Review: Life On Our Planet (2023)

This new documentary being shown on Netflix consists of eight parts, each about 50 minutes long. It tells the story of the evolution of life, starting with the emergence of the very first cell around 3.8 billion years ago and going through various cycles of flourishing and mass extinctions until we got to where we are today. The series is narrated by the Morgan Freeman who seems to have become the go-to person when you need someone to ooze gravitas and convey authority. I felt that he was too unrelentingly solemn and portentous and could have lightened up the Voice of God tone from time to time.

The documentary describes the five major mass extinctions that have occurred.
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Film review: Rustin (2023)

Bayard Rustin played a major role in the civil rights struggle in the US but his name is not nearly as well known as it should be. This film, streamed on Netflix, tries to correct that deficiency. It is not a full biopic since it focuses almost entirely on the eight weeks in which Rustin organized the August 28, 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on the National Mall that culminated with Martin Luther King’s famous ‘I have a dream’ speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. That drew about 250,000 people from all over the country and was instrumental in pressuring president Kennedy and the Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act that had been stalled.

Rustin was multi-talented, a charismatic speaker and an indefatigable and inspiring organizer whom young people rallied to. His idea for the march met with resistance from the old guard Black establishment in the NAACP that wanted a more go-slow, less confrontational approach in dealing with Congress and Kennedy. Rustin allied himself with veteran labor leader A. Philip Randolph to argue that they could pull off a massive march in such a short time. Both sides vied to get King on board with their side. Rustin was an old friend of King and his family and once he got King’s agreement to speak, he went full throttle to get the event organized in just two months. It remains one of the landmark events in the fight for civil rights in the US.
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Why do we still have smoking in films?

There is a lot of smoking in films that are set back in the days before smoking became well known as a serious health hazard. For example, in the film Maestro that I reviewed a few days ago, Bradly Cooper who plays Leonard Bernstein has a cigarette in his mouth pretty much all the time. This caused me to wonder if those were real cigarettes, because it did not seem right to have actors risk their lives with cigarette smoke just to play a role. Films now routinely carry a disclaimer that no animals were harmed in the making of the film, which is a welcome development, but why do we not carry that over to the actors?

This article explains that film makers often use prop cigarettes instead of tobacco-based ones.
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Film review: Maestro (2023)

I had been looking forward to seeing this biopic because Leonard Bernstein was a charismatic multi-talented artist, composer, conductor, and teacher who seemed to enjoy not only creating music and but also making it more accessible to regular people. The film is really a joint biopic focusing on the relationship between Bernstein (played by Bradley Cooper) and his wife actress Felicia Montealegre (played by Carey Mulligan), starting with when Bernstein is just 25 years old and catapulted into fame when he is called in at the last minute to fill in as conductor of the New York Philharmonic when the regular conductor fell ill, and was a rousing success. His career took off after that.

But I found the film to be a let down. Especially in the first, half I found it difficult to get engaged with the lives of Bernstein and Montealegre. Their acting did not seem convincing, artificial, as if they were trying too hard. I am not a high-brow viewer who usually notices such things so for it to register with me is telling. Also for some reason, the first fifty minutes of the film was in black and white, then abruptly changing to color. I later read this article tries to explain why. The article also said that the film’s aspect ratio switched from time to time, something I had not noticed. (Did I mention that I am not a high-brow viewer?) I kind of get the reasoning but found it jarring while watching it and wonder about the benefits of making artistic choices in films targeting the general public that only a few will appreciate or, if they even notice, will be baffled. Often the dialogue was unintelligible, making it frustrating. Since I was screening the film, I had the option of rewinding the film but that would have broken the continuity. The story was also disjointed, with some scenes that lasted too long and others that did not seem to serve any purpose.
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Film review: Minari (2021)

I recently watched this Korean film that has received a lot of praise. It tells the story of a Korean immigrant family (parents, two children, and the wife’s mother) trying to make a life for themselves in rural Arkansas and the increasing tensions between the parents as they worry about money and disagree as to whether they should stay or go back to California, and the complications caused by the arrival of the grandmother. (Youn Yuh-jung won an Academy Award for her role as the grandmother role and Steven Yeun was nominated for the role of the father.)

Here’s the trailer.

It is a curious film in terms of its narrative structure. Rather than pursuing one story arc, it is a series of vignettes about the family grappling with internal tensions, caused by different ambitions of the father and mother. The father wanted to move to this location to pursue his dream of creating a successful farm growing vegetables that are favored by Koreans, while the mother does not like the idea of leaving the California city they used to live to move to a mobile home set far away from any town, where the nearest hospital is an hour away. This is of particular concern because her young son has a congenital heart murmur that requires him to not run or otherwise exert himself.
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Film review: The Duke (2022)

I recently watched this nice little comedy set in 1961 that stars Jim Broadbent and Helen Mirren in which Broadbent plays a working class character who keeps losing his job and getting into trouble because of his efforts to fight for those whom he sees as being unfairly treated, such as old pensioners and disabled veterans of wars, trying to get the government to waive for them the licensing fees that the owners of every television must pay the government and which goes towards funding the BBC.

This film is based on the life of a real person Kempton Bunton and the theft of a painting of the Duke of Wellington that was stolen from the National Gallery, and the trial of Bunton for stealing it. (The link has spoilers for the film.) It is a film that gets its laughs from the behavior of the characters, not from jokes, and Broadbent and Mirren, two excellent actors, have the skills to make the most of their roles.

Here’s the trailer.

One thing I was curious about was how Bunton was able to get a high-powered barrister to represent him at his trial since he clearly would not have been able to afford one. Since this theft really happened, I looked Bunton up and found a link to the lawyer Jeremy Hutchinson who had a privileged background with an elite education that led to an illustrious career and was married at the time to the already-famous actress Peggy Ashcroft.

I do not know the British legal aid system and how this came to be. Maybe because Bunton’s case gained a great deal of notoriety at the time and he became something of a folk hero, a Robin Hood type fighting the establishment, Hutchinson provided his services pro bono.

That was quick: Film about Santos already in the works

To no one’s surprise, there is going to be a made-for-TV film about serial fabulist and no ex-congressperson George Santos. In Santos’s case, the film will be based on a book on his life that was released last week.

A book about the improbable rise and rapid fall of former congressman George Santos has been optioned by HBO Films, it was reported Saturday, and will be produced under the guidance of Frank Rich, a former New York Times columnist known for executive production credits on Emmy awards-winning Succession and Veep.

HBO reportedly optioned the rights to Mark Chiusano’s The Fabulist: The Lying, Hustling, Grifting, Stealing, and Very American Legend of George Santos, published last week.
…

“He is someone who is clearly very ambitious and wants to live a kind of wealthy life, a life of fame and notoriety, and he is trying to attain essentially a version of the American dream, which so many people have sought over the years,” Chiusano said.
…

According to Deadline, the adaptation of The Fabulist will be written by Mike Makowsky, who wrote the screenplay of HBO’s crime drama Bad Education, and will tell the “Gatsby-esque journey of a man from nowhere who exploited the system, waged war on truth and swindled one of the wealthiest districts in the country to achieve his American Dream”.

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Should long films include intermissions?

In the past, film used to be about 90 minutes long, occasionally running to two hours. If they went longer than that, the so-called ‘epic films’ like Lawrence of Arabia and Cleopatra, they would include an intermission. This was a boon to those who needed to use the bathroom and also to the concession stands who got to sell more stuff.

But the intermission being included as part of the film seems to have disappeared even with films running over three hours. As a result some theater owners are inserting their own. This has brought mixed reviews. I for one am in favor of an intermission but, as Nardos Haile writes others are not.

In the last few years, moviegoing has become a larger-than-life experience, and a part of that theater experience has felt like films seem to have increasingly grown longer and longer . . .

Some moviegoers have said this about Martin Scorsese’s newly released masterful Western epic “Killers of the Flower Moon.” The film is a three-hour and nearly 30-minute-long vicious tale of the Osage murders at the hands of greedy white men in 1920s Oklahoma who are trying to steal their oil money. Its runtime is not unusual for Scorsese as his last film “The Irishman” is also three and a half hours long. 

But in the case of “Killers of the Flower Moon,” its lengthy, bladder-busting runtime is causing independent theaters in the U.S. and overseas in the U.K. to include intermissions. According to the British theater chain, Vue, the break they’ve implemented during “Killers of the Flower Moon” has been a success with moviegoers. Vue chief executive, Tim Richards said that they’ve “seen 74% positive feedback from those who have tried our interval.”

Meanwhile, in the states, a Colorado theater that also had an intermission was told by the film’s studio representatives that the intermission violates their licensing agreement.

This has ignited a larger discussion online on whether intermissions should be widely implemented for longer films. However, I don’t believe films like “Killers of the Flower Moon” need an intermission and, while this may be an unpopular opinion, I’m actually against them in most cases.

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Jokes that depend on iconic film scenes

(Mother Goose and Grimm)

To get the joke, you need to be familiar with the famous scene from the film TheTreasure of the Sierra Madre starring Humphrey Bogart.

To the groans of my family and friends, I never hesitate to use the line “We don’t need no steenkin’ badges” whenever the word ‘badges’ comes up in any conversation. Alas, many people have never seen the film and hence I usually just get baffled looks, similar to the reaction I get to the ‘I am Spartacus’ line.

With my immediate family, I have used the badges gag so often that even though they haven’t seen the film, they recognize the allusion. I particularly enjoy using it when the word ‘badgers’ comes up, because the pun and the absurdity of the reference is what makes it funny, to me at least.

I have the sense of humor of a six-year old.

“I am Spartacus!”

(WuMo)

If you get the joke in this cartoon, then you likely have seen the 1960 film Spartacus starring Kirk Douglas in the title role and Tony Curtis as his loyal friend and ally, that was directed by Stanley Kubrick with the screenplay by Dalton Trumbo.

Here is the scene.

Trumbo had been blacklisted during the McCarthy era because he had refused to provide names to the congressional committees seeking to identify Communists working in Hollywood and it is assumed that this scene was designed to praise those who refused to betray their friends and colleagues.

The scene has become iconic and I assumed that it had seeped into the popular culture by now so that at least people of my generation would know of it. But it is not the case. I once told a story to a couple my age of a person who would give his name as Spartacus to the baristas at coffee shops so that when they called out his name, he could stand and say, “I am Spartacus!”

My friends had blank looks which told me that they had no idea what the point of my story was so I had to explain it to them, which of course ruins any humor.