Unless you are living under a rock, you are likely to have been bombarded with stories about the final season of this series that seems to have grabbed the passionate devotion of so many people. Hearing that it has large amounts of gruesome and gratuitous violence, I steered clear of this show and have not seen a single episode and feel like cartoonist Stephen Pastis.
On a whim, I decided to watch the second film in the James Bond franchise From Russia With Love starring Sean Connery. I had seen it as a boy a long time ago when it first came out and remembered my adolescent self being highly taken up with the film and really enjoying it so I decided to give it another go. It is usually a mistake to revisit books and films aimed at one’s teenage self and that one enjoyed as a very young person because the second time around as an adult is usually disappointing, so I was ready to feel a little let down.
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I wrote recently that I prefer TV series that have very limited runs and avoid those that go on and on. So I was startled to read that the British soap opera Coronation Street had, for the first time, added a black family to the residents of the street. What shocked me was not that it took so long to add this element of diversity but that the show was still on. I recall as a young boy in England seeing an episode or two. It was not to my liking and the only thing I remember is that there was a tough-looking, sharp-tongued, woman named Ena Sharples who always had a hairnet on her head. Apparently the show has been showing three times a week on prime time for nearly sixty years which is an incredibly long run even by soap-opera standards.
This shows great loyalty on the part of the British public. I recall an interview that either P. G. Wodehouse or George Bernard Shaw (I forget whom) gave in which he was asked the secret of his success and longevity as a public favorite. He replied that with the British public you just have to hang in there and keep producing new material. After a while you become seen as an ‘institution’ and the public sticks with you forever after that even if the quality of your work declines. He was being modest because his output was usually of high quality but there is a germ of truth there. The British public can be very loyal to their veteran artists and performers and their vintage shows like Coronation Street and Dr. Who, and are loathe to see them end.
I recently watched two television series produced and set in Australia. One was Secret City and the other was Rake. The former is a political espionage drama while the latter is a comedy-farce. How they both portray the Australian political-legal-police-internal security systems in less than flattering, to put it mildly, showing them as utterly corrupt and venal. Both shows portray the Australia-China relationship as a highly fraught one, and in Secret City, the US is shown manipulating Australia to serve its own foreign policy ends.
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I watched these two films this past week. They share certain similarities. They are both based on actual events and characters. Both films have received praise and were heavily promoted by their respective studios for Academy Awards and succeeded, with The Favourite nominated for ten awards and Olivia Colman winning for Best Actress, while Green Book was nominated for five awards and won three including Best Film, Mahershala Ali for Best Supporting Actor, and for Best Original Screenplay.
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I have often wondered, while watching scenes from some film or TV show that takes place in a public setting, about the people who are seen in the background doing everyday things. How many are they paid professionals who do this as a living? When a superhero film was shot in Cleveland some years ago, they sent out an appeal for people to appear as extras for a few street scenes and I think many responded just for the chance to be in a film. It involved just hanging around a lot, apparently. I don’t know if they got paid at all.
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I have never seen the appeal of professional wrestling because violence, even if simulated, makes me cringe so I never watch it. Also, even with scripted fights, there is real wear and tear on the body and actual injuries. The scandal of professional wrestling is not that the whole thing is faked because everyone knows that. It is that the wrestlers are treated like dirt by the monopolistic WWE and its owner Vince McMahon that results in many of them dying young and poor, as John Oliver points out in this expose.
I am always intrigued by the creative process and so am a sucker for documentaries along the lines of “The Making Of …”. Some of you may be familiar with the British TV comedy series Blackadder. I came across this program that goes behind the scenes of this show and talks to the writers and actors about how they conceived the show and their experience in being part of it.
In Sri Lanka, some people who are highly concerned about hygiene have developed the skill of pouring liquid from a container straight into their mouths without their lips touching it. Sometimes people do this even if they are served in a glass, because they fear that the rim of the glass may be unclean. I would not be surprised if this practice has its roots in the odious caste system that said that touching anything touched by supposedly ‘low caste’ people made you unclean.
But I have observed the other extreme many times in films and on TV in the US. Someone opens the refrigerator in a home, takes out a carton or bottle of milk or juice, and then drinks straight from it, putting their lips to the mouth of the container. This is even when the people live in a home they share with family members who presumably use the same container. This strikes me as pretty gross. But I have seen it so many times that I think it must be more common that I would have expected.
Is that the case?
This latest offering from documentary filmmaker Michael Moore looks at the election of Donald Trump as president and asks the question: How the hell did that happen?
He says that the precursor to Trump was Rick Snyder who, a businessman with no political experience who won the Michigan governorship in 2010 on promises much like Trump’s, that his background in business was what the state needed. He then proceeded to run the state for the benefit of the wealthy, gutting democracy by putting major cities in the state under a state of emergency and installing how own people as administrators to run them, sidelining the local elected officials.
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