If Ellsberg is a hero, why not Snowden?

There is a new film The Post starring Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep and directed by Stephen Spielberg that resurrects once again the story of Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers and the legal case that was won by the Washington Post and other newspapers that prevented the suppression of them. Nick Gillespie writes that in an interview with the BBC Arabic service’s Sam Asi, Spielberg, Hanks, and to a lesser extent Streep, praise Ellsberg as a hero for his actions but avoiding doing so with Edward Snowden.
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Film review: The Thin Blue Line (1988) and the conviction of innocent people

This highly acclaimed documentary by Errol Morris has been on my to-see list for the longest time but I never got around to it. I watched it last night and it deserves all the accolades it received. It is also a grim reminder of how in America, at least in some jurisdictions, so many innocent people are executed or incarcerated for decades because the police and prosecutors care less about the truth than ‘notching up a win’ and closing a case as quickly as they can.

The case so well illustrates that when police and prosecutors severely distort the judicial process in order to get a conviction, it is not just that an innocent person is deprived of life and liberty, as bad as that is, but that a whole lot of random innocent people suffer because of it. In their zeal to convict an innocent man of murder, the Dallas police and prosecutors let the real killer walk free and subsequently commit a string of violent crimes for a decade that ended with another murder. It was only after he was arrested for that second murder that the crime spree ended. The authorities are thus indirectly responsible for all those crimes.
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The politics of the latest Star Wars film

I stopped watching the Star Wars films after seeing episode 1 titled The Phantom Menace which, as all aficionados know, was the fourth film is the weird sequencing of that franchise. (Q: Why did episodes 4,5,6 get made before episodes 1,2,3? A: In charge of production, Yoda was.) So I had not planned to see the latest episode (I don’t know what number it is) titled The Last Jedi. But this review by Kate Aronoff surprised me because she says that this film takes a side in the class war.
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Mesmerizing short film about lightning

There is something compelling about lightning, the sight of massive amounts of electrical energy surging through the sky and powering flux capacitors. Via David Pescovitz, I came across this compilation of lightning videos shot at 1,000 frames per second and set to music. The resulting film called Transient was made by Dustin Farrell who spent the summer traveling 20,000 miles within the US to capture all the strikes.
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Brilliant one-minute film about a prepper

‘Prepper’ is the name given to those people who take extensive precautions to survive in the case of a major calamity such as nuclear war breaking out or the US being invaded and taken over by (say) Costa Rica or electing a socialist lesbian of color as president. These precautions take the form of heavily arming themselves, creating well-stocked bunkers, and learning skills that will enable them to survive in the wild and live off the land.
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Review: Godless (2017)

I just finished watching this Netflix mini-series. It is a western, a genre that I am partial to. The main arc of the story is similar to that of the classic western Shane where a mysterious gunfighter weary of the life he has led and seeking to escape his past arrives in a small town and takes a job as a hired hand on a family farm. But he cannot escape his past.
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Film review: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)

I wrote two days ago about how the trailer for this film was so good that it made me want to see it. So I did yesterday. It is definitely a film worth watching though a little different from what I was expecting. The trailer seemed to indicate that it was a comedy, and though there are many very funny moments in it, it is at heart a serious film dealing with important issues.
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Now that’s what I call a trailer

We know that filmmakers put some of the best scenes into their trailers. In fact, when it comes to many action films where character and plot are given short shrift and the focus is on fights and chases, once you’ve seen the trailer, you can pretty much skip the film. But there are some trailers that are so compelling that you know immediately that you want to see the film. One such case is the trailer for the black comedy Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri that was released this past week. It tells you just enough to make you curious for more. It helps that it has two superb actors Frances McDormand and Woody Harrelson in the lead roles of the mother of a raped and murdered woman and the local police chief.
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Did Robert Mugabe watch A Very British Coup?

Zimbabwe has been going through a rather strange political transition. Robert Mugabe has ruled that country since 1980 when his guerrilla force ZANU overthrew the white minority government of what was then called Rhodesia. Since then, his rule has become increasingly autocratic, corrupt, undemocratic, and brutal and it seemed like he, now 93 years old, was grooming his wife Grace to take over from him, and sacking his deputy head of state seemed to be a step in that direction
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Why make Murder on the Orient Express again?

Later this week there will be the release of the second remake of the film Murder on the Orient Express with a star-studded cast. The first version was in 1974 and also had an even more stellar cast with the biggest names of that era, and there was a made-for-TV version in 2001. All these films are based on an Agatha Christie novel with the same title.
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