I saw many good films that were released towards the end of 2015 and have reviewed them, such as The Big Short, Trumbo, Where to Invade Next, Spotlight, The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, and The Martian. However Macbeth was an exception to that string of films worth seeing and unfortunately Carol too belongs in the category of inferior films.
This is an excellent documentary that deals with a complicated and troubled period in American history and the role in it of an organization that is still shrouded in controversy. The documentary covers the six-year period from 1967 to 1973 that saw the rise and fall of the original Black Panthers. It uses archival footage, mixed with current interviews of former members who look back on those events and provide perspective.
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Watching the film Trumbo that I reviewed yesterday brought to mind a very old post of mine that quoted Trumbo extensively from a moving letter he wrote to a friend in 1967 that was published in the March 2004 issue of Harper’s magazine (subscription required). It asks us to reflect on what is really important in life, what is worth making a stand for, and how people use the flag and country to shift blame away from themselves for their unprincipled behavior.
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2015 turns out to be a good year for films. I have been on a roll recently, seeing one excellent film after another, such as The Big Short and Spotlight. The latest one is Trumbo and like the others is based on a mostly true story and is about the Hollywood blacklist of the 1950s and 1960s, focusing on the Oscar-winning screenwriter Dalton Trumbo.
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This is an excellent film that deals with the true story of the Boston Globe‘s 2002 expose of the Catholic Church’s shameful role in covering up the repeated sexual abuse committed by its priests in the Boston diocese and that the cover-up went all the way up the chain to Archbishop Cardinal Law who orchestrated secret settlements with the victims.
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Some states, including Ohio, like to give tax breaks and other forms of subsidies to film companies to make their films there. The case that is made is that making the film in the state brings jobs and revenue that more than compensates for the giveaways, and in addition the state gets lots of free publicity and visibility. At one time, states seemed to be in a bidding war for film companies, much to the latter’s delight.
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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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This website provides sets of paired images showing how things really look on film sets before the graphics designers work their magic on it. Here’s one example from the film Alice in Wonderland.
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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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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