Nicholas Barclay was a 13-year old boy living in a small town outside San Antonio, Texas who suddenly disappeared in June 1994. Three years later, after having pretty much given up hope of ever seeing him again, the family gets a call from Spain saying that authorities have found him. His sister goes to Spain and brings him back where he begins his life again as a high school student.
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I have been enjoying the comedy series Veep starring Julia Louis-Dreyfuss that I reviewed earlier. It is one of the many TV shows and films that purport to show what life is like in the executive branch of government, like The West Wing or House of Cards. This naturally raises the question of which program most accurately captures what life is like in that world.
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Last night I watched the above documentary written and directed by Alex Gibney and largely based on the book Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (2013) by Lawrence Wright that I favorably reviewed here. That review provides a lot of the information that is in the film so I will not repeat it here.
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The producers of the popular TV series starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman have placed the special episode of the story back in its original Victorian time period of the 19th century. I must say that I actually prefer the older, original time period for the stories and am looking forward to this release. The exact date has not been set.
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Films that are immensely popular and feature pretentious dialogue are the best targets for parody and there is one scene in the film The Matrix that has been repeatedly targeted for spoofing. Here is George Carlin in one of them.
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I had avoided watching this film about the life of Alan Turing and his work on the Enigma project during World War II, even though it got good reviews and starred two good actors Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley.
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I did not see the film Zero Dark Thirty (2012) about the mission that resulted in the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011, an action that many of president Obama’s supporters hailed as the finest moment of his presidency, showing his toughness in the face of Republican charges that Democrats are wimps. In fact, in the 2012 election, vice president Joe Biden adopted the slogan that thanks to president Obama, “General Motors is alive and Osama bin Laden is dead.”
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I have long been a fan of the Muppets, going back to Sesame Street and the old Muppet Show on TV and the films. There was always a silly innocence and goofiness to the humor that appealed to me and I did not realize until yesterday that they are going to be back on regular weekly network TV starting today (Tuesday) at 8:00pm on ABC.
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I stayed up way past my normal bedtime last night to catch Stephen Colbert’s debut as a late night talk show host. It has been many, many years, decades even, since I watched TV for any length of time and it reminded me once again of how much I positively hate watching TV.
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This review will deal with both the book and the documentary based on it. The book was written by two historians of science Naomi Oreskes of Harvard University and Erik M. Conway and was published in 2010, while the documentary was directed by Robert Kenner and released in 2014 and has just been released on DVD. I can strongly recommend both. The book is very clearly written and makes a compelling case for the authors’ thesis. Although the documentary is based on the book, its emphasis is different (dealing mostly with the climate change debate) and provides new information that is not in the book. Here’s the trailer.
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