TV Review: The Untouchables

Last night I watched the Frontline documentary The Untouchables that I wrote about yesterday that explored the question of why, more than four years after the financial debacle involving widespread mortgage fraud, not a single high-level Wall Street executive has faced criminal prosecution. All that has happened is a bunch of very low-level people being charged and a series of civil prosecutions resulting in plea bargains in which some banks have paid fines that seem large but are puny compared to the scale of the fraud, and which the bank executives can simply write off as the cost of doing business while they continue to enrich themselves with high salaries and bonuses. The program covers some of the same ground as that excellent 2010 documentary Inside Job that I reviewed here [Read more…]

Film review: Game Change (2012)

Over the weekend I saw this film about the ill-fated McCain-Palin campaign of 2008. The film is based on a book of the same name by two journalists who relied heavily on anonymous sources on ‘deep background’, which means that one has to be wary of the material that took place out of the public eye or was not reported previously, and treat it with some skepticism. As a film I found it entertaining and engrossing even though I was very familiar with the entire narrative. I was not particularly surprised by any of the information in it but then I am a bit of a political junkie and followed that election pretty closely. With that knowledge I can say that events portrayed in the film were largely consistent with my understanding of the people and events. [Read more…]

Film review: My Man Godfrey

I saw the 1936 black-and-white comedy My Man Godfrey over the weekend and really liked it. I hadn’t expected to because it seemed to be about the high life of a very rich but eccentric family indulging in endless rounds of vapid partying in the post-1929 crash period. I watched it out of solidarity with my visiting daughter who has developed a taste for classic films and discovered that the film was not only funny, it had a pretty good social message too. [Read more…]

Christmas film recommendation: The Ref

Every year I recommend that people forget the standard Christmas films and check out instead the 1994 film The Ref. With great performances by Denis Leary, Kevin Spacey, and particularly Judy Davis, it is a hilarious story of a burglar on the run from the law who takes a seriously dysfunctional family hostage on Christmas eve and then has to keep them from fighting with each other while trying to make his escape. I discovered that the full film is available in one stream on YouTube in good quality. [Read more…]

The famous crocodile jump in Live and Let Die

One of the recurring features of James Bond films is how the villains devise increasingly outlandish schemes to kill him. If you have seen the 1973 film Live and Let Die which I reviewed here, you will recall the scene in which he is left standing on a tiny island surrounded by a moat containing crocodiles who can easily climb onto the island. The villains then leave him, presumably because they have other pressing things to do like iron their socks or something, and so miss Bond escaping by using three crocodiles as stepping stones, running over them to get to the safety of the other bank. [Read more…]