After linking to the video of Dustin Hoffmann talking about the creation of the film Tootsie where he describes having an epiphany about how women are treated while researching the film, I decided to watch it again. [Read more…]
[UPDATE: Please see comment #7 by Holly Wesley, daughter of the late Mary Hamilton.]
There are some film scenes that are not only indelibly etched in one’s personal memory but become part of the collective memory of an entire generation. One such scene is this one with Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger from the 1967 film In the Heat of the Night, with Poitier as a police detective from Philadelphia who gets involved, alongside Steiger as the local sheriff, in a murder investigation in a small town in Mississippi and has to deal with the racism he encounters.
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I wrote sometime ago about the pending release on DVD of the HBO documentary The Loving Story (2011), about Mildred and Richard Loving, the couple whose case led to the throwing out as unconstitutional all state laws banning inter-racial marriage. I just saw the documentary and I can strongly recommend it as a heartwarming story of overcoming racial prejudice. [Read more…]
I just watched the latest work by guerilla filmmaker Robert Greenwald. He is developing a new form of journalism that makes documentaries on important issues that are timely because they are low-budget and filmed on a short schedule, and then sells them (or even gives them away free) directly to people, bypassing the usual channels of theaters or TV, and encourages them to arrange free screenings for others. He has produced and/or directed the following: [Read more…]
The HBO comedy series Veep is pretty funny. The first season of eight episodes is out on Netflix and I watched it over two weekends. The backstory is that Selina Meyer is a US senator who tried and failed to get her party’s nomination for the presidency, then accepted the role of running mate and became vice-president. She finds that in the world of Washington politics, she now has far less clout than when she was a senator, reduced to making human interest appearances at kindergartens and yoghurt stores and the like. She has all the trappings of power (massive security detail and six limousine motorcades wherever she goes) but not the reality and the show deals with her frustration and insecurity at being deliberately excluded from the really important decision-making processes. [Read more…]
A few days ago I watched an excellent hour-long Peabody-winning documentary with the above title that tells the story of the lawsuit brought by Vashti McCollum. The daughter of freethinkers, she and her husband, who taught at the University of Illinois, were not religious and the family did not belong to any church or send their children to Sunday school, which made them anomalies in the conservative religious community of Champaign, Illinois that they lived in in 1945. [Read more…]
In a comment on my review of Skyfall, Daniel Schealler introduced me to the ‘Honest Trailers’ series, where people create their own trailers poking fun at the film. Of course, it is funnier if you have seen the film and I particularly liked this one. [Read more…]
I was intrigued following my review of Skyfall when commenter Enkidum said that the implausibilties in this film pale “in comparison to the final poker hand in Casino Royale, which has never occurred in history and likely never would, even if people kept playing poker until the heat death of the universe.” [Read more…]