Time for a new Netflix?

The original Netflix business model was clever. You would queue up the films you wanted. They would mail you a DVD of a film that you would mail back after watching. It was easy. There were no due dates and no overdue fees. All it required for them was to purchase DVDs and stock a warehouse with them, with little other overhead since once you purchase a DVD, you can rent it out as many times as you like. It is little wonder that these low overhead costs drove the brick-and-mortar Blockbuster out of business.
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Dara O’Briain reviews the film 2012

I have not seen this film or even heard about it but after watching this hilarious review of it by the comedian, I don’t think I need to. Like most natural disaster films, there is an attempt to give a scientific explanation for the catastrophe but O’Briain says that this ludicrously over-the-top apocalyptic film offered one that was so utterly outlandish that he used it to insert a useful lesson about neutrinos.

Game of Thrones mania

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.

How a James Bond film went from serious to parody

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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Coronation Street finally gets black residents

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.

Australian politics on TV

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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Reviews of The Favourite (2018) and Green Book (2018)

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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The life of a film extra

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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The scandal of professional wrestling

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.

Behind the scenes of Blackadder

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.