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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Although I like science, or maybe because of it, I tend to get irritated with films that casually break the laws of science merely to achieve a cheap solution to a plot problem. I don’t expect perfect fidelity but gratuitous violations of laws (such noisy explosions in space or the presence of Earth-like gravity on spaceships) are annoying. This is why I liked 2001: A Space Odyssey and to a lesser extent Gravity, because they tried to stick as closely as possible to what may be actually possible.
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I recently watched two films Divergent and Elysium. While mildly entertaining, I would not really recommend either of them. As with many such futuristic films, the plots are full of holes large enough that one can drive a truck through, but I am going to overlook them. What prompted me to write about them was what they said about the prevailing zeitgeist.
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Renee Zellweger has not acted in a film since 2010 but is now about to release a new one. She has thus re-appeared in the public eye and surprised many people because she looks different. Very different. It is not just that she has gone through the normal changes of aging over five years and is an older version of herself but that she looks so different that one might not have recognized her.
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The Laura Poitras documentary film about Edward Snowden is having a staggered release. The list of dates when it will be released can be seen here. It is having its US premiere in four US cities today but not in Cleveland where I will have to wait until November 7th.
Via Andrea James I learned that they have issued a new trailer for this film that many of us have seen more than once, to commemorate the re-release of the film in the UK. I hope they show it in a wide-screen theater locally since I would definitely go and see it again for the fourth (?) time.
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I am insatiably curious about what goes on behind the scenes in the production of films, TV, and radio shows. The mechanics of how these things are put together fascinate me because unlike the products of largely solo creative processes like a book or painting or sculpture, these involve a lot of people.
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I saw this yesterday and it was excellent. The filmmakers wisely decided to make the entire film cover the two year period 1996-1997 which saw Gary Webb break the series of stories titled Dark Alliance for the San Jose Mercury News that exposed the shady links between the US-backed Contras in Nicaragua, the CIA, and the drug dealers who were ravaging the black communities in the inner cities of the US by flooding them with crack cocaine. (See my earlier posts on this story and film here and here.)
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The actor who plays journalist Gary Webb appeared on The Daily Show to talk about his film Kill the Messenger which deals with his expose of how the CIA and the Nicaraguan contras it supported were involved in the spread of the crack cocaine epidemic in America’s inner cities. (I wrote about it here.)
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