Today is reportedly the day when William Shakespeare was born 450 years ago in 1564. There is no actual record of his birth date but he was baptized on April 26th and this makes people think that today was the likely day, which also happens to be the day he died in 1616.
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Like Philomena that I reviewed yesterday, this film was also up for multiple Academy Awards this year, though it too did not win any. It was nominated in 10 categories, including the grand slam of the seven major ones (film, director, actress, actor, supporting actress, supporting actor, screenplay).
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Over the weekend I watched this film that was nominated for four Academy Awards including best picture, actress (Judy Dench), adapted screenplay, and music score, although it did not win any. It is an excellent film, one of the best that I have seen in recent years, and one that I can strongly recommend to readers.
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Aaron Sorkin is the creator of popular shows such as The West Wing and The Newsroom that have his signature style such as the walk-talk in which characters in positions of importance are moving around and talking over each other at times of crisis, behaving with a great sense of urgency, mixing the personal with business, interspersed with somewhat preachy messages and moralizing.
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Jon Stewart looks the reactions of Christians to the new film.
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While modern computer technology enables special effects artists to produce remarkable results, we should not forget that it is not just technology but also human ingenuity that is the foundation for good effects. Gifted people with lots of patience but very little else can do amazing things , while those without imagination will produce pedestrian stuff even with all the technology at their disposal.
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Now that the film Noah has been released and been reviewed, more elements of the film version of the story are known and I found it interesting that the filmmaker Darren Aronofsky seems to have brought to the fore some odd aspects of the biblical story that are usually glossed over so that most people are ignorant of them.
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The actor who plays Dr. Watson in the Sherlock, Arthur Dent in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbitt was interviewed at the premiere of the last one and reveals a nice, self-deprecating sense of humor that is very much like the character of Watson and his first role in the BBC TV series The Office which is where I first became aware of him.
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When I was reading the Harry Potter books, although J. K. Rowling told a good yarn and plotted her stories well, the romance between Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley never seemed to me to be plausible. It seemed like the author was trying to avoid the obvious narrative device of the leading man and leading woman getting together at the end and was going for the slightly counter-intuitive relationship. It just did not work for me. Harry’s romance and marriage to what’s-her-name was also implausible as can be seen from the fact that I can’t even recall her name (or her face from the films) and remember anything about her except that she was Ron’s sister.
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Those of us who love films also tend to be avid watchers of film trailers. Many of us will immediately recognize the throaty, urgent voice of the narrator in many of the trailers, even though we never knew who he was. Well, his name was Hal Douglas and he died last week at the age of 89.
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