombie eating brains sound like?

I have written before about the fascinating sound effects produced by Foley artists for films. They use mostly everyday items to create sounds for films and then have to carefully sync those sounds with the final film. They do that by matching the image to the sound film clip while watching the film. In this clip, Matt Davies eats tomatoes and peppers and other assorted food items, plus does other things to them to create the gross-out sounds of horror films, such as zombies eating brains and flesh and so on.
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TV review: Galavant

I have been really enjoying this musical comedy series, described as Monty Python meets The Princess Bride, that originally aired on the ABC TV network but is now available on Netflix. There were only two seasons of eight and ten episodes that aired in 2015 and 2016. It is set in the 13th century and the plot involves a heroic knight Sir Galavant, his squire Sid, and a princess Isabella who seek to liberate Isabella’s kingdom of Valencia after it was captured by the king from another kingdom. That king Richard is inept and childish and it is his assistant Gareth who really gets things done.
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Film review: Won’t you be my neighbor? (2018)

I have long had a soft spot for Fred Rogers, host of the long running children’s show Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, that I used to watch with my children when they were little. This was not because of the show itself. While its wholesome messages were universal and timeless, the presentation unabashedly aimed itself at very young children and its languid pace, low production values, and simple format made it somewhat dull for adults. It did not have the fast pace and dualistic sensibilities of Sesame Street that catered to children and also to their parents. The reason I like him was because of a very specific incident that occurred when my older daughter was just about to enter kindergarten at the local public school.
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Film review: The Death of Stalin (2017)

I had been eagerly anticipating the release of this film ever since I heard about its debut in England lost November. This is because it is the creation of Armando Iannucci, who has a string of successful political satires such as the British TV series The Thick of It, the American TV series Veep, and the transatlantic comedy film In The Loop (2009) that dealt with how the American and British governments colluded to sell the phony case for the invasion of Iraq. Iannucci is a writer of sharp insight and dialogue and the topic of this film, dealing with all the political infighting for power immediately following the death of Stalin, got rave reviews on its release.
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Why bother to give him a code name at all?

The actress Eunice Grayson died yesterday at the age of 90. It was she who cued up the moment when Sean Connery would, as James Bond in Dr No, first say his name in the iconic way that has been parodied mercilessly so many times.

What always struck me is that the only people who ever called Bond by his code name of 007 were his co-workers in British intelligence. He himself would tell everyone his real name, even when introduced to his enemies, which seemed to make having a code name utterly pointless.

As a piece of trivia, the actual voices of Grayson and many of the ‘Bond girls’ (as they were referred to) in the films made in the 1960s and 1970s were never used but instead were overdubbed by voiceover artist Nikki van der Zyl. Why, I don’t know, but it did reinforce the impression that they were largely scenery and interchangeable.

TV review: The Good Place

This is a pretty funny show that has a clever premise. It involves Kristen Bell playing Eleanor Shellstrop, a thirtyish woman who opens her eyes and finds herself facing Michael, an elderly man played by Ted Danson. Michael tells her that she has died but that everything is fine because in the afterlife she is in The Good Place. Who ends up in The Good Place is determined entirely by an algorithm that assigns a numerical score (positive or negative) for every single act on Earth and then computes the final tally. Only the people who have lived the most exemplary lives on Earth end up there. He tells her that The Good Place is divided up into communities of exactly 322 people with each community designed by an architect of the afterlife and this one is his first design. Each person is assigned a soul mate and hers is Chidi Anagonye (played by William Jackson Harper) who was a professor of moral philosophy when he was alive.
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Film review: Spectre (2015) (Spoilers!)

The James Bond series has really got to be treated as straight-up comedies. In the Roger Moore era, the campy humor was more explicit with Moore’s wisecracks letting the audience know that it was all utterly ridiculous. In the Daniel Craig era there seemed to be an attempt to revive the original Sean Connery darker vibe of the hero being more ruthless and cold-blooded, willing to use more freely his license to kill. But despite Bond’s somber expression throughout, this film is a real hoot that had me laughing at its unintended humor.
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