I am a huge fan of the Monty Python TV series and films but was not so fond of the animations that separated the sketches and the scenes. In this video, Terry Gilliam explains how he created them using simple materials .
(Via Mark Frauenfelder)
I am a huge fan of the Monty Python TV series and films but was not so fond of the animations that separated the sketches and the scenes. In this video, Terry Gilliam explains how he created them using simple materials .
(Via Mark Frauenfelder)
I used to read Batman and other comics as a boy but for whatever reason have not seen any of the major Batman films that have regularly been produced in the last few decades.
In general, I am not a fan of the superhero genre of films but like to get a sense of how the filmmakers translated the books to the screen. However, filmmakers seem to churn them out on a regular basis and I do not wish to see a whole slew of them. I would like to see just one but am not sure which would be a good one for the Batman series. In the case of Superman, I saw just the first one with Christopher Reeve. With the Marvel comic book heroes, I watched The Avengers because it had a lot of the characters in it and while that was fun, it was enough for me. I get bored with non-stop action, which is what these films tend to show. I never watched any of the Spiderman films because that character annoys the hell out of me.
I have benefited a lot from film recommendations from this blog’s readers and was wondering if people had any suggestions as to which Batman film might be the best to see, if I were to see only one. I should perhaps add that I am not a fan of excessive violence, blood, and gore.
Hindu extremists in India are threatening violence if a new Bollywood film Padmavaat is released that they allege depicts a romance between queen Padmaavati and a 14th century Muslim ruler Alauddin Khilji. They have not seen the film and the filmmakers say the film does not show this and have offered an advance screening to allay their fears. But hell hath no fury like an enraged religious extremist and now that they have got worked up, they are not going to calm down easily.
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While I have been following cricket matches, I have not paid much attention to the politics of the game. I stumbled upon the documentary Death of a Gentleman quite by accident and it was quite an eye-opener. The film looks at the way that international cricket is run. The documentary started out as a project by two sports journalists Jarrod Kimber and Sam Collins who are ardent fans of cricket at the highest level, which consist of the five-day Test matches played between national teams. They were concerned that this form of the game (that purists like me like the most) was in danger of extinction because of the rise of the abomination called T20 which reduces the game to about three hours but in the process eliminates many of the features that had made this game into the second most popular sport in the world after soccer. The long form of Test matches has many subtleties that the short form T20 lacks. I personally find the short-form boring, requiring as it does a very limited range of batting and bowling skills.
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If you follow US political news at all, you have undoubtedly heard of Gloria Allred, the attorney who has represented many female clients in high-profile gender-related cases and who is currently taking on Donald Trump on behalf of Summer Zervos who says that she was defamed by Donald Trump when he publicly called her a liar for saying that he sexually assaulted her in 2007. Allred has been portrayed negatively by her opponents as a publicity-seeker whose expertise mostly lies in getting attention for her press conferences with the victims of abuse.
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Kevin Fallon writes that a new documentary Three Identical Strangers that just debuted at the Sundance film festival tells the story of three identical triplets Bobby, Eddy, and David who were separated at birth who, in 1980, joyfully discovered each other 19 years later.
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I recently watched all six episodes of season four of the series Black Mirror that was released in December. I reviewed the three earlier seasons here. For those not familiar with the series, it was conceived by caustic British news and media critic Charlie Brooker who along with Annabel Jones are the showrunners. It is a science fiction anthology set in the near future, with each episode being independent of the others. The series focuses on how technology influences people’s lives in unpredictable ways, dealing mainly with neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality innovations.
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A couple of years ago I wrote a review of the thought-provoking and disturbing 2015 science fiction film Ex Machina that dealt with the interaction of people with highly developed robots that are almost indistinguishable from humans, and what kind of sensibilities we might reasonably expect them to have.
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Now that I have seen Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens, I can understand and enjoy parodies of it. Until I had seen its introduction of the new Darth Vader-like villain Kylo Ren, this comedy sketch would have made no sense to me. Now I find it pretty funny.
I wrote recently about how I had abandoned watching the Star Wars series after being disappointed with Start Wars I: The Phantom Menace but a review of the latest entry Star Wars VIII: The Last Jedi suggested that it had somewhat progressive politics that might make it worth watching. But my son-in-law, who is an aficionado of the series, suggested that before watching it, I should see Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens because otherwise the plot of the latest film would be hard to follow.
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