Film review: The Big Short (2015)

This is an excellent film. It is a lightly fictionalized version of the events that led up to the financial crash of 2008 due to the housing bubble. It focuses on several individuals who looked closely at the way that housing prices were rising at a far faster rate than the rise in people incomes would predict, looked closely at the mortgages that were being handed out that enabled people to pay ever-increasing prices for the same homes, and came to the conclusion that the whole system was rotten with no accountability and was destined to crash.
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Film Review: Macbeth (2015)

I had been really looking forward to seeing this film because of the strong reviews it had received, such as this one. Macbeth is my favorite of all the plays of William Shakespeare and because it had excellent actors in Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard in the lead roles, I expected a lot. I tend to like his tragedies and histories a lot more than his comedies and this story is a timeless morality tale of a once-honorable man whose ‘vaulting ambition’ turns him into a ruthless and disturbed monster, egged on by an even more ambitious wife and led astray by deceptive promises of success and invincibility.
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Film review: The Martian (2015)

Although I am not in general a fan of the disaster/survivor genre of films, I enjoyed The Martian though I think that at 2 hours and 20 minutes it was a tad too long. The film deals with a NASA mission to Mars in which the six-member crew finds itself suddenly hit by a massive dust storm that not only seems to have killed one of them (played by Matt Damon) by being impaled by an antenna and buried under dust, but also threatens to wreck their return vehicle.
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A medical show without the gross medical scenes

I don’t watch medical dramas because they dwell too much on what takes place inside the surgical rooms and I am not fond of scenes involving blood and gore, which is why I tend to also avoid US police dramas. So I was interested in this comedy TV series called Save Me by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that apparently deals with the sequence of events that lead up to the 9-1-1 call and not so much after that.
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Film Review: Jimmy’s Hall (2014)

This film by British director Ken Loach will be welcomed by those who would like a change from the films and TV shows from the UK that portray upper class life. Based on a true story, it deals with life in an impoverished Irish village in the depression-era 1930’s when a young rebel Jimmy Gralton returns from a self-imposed exile in the US and reopens a hall for the local community where they conduct classes but also have fun such as dances.
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The making of Airplane!

One of the all-time great comedies is the 1980 film Airplane!. Its creators gave an interview about how they wrote the script and managed to get a major studio to back the film, especially the idea of using actors such as Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges, Pater Graves, and Leslie Nielsen, known for playing dramatic roles, to play parts that would have normally gone to comedians.
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The mocking of the Academy Awards nominations continues

The Academy Awards continues to get its lumps for the fact that its membership is skewed heavily white and male and old and this year’s nominees were conspicuous by the lack of actors of color, and that even in films that dealt explicitly with black themes and featured black actors in major roles, it was the white people involved who got nominated.
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