Film review: The Shape of Water (2017)

Last night I watched this film that won this year’s Academy Award for best film and best director (Guillermo del Toro). I am not really a fan of the fantasy genre (the scientific implausibilities grate on me even though I try hard to suspend my critical faculties) but found this film, despite some scenes of violence, to be quite a sweet love story. For those who haven’t heard of it, it is set around 1960 at the height of the Cold War. The US military has found a strange human-like amphibian in the Amazon and brought it back to the US to study in a top-secret facility.
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Class issues in ice-skating as shown in the film I, Tonya (2017)

I was never a fan of ice-skating, an event whose appeal eludes me and whose inclusion as a sport in the Olympics mystifies me. But it is hugely popular, though perhaps less so now than about two-decades ago. But like everyone else, I heard about the infamous event in which Nancy Kerrigan was attacked during the US trials to select the team in 1994 when an assailant came and hit her on the legs with a baton. She recovered enough to make the team and win a silver medal. A rival skater Tonya Harding was accused of being behind the attack and she came eighth after a mishap with her laces. This film is Harding’s story though, as with all biopics, one has to be wary of its accuracy.
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Jesus Christ Superstar

Last night the NBC TV network broadcast a live performance of this rock musical to coincide with Easter Sunday. I started watching the high-energy 2½ hour show but gave up after 40 minutes. This was not because I thought it was bad. I liked what I saw but the frequent breaks for commercials finally got the better of me. It seemed like for every 8 minutes of the show, we had a break for about 4 minutes of commercials. I understand the business model of ads paying for free programming, but the time spent on ads was just too much and they were so frequent that it destroyed the sense of engagement. If a DVD comes out, I may well watch it but today clips were made available and I embed some below.
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Terry Gilliam is totally wrong

Gilliam is one of the members of the Monty Python troupe, not as well known as the other five because he was rarely seen in the TV series and films. His main role was providing the animations that provided the transitions between sketches and scenes. After the Python era ended, he went on to become a successful director. In a recent interview, he gave his opinion on the recent exposes of predatory sexual behavior in the entertainment industry and said some appalling things, among other things comparing the #MeToo movement to mob rule.
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You can watch Abacus: Small Enough to Jail online [UPDATED}

I just discovered that the documentary that I highly praised earlier today can be viewed in its entirety at the Frontline website. I strongly recommend it. When I watched the documentary, I was surprised at the access the Sung family gave the filmmakers., allowing them to sit in on their conversations. Director Steve James discusses the making of the film and why he wanted to show so much of the family and why thinks they took that risk.
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Film review: Abacus: Small Enough to Jail (2017)

This is a must-see documentary about one overlooked story on the financial crisis of 2008. I did not hear about it until last week when it was discussed on the radio as one of the Academy Awards nominees for best documentary. There have been many good films about that crisis that I have reviewed before, such as Inside Job, Requiem for the American Dream, The Big Short, Margin Call, Capitalism – A Love Story. In each of them, the viewer is left furious at the fact that the top officials at the big banks were not criminally prosecuted and were able to escape scot-free while so many people suffered as a result of their actions.
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Jimmy Kimmel’s excellent Oscar monologue

As usual, I did not watch the Academy Awards ceremony last night. I was glad to read today that Frances McDormand won the Best Actress award for her performance in Three Billboard Outside Ebbing, Missouri along with Sam Rockwell for Best Supporting Actor. I had praised that film and McDormand’s performance before in my review of the film. The host Jimmy Kimmel gave an excellent opening monologue that was both funny and pointed and gave a shout out to the students at Parkland and their March for Our Lives rallies on March 24, although another unknown group has claimed the Mall in Washington DC for that day to film a ‘talent show’..

Here it is.

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Public toilet etiquette

On my long flight back from California, I whiled away some of the time by watching some episodes of the comedy show Curb Your Enthusiasm that stars Larry David who plays himself as a somewhat cantankerous and annoying busybody who talks all the time, and deals with his life and interactions with other comedy writers and actors in Los Angeles who makes cameo appearances. I had never seen a full episode of the show before but had seen clips and was of course aware of David himself, especially given his many appearances on Saturday Night Live during the 2016 election campaign where his strong physical and vocal resemblance to Bernie Sanders, including his gruff manner, was exploited to the hilt.
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Supercut of the Special Effects Oscar winners

I enjoyed this supercut of brief clips from all the past Oscar winners in the Special Effects category starting from 1927, plus all the nominees for this year’s award. While I have a deep admiration for the people who produce these amazing effects, I must admit to a soft spot for the ones from the early days before they were all done using computer graphics. How they could have got the effects using just physical models and camera trickery really impresses me.
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Film review: Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

I recently watched this sequel to the 1982 film Blade Runner and enjoyed it. It continues the theme of what happens when, in a dystopian future society, technology enables the creation of ‘replicants’, human-like synthetic creatures that are almost impossible to distinguish from human beings. In this film, it explores the possibility that they might become able to reproduce.
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