The controversy over Bradley Cooper playing Leonard Bernstein

Leonard Bernstein had a wildly successful career as a conductor and composer who made it his mission to make classical music accessible to a wide range of people, especially young people. He was also, by all accounts, a flamboyant and charismatic figure and so it was inevitable that there would be a biopic of him some day and that day has arrived with the release of the new film Maestro starring Bradley Cooper as Bernstein. Cooper also co-wrote the screenplay and produced and directed it so it was clearly a project that meant a lot to him personally.

This review praises the film and I will likely watch it when it appears on a streaming service.

There have been a few controversies about the film, once again dealing with the issue of representation. Some have criticized the fact that while Bernstein was Jewish, Cooper is not and that while Bernstein was bisexual, Cooper is straight. But the most difficult controversy to deal with was that Cooper had a prosthetic larger nose put on as make up to make him look more like Bernstein, resulting in Cooper even being accused of being anti-Semitic.

These are really tricky issues to navigate.
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An astonishing high school football scam

It is quite astonishing the kinds of scams that are successfully pulled off, even for a short time. Take this scam about an entirely fake faith-based high school named Bishop Sycamore that was created seemingly just to have a football team. That scam is now the subject of a new documentary titled BS High.

In August 2021, two high school football teams met in the Pro Football Hall of Fame stadium in Canton, Ohio, for a much-hyped matchup shown live on ESPN. When it quickly became a 58-0 blowout, suspicion descended most heavily on the losing side – an outfit called Bishop Sycamore purporting to be a faith-based school that actually turned out to be fake.
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The redemption of Jar Jar Binks

Since I had enjoyed the original three Star Wars films (Episodes 4, 5, 6) that came out in the 1977, 1980, and 1983, I went to see the first of the three prequels (Episode 1) when it was released in 1999. I found it to be a waste of time so that I did not watch Episodes 2 and 3 either.

One of the really off-putting features of Episode 1 was the exceedingly annoying character Jar Jar Binks. My dislike for the character was shared by many who mounted a hate campaign against him. Since I thought that he was a purely CGI animation, I did not pay much attention to this campaign. But it turns out that behind the mask was a real actor Ahmed Best, who had been a huge fan of the films and was overjoyed to be selected to be part of the franchise. But his life was made such hell by the vitriol and even death threats aimed at him that he seriously contemplated suicide. The idea that one would not just intensely dislike a fictional character but go after the hapless actor playing that role amazes me. Mind you, this was even before the current social media environment made such pile ons easier. Thankfully he did not carry out that plan to kill himself and has managed to make a comeback as a new character in The Mandalorian

This article tells his story.

Religious people can be so touchy

Some Hindu groups in India are up in arms about a scene in the new film Oppenheimer, a biopic about physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the leader of the Manhattan project that developed the first atomic bomb in the top secret laboratory created just for that purpose in Los Alamos, New Mexico.

Oppenheimer was a very cerebral person who taught himself Sanskrit and was fond of the classic work the Bhagavad Gita that is considered one of the holy scriptures of Hinduism. He said in a later interview that when he witnessed the first explosion of the bomb at the Trinity test site in the New Mexico desert and saw its explosive power, these words from the book “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” came to his mind. Here is a more complete quote from the interview of the reactions of the observers as they witnessed the mushroom cloud:
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The evolution of Columbo

The TV series Columbo created one of the most endearing police detectives in TV history. It was extremely popular, with Peter Falk playing the rumpled, hair disheveled, trench-coat wearing, cigar smoking detective who had a perpetually befuddled expression and apologetic manner that was discarded only at the end of each episode when he confronts the murderer with convincing evidence of the crime. He drives a junky beat-up Peugeot Cabriolet and when asked if he has another car, sometimes replies “I do have another car, which my wife uses. It’s nothing special, just for transportation.”

This hilarious scene from episode 2 in Season 4 in 1974, captures the nature of the character when a kindly nun (played by Joyce Van Patten), who runs a homeless shelter, mistakes Columbo for a homeless person, when he has merely gone there to interview a homeless person who was a witness to a crime.

In the same episode, he is turned away from a junk yard by someone thinking he has brought his car to abandon it.
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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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