The comedian was interviewed by Frank Rich prior to the release of his new film Top Five. The interview has been widely commented on because Rock says many things that are likely to make people uncomfortable and that is unusual for celebrities who typically do not talk politics for fear of offending anyone. Here’s a sample:
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Noted documentary maker Alex Gibney has a new film coming out on the Scientology movement. It is based on the book Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (2013) by Lawrence Wright that I reviewed favorably here. The film is being produced by HBO and will be released early next year.
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I always liked Gregory Peck. Although he was sometimes criticized for having a somewhat wooden acting style, there was no question that he had an impressive on-screen presence where he seemed to ooze integrity and the viewer was confident that he would do the right thing. I haven’t seen all his films of course, but as far as I am aware, there were very few in which he played a villainous character, one being Joseph Mengele in The Boys From Brazil.
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I have heard of actor Eva Longoria and the hit TV show Desperate Housewives that she starred in but had never actually seen her perform. So I was initially inclined to give her appearance on The Colbert Report a miss because celebrity interviews with people whose work I am not familiar with tend to bore me.
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The notoriously publicity-shy documentarian is making the rounds promoting her Edward Snowden documentary Citizenfour (see my review here) and she appeared on The Daily Show. Jon Stewart makes the same point that I did, that the picture of Snowden that was painted by his early critics has no resemblance to the person seen in the film and that he seems to an earnest, idealistic young man who realized that he had information the people needed to know and was willing to take the risk to tell them. Poitras thinks that history will vindicate Snowden like it has with Daniel Ellsberg
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I saw this film yesterday and really enjoyed it. Documentarian Laura Poitras, a key person in the chain of events that led to the revelations of Edward Snowden, was in the odd position of making a documentary in which she could have been one of the featured people. But she is someone who hates the spotlight and she manages to largely write herself out of the film, appearing only in brief glimpses in mirrors or in the text of emails exchanged by her with Snowden and Glenn Greenwald, and providing the voice for the emails she received from Snowden that started the process.
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Thanks to reader boadinum, I learned that the Al Jazeera program with the above title about the attack on the USS Liberty on June 8, 1967 was freely available on YouTube (see the embedded link at the end of this post) and I watched it yesterday. It was a fascinating program that had a lot of new information that was not made public before. The producers had correspondence, tape recordings, and interviews with survivors and government officials that reveal the sequence of events and what the discussions were prior to and after the attack.
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In watching the film A Most Wanted Man, the issue of accents in films once again entered my mind. The film takes place in Germany and almost all the main characters are supposed to be German. Germans taking to other Germans in Germany would naturally speak German. So the natural thing would be to have the film in German with English subtitles.
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Harry Belafonte was given an honorary Oscar, the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, at a ceremony last week. The 87-year old actor and singer took the opportunity to deliver a powerful speech on racism and justice and human rights.
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I saw this film over the weekend. It is one of the final ones by Philip Seymour Hoffman and he gives a typically fine performance as the head of a small German counter-terrorism unit based in Hamburg that is keeping track of potential Islamic terror networks who might be using that city as a stage to launch operations. Hamburg is where Mohammed Atta plotted the 9/11 attacks and none of the German authorities want a similar plot to go undetected.
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