Big Bird actor Caroll Spinney retiring

Sesame Street announced that actor Caroll Spinney, who played the parts of Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch from its inception in 1969, is retiring at the age of 84. Big Bird became one of the most recognized personalities on the planet. It was not easy to do him, requiring Spinney to hold his hand up above his head in order to manipulate the head and eyes, while looking down at a tiny screen inside the stifling costume that showed him what the camera was showing, all the while reading the script as well.

Sesame Street Season 1 Caroll Spinney and Big Bird

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Netflix’s ethnic and genre targeting goes too far

If you subscribe to Netflix, you know that as soon as you turn it on, your home page will show still images for various shows that they are promoting for you specifically to watch. I knew of course that they use some kind of algorithm to determine your likes and dislikes, presumably based on your past viewing history. What I had not realized was that they are also trying to deduce whether I am a person of color or not and if they felt that I was, they would show a different still image featuring actors of color, even if they had just minor roles in the film or TV show. Here is an example.
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Film review: Three Identical Strangers (2018)

This is a documentary about three identical triplets who, in 1979 at the age of 19, found each other by chance. The events depicted are already known and some older readers might recall the case that made such a big splash in the media. The filmmaker has presented it in such a way that it is like a film in three acts, starting out in one way before somewhat abruptly revealing facts in the second act that takes the film in a different direction. The film raises some disturbing ethical issues but I cannot discuss them without revealing what the film is all about which I will do after the trailer.
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Film review: The Seagull (2018)

I am not by any means an expert on Russian theater and so seized the chance to see a film adaptation of Anton Chekov’s acclaimed play The Seagull starring Annette Bening. It was an enjoyable film, but as I watched it I could not help noticing that it conformed to the popular view of Russian plays where no one is happy and everyone complains to one another about their unhappiness.
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Short film about an incel

I have written several times before about the so-called ‘incels’ (which stands for involuntarily celibate) who blame everyone else but themselves for the fact that women do not want to have sex with them even though they think that they deserve it. Their frustration has led some of them to go on murderous rampages.

Via Andrea James, I came across this tense short (about 14 minutes) film about an incel.

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Mary Poppins returns

When I read that Walt Disney studios were doing another Mary Poppins film, I was dismayed, thinking that they were doing a remake of the classic original that I enjoyed and could only compare unfavorably with the original. But the new Mary Poppins Returns is not a remake but a sequel that shifts the story to 25 years later, though Poppins remains a young woman. Emily Blunt takes over the role immortalized by Julie Andrews and returns to the same house to assist the two children in the original who are now adults and dealing with their own problems. Dick Van Dyke also appears in the film, not as the chimney sweep Bert but as the son of the head of the bank and thus without the atrocious Cockney accent that he was forever being asked about. Lin-Manuel Miranda seems to be the new chimney sweep.

The trailer looks pretty promising. The film releases on December 19.

Film review: American Animals (2018)

In 2003, four undergraduates at two universities in Lexington, Kentucky cooked up an utterly hare-brained scheme, providing further evidence that young men (and I say this from personal experience) are basically stupid and should not be trusted to operate even a toaster. What was their plan? To dress up as old men and steal rare books, including those by naturalist John J. Audubon and Charles Darwin, from the collection held in Transylvania University.
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Hidden jokes

I have written before about my enjoyment of the excellent TV comedy The Good Place and gave it a rave review. One of the things I noticed is that there are many hidden jokes that either fly by very fast or that are on the periphery of your vision. Some of those involve the complicated points system for every single action and whose final total at death is used to determine whether you are a good person, deserving to go to the Good Place or a bad person who needs to go to the Bad Place. Samples of the point system flash by on a screen too fast to see more than one or two. You have to freeze the frame to read them all and this website has grabbed a couple of them.
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TV Review: Documenting Hate: Charlottesville

This week will see the anniversary of the Unite the Right rally of white supremacists and neo-Nazis that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 11 and 12, 2017. The same people wanted to hold an anniversary rally in Charlottesville but their application for a permit was turned down. But their application to hold a rally in Washington, DC was approved by the National Park Service and they are planning what they call a ‘White Civil Rights Rally’ this weekend in front of the White House. No word yet if Donald Trump has been invited to address the groups, since they clearly see him as a supporter. But a coalition of 18 groups under the umbrella ‘DC Against Hate’ plan a massive counter-protest. This has again reignited the debate as to the best way to deal with hate groups: whether to ignore them and that, starved of attention, they will disappear, or that letting them to do their thing with impunity just emboldens them.
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