Supercut of the Special Effects Oscar winners

I enjoyed this supercut of brief clips from all the past Oscar winners in the Special Effects category starting from 1927, plus all the nominees for this year’s award. While I have a deep admiration for the people who produce these amazing effects, I must admit to a soft spot for the ones from the early days before they were all done using computer graphics. How they could have got the effects using just physical models and camera trickery really impresses me.
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Film review: Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

I recently watched this sequel to the 1982 film Blade Runner and enjoyed it. It continues the theme of what happens when, in a dystopian future society, technology enables the creation of ‘replicants’, human-like synthetic creatures that are almost impossible to distinguish from human beings. In this film, it explores the possibility that they might become able to reproduce.
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Film review: Seeing Allred (2018)

Netflix released yesterday the documentary Seeing Allred on Gloria Allred, the high-profile attorney who has been prominent in representing the women who were the victims of odious people like Bill Cosby and Donald Trump. I watched it last night and it was very good. Allred has been a lightning rod for critics, many of whom have accused her of being a publicity-seeking, ambulance-chasing, money grubbing lawyer, exploiting her clients for her own financial benefit and ego.
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I now hate Quentin Tarantino and his films even more

After seeing Pulp Fiction I swore never to watch any more of Quentin Tarantino’s films, seeing them as vehicles for him to indulge his personal fantasies of violence and the use of racist language, especially the N-word. However I am aware of many fans of his who claimed that he was some kind of genius filmmaker and that I was just not getting it. One of these was a highly respected professor of film at my university. When I wrote about his films five years ago, some readers of this blog tried to explain to me why he was good. I was not convinced.
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Film Review: Shakespeare Behind Bars (2005)

This documentary looks at a program with that title that has prisoners tackle Shakespeare’s plays. The program began in 1998 and has spread to several prisons. Each year the inmates work on a single play, starting in the fall and rehearsing through the year before performing it the following spring, both for members of the community and for other inmates in their own prison and at other prisons. This documentary looks at the 2003-2004 year at a prison in Kentucky
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Recommendations sought for Batman film

I used to read Batman and other comics as a boy but for whatever reason have not seen any of the major Batman films that have regularly been produced in the last few decades.

In general, I am not a fan of the superhero genre of films but like to get a sense of how the filmmakers translated the books to the screen. However, filmmakers seem to churn them out on a regular basis and I do not wish to see a whole slew of them. I would like to see just one but am not sure which would be a good one for the Batman series. In the case of Superman, I saw just the first one with Christopher Reeve. With the Marvel comic book heroes, I watched The Avengers because it had a lot of the characters in it and while that was fun, it was enough for me. I get bored with non-stop action, which is what these films tend to show. I never watched any of the Spiderman films because that character annoys the hell out of me.

I have benefited a lot from film recommendations from this blog’s readers and was wondering if people had any suggestions as to which Batman film might be the best to see, if I were to see only one. I should perhaps add that I am not a fan of excessive violence, blood, and gore.

Hindu extremists get mad over a film

Hindu extremists in India are threatening violence if a new Bollywood film Padmavaat is released that they allege depicts a romance between queen Padmaavati and a 14th century Muslim ruler Alauddin Khilji. They have not seen the film and the filmmakers say the film does not show this and have offered an advance screening to allay their fears. But hell hath no fury like an enraged religious extremist and now that they have got worked up, they are not going to calm down easily.
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Film review: Death of a Gentleman (2015) and corruption in cricket

While I have been following cricket matches, I have not paid much attention to the politics of the game. I stumbled upon the documentary Death of a Gentleman quite by accident and it was quite an eye-opener. The film looks at the way that international cricket is run. The documentary started out as a project by two sports journalists Jarrod Kimber and Sam Collins who are ardent fans of cricket at the highest level, which consist of the five-day Test matches played between national teams. They were concerned that this form of the game (that purists like me like the most) was in danger of extinction because of the rise of the abomination called T20 which reduces the game to about three hours but in the process eliminates many of the features that had made this game into the second most popular sport in the world after soccer. The long form of Test matches has many subtleties that the short form T20 lacks. I personally find the short-form boring, requiring as it does a very limited range of batting and bowling skills.
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Gloria Allred’s story

If you follow US political news at all, you have undoubtedly heard of Gloria Allred, the attorney who has represented many female clients in high-profile gender-related cases and who is currently taking on Donald Trump on behalf of Summer Zervos who says that she was defamed by Donald Trump when he publicly called her a liar for saying that he sexually assaulted her in 2007. Allred has been portrayed negatively by her opponents as a publicity-seeker whose expertise mostly lies in getting attention for her press conferences with the victims of abuse.
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