2015 turns out to be a good year for films. I have been on a roll recently, seeing one excellent film after another, such as The Big Short and Spotlight. The latest one is Trumbo and like the others is based on a mostly true story and is about the Hollywood blacklist of the 1950s and 1960s, focusing on the Oscar-winning screenwriter Dalton Trumbo.
[Read more…]
This is an excellent film that deals with the true story of the Boston Globe‘s 2002 expose of the Catholic Church’s shameful role in covering up the repeated sexual abuse committed by its priests in the Boston diocese and that the cover-up went all the way up the chain to Archbishop Cardinal Law who orchestrated secret settlements with the victims.
[Read more…]
Some states, including Ohio, like to give tax breaks and other forms of subsidies to film companies to make their films there. The case that is made is that making the film in the state brings jobs and revenue that more than compensates for the giveaways, and in addition the state gets lots of free publicity and visibility. At one time, states seemed to be in a bidding war for film companies, much to the latter’s delight.
[Read more…]
This is an excellent film. It is a lightly fictionalized version of the events that led up to the financial crash of 2008 due to the housing bubble. It focuses on several individuals who looked closely at the way that housing prices were rising at a far faster rate than the rise in people incomes would predict, looked closely at the mortgages that were being handed out that enabled people to pay ever-increasing prices for the same homes, and came to the conclusion that the whole system was rotten with no accountability and was destined to crash.
[Read more…]
This website provides sets of paired images showing how things really look on film sets before the graphics designers work their magic on it. Here’s one example from the film Alice in Wonderland.
I had been really looking forward to seeing this film because of the strong reviews it had received, such as this one. Macbeth is my favorite of all the plays of William Shakespeare and because it had excellent actors in Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard in the lead roles, I expected a lot. I tend to like his tragedies and histories a lot more than his comedies and this story is a timeless morality tale of a once-honorable man whose ‘vaulting ambition’ turns him into a ruthless and disturbed monster, egged on by an even more ambitious wife and led astray by deceptive promises of success and invincibility.
[Read more…]
Although I am not in general a fan of the disaster/survivor genre of films, I enjoyed The Martian though I think that at 2 hours and 20 minutes it was a tad too long. The film deals with a NASA mission to Mars in which the six-member crew finds itself suddenly hit by a massive dust storm that not only seems to have killed one of them (played by Matt Damon) by being impaled by an antenna and buried under dust, but also threatens to wreck their return vehicle.
[Read more…]
I don’t watch medical dramas because they dwell too much on what takes place inside the surgical rooms and I am not fond of scenes involving blood and gore, which is why I tend to also avoid US police dramas. So I was interested in this comedy TV series called Save Me by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation that apparently deals with the sequence of events that lead up to the 9-1-1 call and not so much after that.
[Read more…]
I went to see the film Where to Invade Next yesterday and it confirmed my view that Michael Moore is one of the most important American makers of documentaries. He is unabashedly political but manages to mix his messages with humor and that is what makes him different. The film is very cheerful and hopeful, that we can do better than we do.
[Read more…]
This film by British director Ken Loach will be welcomed by those who would like a change from the films and TV shows from the UK that portray upper class life. Based on a true story, it deals with life in an impoverished Irish village in the depression-era 1930’s when a young rebel Jimmy Gralton returns from a self-imposed exile in the US and reopens a hall for the local community where they conduct classes but also have fun such as dances.
[Read more…]