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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Will Smith is a big Hollywood star. He and his actor wife Jada Pinkett-Smith seem intent on using their own star power to advance the acting career of their young son Jaden, securing two co-starring roles for him. The second one After Earth got panned by critics and also bombed at the US box office.
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When I wrote about the major Hollywood film Noah starring Russell Crowe as the arkmeister that is being released next month, I suggested that the filmmakers would have a tough time making Yahweh acceptable to the many religious people whom they need to buy tickets because there is no question that the story reveals him to be a monster. I said that I would be curious to see to what extent the filmmaker would go to sanitize Yahweh.
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Since today is Oscar day, here is another post about films, albeit a downbeat one about the little noticed but important category of Visual Effects or VFX. I have written several times about the way that the special effects film industry in the US is being steadily destroyed. The reasons are fairly complicated but reader Gordon has sent me an excellent article by David Sirota that provides the clearest explanation for what’s going on.
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Tonight is the big night for films when the 2014 Academy Awards are given out. While I love films, I hate awards shows in general and find them incredibly boring and so will not watch. I have only seen Gravity from among the nine nominees for Best Picture and I reviewed it here. I thought it was good but not great.
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I have written before about how the visual special effects (VFX) industry in the US is in a sorry state. Even as so many major American films based their success on special effects and had spectacular box office returns, the industry that was so essential to their success was itself collapsing.
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Nobody’s perfect. The fact that actors and writers and other artists may be personally flawed does not usually cause a problem with appreciating their work because we have learned to (mostly) separate the work of the artist from the person of the artist, so that praise for the artistic work does not mean we like or approve of the artist or the lives they lead. [Read more…]