“They call me Ms. Hamilton!”

[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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Film review: The Loving Story (2011)

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…]

Film review: War on Whistleblowers

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…]

TV review: Veep

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…]

Film review: The Lord is Not on Trial Here Today

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…]

Film review: Skyfall

Skyfall is the latest in the James Bond saga. It starts out with the obligatory very long chase sequence using multiple modes of transport and has the usual large quota of action scenes, but it also tries to make the characters of Bond and his boss M more complicated and develop her character and their relationship. At times Bond looks old and weary, more like The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. [Read more…]

Documentary: War on Whistleblowers

I wrote earlier about guerilla film maker Robert Greenwald’s new documentary called War on Whistleblowers: Free Press and the National Security State. The documentary has now been released and Greenwald is offering free copies to anyone, though of course it would be nice if people donated some money to help him produce more films and also spread the word about it.

You can find out more here and here’s the trailer again.