Award-winning documentarian Laura Poitras has just released her new film Citizenfour about Edward Snowden. (The title of the film is taken from one of the aliases he used in his initial communications with her.) Spencer Ackerman provides a review of the film while George Packer provides a lengthy profile of the notoriously publicity-shy Poitras and also discusses the film which he saw in Berlin before its release.
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When a mainstream media organization describes someone as their ‘national security reporter’, I immediately pigeonhole them as basically public relations flacks for the agencies they cover because often their main method of ‘news gathering’ is to cultivate sources at high levels within the agencies who will feed them self-serving leaks that these reporters then pass on to us. There are some good reporters on this beat, one being Jane Meyer for the New Yorker magazine and James Bamford who writes for a number of publications, but they tend to be the exception.
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This brilliant but strange and fascinating film by director Lindsay Anderson stars Malcolm McDowell and Helen Mirren and a raft of first-rate British character actors. It is a biting satire on the ruthlessness of the capitalist system in which McDowell plays a naïf who thinks that he can become rich by doing the will of wealthy people and thinks that they will show their gratitude by taking care of him and rewarding him, and ends up in one mess after another. It is an illusion shared by many today. I liked one gag where the graffiti on a wall has the message “Revolution is the opium of the intellectuals”.
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I recently wrote about the controversy over the film Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Those who have seen the film may recall a funny but puzzling episode near the very end, involving a uniformed ‘suicide squad’ of soldiers who appear at the scene of Brian’s crucifixion.
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Anyone who has seen a James Bond film will likely remember the iconic opening sequence in which Bond, viewed through a gun barrel, strides from right to left of the screen and halfway through whips out his gun and shoots in the direction of the viewer, accompanied all the while by the familiar theme music with its memorable guitar riff.
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There is new comedy show appearing on cable TV.
The new show stars Gerald “Slink” Johnson as a modern-day black Jesus living in rough-and-tumble Compton, Calif., spreading “love and kindness” with a “loyal group of downtrodden followers,” according to Turner Broadcasting System’s press release.
…In a statement, Adult Swim said “Black Jesus is a satire and one interpretation of the message of Jesus played out in modern day morality tales; and despite what some may consider a controversial depiction of Jesus, it is not the intent to offend any race or people of faith.”
The new film Boyhood has got rave reviews all around. I have not seen it as yet and so was interested by this article by Los Angeles Times and NPR film critic Kenneth Turan who was not overly impressed with it, thinking it merely OK and somewhat gimmicky.
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I have been railing about the fact that so many films that I have seen recently are too damn long and would benefit from much tighter editing. But is it in fact the case that films are actually longer than they used to be? I intuitively thought they were but the data don’t seem to back me up.
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Actor George Takei was a guest on The Daily Show and Jon Stewart wisely decided not to make it a yuk-fest with Star Trek jokes but instead spent the time allowing Takei to describe the time during World War II when his family were herded into barbed-wire enclosed internment camps for the entire duration of the war purely because of their Japanese ethnicity or, as we say now, racial profiling.
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This is a documentary that by all rights should be offensive and yet it was likable. It tells the story of Ivan Thompson, a 60-year old cowboy from New Mexico who acts as a matchmaker between American men and Mexican women. He stumbled into this business after his own divorce when he placed an ad for a wife in Mexican newspapers and received about 80 responses. He realized that if there were that many Mexican women who were seeking American husbands, then he might be able to match them up, so he advertised his services to American men. The takers are usually older divorced men who seek more submissive women and think that Mexican women make better candidates.
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