Alan Arkin (1934-2023)

The veteran actor has died at the age of 89.

Over his long career, Arkin played a huge variety of roles and was always enjoyable to watch. I have seen him in a huge number of films but particularly liked his deadpan, understated performances in comedies such as Catch-22 and The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming. But also he played a menacing, convincing villain opposite Audrey Hepburn in Wait Until Dark.

Here is a clip from The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming (1966), released during the Cold War about a Russian submarine that runs aground off the coast of a small US town due to the incompetence of its captain. Here is a synopsis.

When a sightseeing Soviet commander runs his submarine aground off the New England coast, the crew’s attempts to find a boat to dislodge them almost start WWIII! Alan Arkin leads an all-star cast–including Carl Reiner, Eva Marie Saint, Brian Keith and Jonathan Winters–in this riotous, uproarious [and] side-splitting (Cue) comedy! Russian Lt. Rozanov (Arkin) and his crew hit the beaches of Massachusetts unaware of the panic they’re about to start. Despite the Russians’ harmless intentions, the folks in town think a full-scale Soviet invasion has been launched! What’s worse, their police chief (Keith) has left his hysterical assistant (Winters) in charge and the one man who knows the truth (Reiner) is only stirring up more chaos!

The film is an endearing comedy about how the absurdity of nationalistic antagonisms can be countered by experiencing the commonality of human interactions. It is the kind of film that I can watch again.

Glenda Jackson (1936-2023)

That wonderful actor has died. She had a striking presence on screen and was a consistent voice for progressive causes, and served as a member of the British parliament from 1992 until 2015, after which she went back to the stage to appear as King Lear in 2016.

Sir Michael Caine has described actress and former MP Glenda Jackson as “one of our greatest movie actresses” following her death aged 87.

Jackson won two Oscars, three Emmys, two Baftas and an Tony in an acting career which spanned six decades.

Sir Jonathan Pryce said he believed she was “the greatest actor that this country has ever produced”.

Back in 2018, I posted a clip of her delivering a blistering attack in parliament on Margaret Thatcher and Thatcherism when Thatcher died. Not for her the bogus pieties that people feel obliged to give to awful people when they die. A conservative lawmaker tried to get her censured for attacking Thatcher instead of paying a tribute but the Speaker shot that down.

Black villains and stereotypes

In a comment on my post about the TV series Les Misérables and colorblind casting, commenter Raging Bee made two points that are worth further discussion.

The first point is one of terminology:

First, how can casting be “color-blind?” Are people really pretending they don’t, or can’t, see the visible characteristics of the actors they hire? Whatever they’re trying to say, that’s a terrible and stupid-sounding word to use.

Of course, casting directors see the color of the actors. Choosing people for roles without seeing them cannot be done for actors the way that it can be done for (say) music auditions. ‘Color-blind’ in this context simply means that they do not rule out an actor for a part because of that person’s color. Silentbob suggested that the term ‘color conscious’ better represents the process that they describe as ‘deliberately inclusive casting’. But I do not know about that either since it seems to suggest that filmmakers actively sought out people of color for roles in order to be inclusive. There is no evidence that they did that.

What I would like to see is, as I said, for actors to be chosen for what they bring to the characters they are playing. This raises Raging Bee’s second point about the role of inspector Javert.

[H]aving a Black man portray the rigid, relentless, petty, evil Javert, against the wise, good-hearted, self-redeeming White hero, doesn’t seem to me the best optics.

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TV Review: Les Misérables (2018) and color-blind casting

I recently watched a six-part 2018 BBC miniseries Les Misérables that is based on the famous novel by Victor Hugo that was published in 1862. I had read the novel a long time ago and I thought that the mini-series was very good and stayed pretty close to the original story.

For those not familiar with it, the story is set in the period 1815, just after Napoleon had been sent into exile and the monarchy restored, and the failed Paris Uprising of June 1832 that attempted to restore republican form of government. This is the backdrop to the tale of Jean Valjean, a man who served 19 years in prison doing hard labor because he stole a loaf of bread to feed his sister’s starving children. When he finally gets his freedom, he leaves prison deeply angry and bitter. Even when a poor but kindly bishop welcomes him and gives him food and shelter for the night, he repays him by stealing the small amount of silverware in the house and escaping into the night. When he is quickly captured by the police and brought to the bishop, the bishop surprises him and the police by saying that he had given the silverware to Valjean and even gave him two silver candlesticks, the only things of value remaining in the house.
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Remaking Caligula

This 1979 film about notorious Roman emperor Caligula had a script written by Gore Vidal, a well-known director Tinto Brass, and featured a cast of A-list actors like Malcolm McDowell, Helen Mirren, Peter O’Toole, and John Gielgud. I saw the film a long time ago and despite the sterling credentials of the people involved, it was a mess. But that was not the fault of any of the above luminaries, but of the producer Bob Guccione, publisher of Penthouse magazine who financed the film.

Guccione took charge of the final cut and seemed to think that it was a good idea to waste all this star power by inserting, after filming had been completed by Brass, large amounts of gratuitous sex scenes to make what some considered a pornographic film. He probably thought that all those sex scenes would draw audiences who would seize on the chance to see a mainstream film that was soaked in sex and violence, since in those pre-internet days, video of explicit sex was not available to the general public except in selected theaters that showed low-budget, crudely made films. He may well have been right since the film made $23.4 million at the box office, exceeding its cost of $17.5 million.
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Film review: Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022)

I watched this film that has garnered a number of awards and eleven nominations for this year’s Academy Awards. It takes the intriguing scientific concept of the multiverse as its basic premise, that the universe splits and branches at various points and hence there are a huge number of parallel universes, of which ours is just one, that have different degrees of similarity to our own depending on how long ago those universes split away and evolved independently. As far as we know, if the multiverse exists, there seems to be no known connection between the various universes but in this film, the main characters can move between them.

Given the acclaim that the film has received and that the multiverse is the driving idea, I anticipated enjoying it but found the film to be a huge disappointment. It started out trying to make some points about why some people are moving from universe to universe (because they are trying to stop a very bad person from doing some very bad thing) but about two-thirds of the way through, the screenwriters seemed to lose interest in that and instead turned the film into a fairly standard family drama involving the strained relationships in families and the way they play out in the various universes.
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Gina Lollobrigida (1927-2023)

The Italian film star has died at the age of 95. She was stunningly beautiful and was constantly being pursued by men including her co-stars. I am sure that I am not the only one of my generation who would go to see her films just to see her.

Mostly famously, rich recluse Howard Hughes, based on some photos that he had seen of her, tried everything in his power to try and persuade her to divorce her husband and marry him, including asking her to come to the US for a screen test.
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Norma Desmond reincarnates as Donald Trump

During the holiday season, even the most dense politician knows enough to send out a message to everyone containing the usual bromides about wishing for peace in the world and hoping that everyone enjoys time with their family and friends. The message from Joe and Jill Biden followed this template, saying simply, “Jill and I wish you a very Merry Christmas. We hope you and your loved ones are surrounded by love, happiness, and cheer this holiday season.”

But not Donald Trump. For him this is yet another time to whine and rant about how terrible things have become since he was kicked out of office and how mean everyone is to him. Here he is on one of his many Christmas messages .

“We had the most SECURE Border in our history, versus the ‘horror show’ that is happening now, with record setting numbers of people, many of them hardened Criminals (including Killers, Human Traffickers and Drug Dealers), POURING INTO OUR COUNTRY at a rate the likes of which we have never seen before. The USA is dying from within!!!”
…

“Just two years ago we were Energy Independent, had almost Zero Inflation, there was no war with Russia and Ukraine (would NEVER have happened!), ISIS was defeated, our Military was rebuilt and respected (before the disaster of Afghanistan), our Border was Strong, the Economy was GREAT, the China Virus was in retreat (Operation Warp Speed was considered a modern day ‘miracle’), and we weren’t the laughing stock of the World,”

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Film review: Glass Onion (2022) (No spoilers)

Yesterday Netflix released the second in the series of whodunits featuring Daniel Craig as the brilliant detective Benoit Blanc, playing him with a caricatured Southern accent, vaguely reminiscent of Peter Sellers’ outrageous French accent as Inspector Clouseau. The writer snd director Rian Johnston is a self-admitted devotee of the Agatha Christie-style murder mystery novel and he clearly brings that sensibility to his films. The first one Knives Out (2019) followed the classic form of the genre, taking place in the large country home of a wealthy person, so that the suspects are limited to being few in number.

The second takes the same form except that location is more exotic, the luxurious home on the private Greek island of a billionaire tech entrepreneur who invites a group of his friends and collaborators for a weekend to take part in a murder mystery game. During the event, old animosities surface because of the arrival of the billionaire’s former collaborator who claims that he cheated her by stealing the idea that made him rich, and that the others colluded with him.
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