TV Series (Educational): THE STORY OF FILM: AN ODYSSEY (2011) C

For people who want to know more about the history of the Cinema (the movies), this series is not for you.  Primarily it deals with the avant garde aspects of cinematography.  

Starting in the early 1800's, the series takes us through the development of the movies as an art form.  After painfully watching all15 episodes I found it tedious and lacking in good organization . . . from an educational standpoint.   What I see  lacking is that is doesn't divide the elements of a movie into their constituent parts, such as story, cinematography, lighting, etc., etc.  What we get is primarily are very special aspects of cinematography for a very limited audience.  Almost nothing about the story.

The Story of Film: An Odyssey (from Wikipedia):  A documentary film about the history of film, presented on television in 15 one-hour chapters with a total length of over 900 minutes. It was directed and narrated by Mark Cousins, a film critic from Northern Ireland, based on his 2004 book The Story of Film.^[1]

In February 2012, A. O. Scott of The New York Times described Cousins' film as "a semester-long film studies survey course compressed into 15 brisk, sometimes contentious hours" that "stands as an invigorated compendium of conventional wisdom." Contrasting the project with its "important precursor (and also, perhaps, an implicit interlocutor)", Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma, Scott commended Cousins' film as "the place from which all future revisionism must start".^[1] WW comment:  You tell me what that means.  Doubletalk.

THE WOLF OF WALL STREET (2013) AA

Sorry for the delay in this review.  This was one of the special movies of the year.  If you didn't take it seriously (that is, being one of the people hurt by the type of stock scam artists depicted in the movie), it was a great comedy.  Woody Allen couldn't do better.  

The acting by DiCaprio was the best ever.  The screenwriting was superb. 

I'm afraid that the people who didn't like the movie were either offended by the depravity or were those who buy into fly-by-night stock schemes and have great difficulty in analyzing the real value of a business or a product.  For those, I recommend watching SHARK TANK on ABC, following Krugman in the NY Times and reading Consumer Reports on a regular basis.

Sandy's son (my step son), had a different take on the movie. Among his other tasks at THE FINANCIAL TIMES he writes a regular opinion column.  It is shown below.  He views this type of scam as a new replacement for the gangster type mobs of years ago . . . where if you didn't pay what you owed, someone shot you in the kneecap.

Make way for more wolves of Wall Street

By Gary Silverman in New York

The people who once would have been gangsters can now be found in the darker corners of finance

Isuspect that many readers of the Financial Times will find something objectionable in Martin Scorsese’s latest film, The Wolf of Wall Street. Running at three hours, it explores the pleasures of snorting cocaine, swallowing sedatives, lying, stealing, cursing, cheating on your wife, hiding money in Switzerland, taking part in orgies and dwarf tossing.

But for anyone interested in business – and the way it is practised in New York – the movie is food for thought. Mr Scorsese is a leading chronicler of the American underworld, and he has documented a disturbing chapter in its evolution. The auteur himself has noticed that the kinds of people who used to do terrible things in his old mob films have found profitable homes in the darker corners of finance.

  
  
  

More

ON THIS STORY

• FT Alphaville The boiler rooms amongst us
• UK watchdog warns on graphenescams
• ‘Boiler room’ scam shut down
• Cyber security landscape changes
• Why film costume designers love Wall Street’s anti-heroes

GARY SILVERMAN

• Treat the jobless like animals
• A bus station Christmas
• Angry White Men, by MichaelKimmel
• De Blasio plays it safe

The Wolf of Wall Street is based on the memoirs of a New Yorker called Jordan Belfort. Before he was sent to a federal prison for 22 months in the last decade, he made millions of dollars in the 1980s and 1990s running a brokerage called Stratton Oakmont on Long Island (where I grew up). It specialised in a racket known as “pump and dump” – using high-pressure sales tactics to con people into buying dodgy stocks in smaller companies as a way to generate commissions.

By his own admission, Belfort is a bad person. After his release, he boasted to CNBC in 2007 that he had “played the game of crime very carefully for many, many years, and covered my tracks with zest and zeal”. As portrayed in the film by Leonardo DiCaprio, he is an archetypical Scorsese “wise guy”, familiar to anyone who has seen the director’s later Mafia movies, such as Goodfellas and Casino. He chases after the easy money, and flaunts it when he gets it. He cracks jokes with the boys – in this case, mostly former small-time pot dealers – and he cannot resist the blondes.

The big difference between Belfort and earlier Scorsese hoodlums is in their choice of weaponry. Belfort has no need to pick up a gun to make money. He never has to wield an ice pick or use his fists to take care of a business problem (although he punches his wife in the stomach when the marital going gets tough). Belfort only has to pick up a phone to become another Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci or Ray Liotta.

It makes for a very different initiation. In the old Mafia movies, a gangster made his bones – that is to say, qualified for membership – by killing someone. In this film,Belfort lets his fingers do the walking. At his first brokerage, the neophyte nogoodnik’s initial orders involve making 500 calls a day.

Yet Belfort soon learns he can get away with murder, as it were, with the right rap. At Stratton Oakmont, he inspires his troops by speaking of their telephones in martial terms. He describes the devices as M16s wielded by killers “who will not take no for an answer” when they are pushing a public offering. He tells them that, to get rich, they have to become “telephone f***ing terrorists”.

Guns in the movie are almost a symbol of low status. They are wielded by people who do not make the really big money. The first time a firearm is fired it is being used for target practice by Belfort’s pursuer, a strait-laced FBI agent who notes later, almost sheepishly: “You get a free handgun when you join the bureau.”

The agent ultimately brings down Belfort, but Mr Scorsese depicts the winner of the battle as a somewhat sad sack. Towards the end of the film, the agent is seen reading about the case in the Long Island newspaper Newsday as he rides the subway alone, surrounded by beaten-down commuters.

Belfort, on the other hand, emerges from prison with a career as a motivational speaker, teaching the poor saps in lesser burgs (the name of which was changed in the film to Auckland, New Zealand) how to sell stuff. The viewer is left with the sense that his story is not over.

Nor, I would argue, have we seen the last of the Belforts in our financial midst. Now that the wise guys can make serious money by picking up phones (or plugging in laptops, for that matter) rather than wielding guns, crime has become easier. What the economists call the barriers to entry have come down.

The gangsters in Mr Scorsese’s older oeuvre did dirty work; they saw the blood of their victims and heard their cries of pain. Belfort and his ilk found cleaner hustles. They were tough guys at a distance, and we will see more of them in the years to come. There are plenty of other people on Long Island who want to party.

Classic Foreign Movie Review: WAKE IN FRIGHT (2012) A to D (NOT FOR EVERYONE)

A so-called classic film about brutality between males in the Australian outback.  No real plot or story. Slice of life of guys who are only partially civilized. 

From Other Reviewers:

1. Awe-inspiring, brutal and stunning, Wake in Fright is the story of John Grant, a teacher on Christmas break who arrives in the rough outback mining town of Bundanyabba, planning to stay overnight before catching the plane to Sydney. But, as his one night stretches to five, he plunges headlong toward his own destruction. When he meets some alcoholic misfits, the educated John Grant is no more. Instead he turn into a self-loathing man in a desolate wasteland, dirty, red-eyed, sitting against a tree and looking at a rifle with one bullet left. Th e movie was believed yo lost for many years, Wake in Fright has been painstakingly restored by Australia's National Film and Sound Archive and AtLab Deluxe, and is presented in its original uncompromising form. 

2. "Wake in Fright" is a film made in Australia in 1971 and almost lost forever. It's not dated. It is powerful, genuinely shocking and rather amazing. It comes billed as a "horror film" and contains a great deal of horror, but all of the horror is human and brutally realistic.

Screened at the Toronto Film Festival in 2009, picked up three years later by Drafthouse, it arrives still powerful and crushing. It has what would have been an all-star cast when it was released, and still is now for those who know their actors: Donald Pleasence, Jack Thompson and Gary Bond.

The story involves a young schoolteacher in the middle of the desolate wilderness of the Outback. The opening overhead shot shows a shabby building beside a railroad track, the camera pans 360 degrees and finds only the distant horizon, and then returns to find a second building on the other side of the tracks. One building is the school. The other is the hotel. To get to either, people must have to travel a great distance.

It is the end of the school year. The teacher (Gary Bond) takes the train to a town where he plans to get a flight to Sydney. He loses his money gambling and is swept up in the vortex of a group of hard-drinking, hard-living, crude, vicious men. His "vacation" descends into drunkenness, brutality, rape and a gruesome moonlight hunt where they massacre kangaroos.

According to Australian critics, the film was originally reviled because it painted such a horrifying portrait of life in the isolation of the Outback — life making our own Old West look positively civilized. "Deliverance," made a year later in 1972, is mild by comparison.

Kotcheff's film is raw and uncompromised, well-acted, brilliantly photographed and edited. Animals were certainly "harmed." Footage of an actual kangaroo hunt was seamlessly edited in by Buckley, and a "producer's note" says this documentary footage was included with "the participation" of animal rights' organizations, whatever that means. It's rare to find a film that goes for broke and says to hell with the consequences.

Foreign Movie Review : FAUDA (2015- ) AAA+

Netfix Original Streaming;

Subtitles: Israeli, 12 episodes

"Fauda" the movie series (Arabic for 'Chaos') depicts the (most horrible aspects) of the two-sided story of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The quote another person who reviewed this painfully difficult to watch series, it is a "Gripping drama so real that it hurts".  It definitely SHOULD NOT BE WATCHED FOR THE WEAK AT HEART.  Unending violence a hatred.  I only hope that the situation in the real Israel is a lot less violent and intense than shown in this series.  However, The amazing thing is that past leaders of the Israeli 'mista'ar'vim' have said that the reality is even more astounding than that which is portrayed in this series. If so, it boggles the mind . As an aside I'm not sure a follow up series was created.

Purchased and broadcast by Netflix, this is the best series to come from Israel TV film-makers, who are rapidly becoming masters of the genre --and all this on strictly limited budgets.

These Comments Are Excerpts From Other Reviewers:
Doron, a commander of undercover Israeli unit, the Israeli Special Forces, operating inside Palestinian territories, and his team, are hunting down Hamas terrorist Abu-Ahmed. On the other side of the fence, the life of Abu-Ahmed and his family, who has thus far murdered 143 Israelis, will never accept the State of Israel, and will continue Jihad for as long as it takes.

Why is Fauda different? Well, for a start, there is the fact that it reeks of authenticity about the cat and mouse tactics Israel is forced to employ when hunting down highly motivated Palestinian terrorists. This drama has everything. It is played out in Arabic and Hebrew by superb actors who have bilingual command of the languages.

It is never condescending to the Arabs, so even the most fervent of Palestinian supporters will find it hard to find bias. The eternal struggle is seen from both sides and does not moralize. Love and betrayal are exposed, not only between human beings but also between ideologies. This, indeed, is a fight to the death.

The Israeli Arab actors, too, deserve credit for portraying their characters with such humanity. Betrayal is an integral part of Arab society in the West Bank (and Gaza for that matter). Israel would not have been able to succeed as often as it has if not for the myriad informants and stool pigeons willing to 'shop' the terrorists among them, whether for money or for political reasons. Everyone, it seems, has his price. The enmity between Fatah, which runs the West Bank, and Hamas, dominant in Gaza, is palpable. Israel uses this to its advantage.

The reason why this series must be seen on TV throughout the Western world, and even further afield, is that it shows in depth how Israel combats terrorism. All we usually see on the news channels are the results of hits via video from drones and guided missiles. We never see the story behind the assassination of terrorists.

The suspense of the story reminded me that life under constant threat of terrorism is a brutal and hardening existence. I was on edge, despite knowing what the eventual outcomes were likely to be. The lesson I took from this story was how sad it is that two sets of human beings with amazing fortitude and commitment cannot channel those qualities to make a mutually progressive existence.

Knowing little of the Israeli - Palestine conflicts and issues I watched this series initially only because of a review I read somewhere. Not really into watching something with subtitles I was gripped from the beginning and couldn't stop watching it.

Intense and Engaging
This is super addictive so watch out! I watched 6 episodes in a row and I definitely don't regret it one bit. Definitely recommend this show, you wont regret it. The acting, the filming, the effects-its all truly amazing. Unfortunately , I think this show only has one season, which is really upsetting to me. Hopefully the series will continue for as long a possible. 10/10

Very realistic (although many of the things depicted in the show are out of date, like tracking techniques used by Israelis - they use much faster and slicker technology now and Hamas too - I can't believe that they didn't sweep the place & the visitors for bugs), but somehow it is very depressing: you realize that there can never be any peace - one side just has to ex

terminate the other. And that is the bitter truth.

Classic Movie Review: TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD (1962) A

After watching the excellent movie, Capote, I decided to see this movie which is based on the book that Harper Lee was writing while Capote was gathering information on the story about a killings in Kansas  . . . which ultimately led to his writing of IN COLD BLOOD.  Harper Lee accompanied Capote to Kansas at that time.  http://movieandtvreviewsforgrownups.blogspot.com/search?q=capote

The first thing that struck me about To Kill A Mockingbird was the difference from today in cinematography, character development, emotion and music that accompanied the film.  It was of a different era.  50 year has made a big difference in movie making.  See the STORY OF FILM. http://movieandtvreviewsforgrownups.blogspot.com/search?q=THE+STORY+OF+FILM. 

But MOCKINGBIRD was good for it's time . . . at the beginning of the 60's when real racial conflicts were just starting in the United States.

Set a small Alabama town in the 1930s, the story focuses on scrupulously honest, highly respected lawyer Atticus Finch, played by Gregory Peck. (Who I think always played the same part in all his films).  Finch puts his career on the line when he agrees to represent Tom Robinson (Brock Peters), a black man accused of rape. The trial and the events surrounding it are seen through the eyes of Finch's six-year-old daughter Scout. I understand that the book that the film was based on was written for young adolescents. The end of the trial is predicable, considering the times (1930's). To Kill a Mockingbird won Academy Awards for Best Actor (Peck), Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Art Direction. 

WAR OF THE CENTURY (1999) AAA (For educational purposes)

THIS IS A VERY DIFFICULT DOCUMENTARY TO WATCH!!
THIS IS NOT ENTERTAINMENT

This series of disks, produced by the BBC, describes the worst side . . . the ugliest, the most hideous side of human behavior. After viewing this material it is very, very easy to believe that the human race is destined in the not too distant future, to destroy a good portion of people who live on this planet.

(From NETLIX)
More than 30 million people were killed in the conflict in Eastern Europe during World War II; the battle between Nazism and Stalinism is examined in this four-part series filmed in Germany, Hungary, Poland, Russia, the Ukraine and Belorussia. Leading historians, eyewitness accounts and rare film archives help chronicle the battle for Moscow, from Hitler's early plans to the Red Army's 1942 victory and the final, brutal days of the conflict.

This superb documentary focuses exclusively on the German-Soviet theatre of World War II, and amply supports its thesis that this "eastern front" deserves consideration not only a war in and of itself, but the most momentous war of the 20th century.

The documentary is separated into four hour-long episodes. "High Hopes" tells the story of the German invasion of Russia in 1941, and how shows how the Blitzkrieg was just as effective over Russia's vast open spaces as it had been in the West - the Wehrmacht covered 600 miles and captured 3 million enemy troops.

"Spiral of Terror" tells the story of what happened in 1941-42 as the German advance slowed - how across Germany's new occupied territories, a brutal guerrilla war personally fueled by both Hitler and Stalin led to near-anarchy and endless civilian suffering.

"Learning to Win" focuses on the Battle of Stalingrad and how the Russians adopted Germany's blitz tactics to encircle and destroy the German 6th Army, thus turning the tide of the war. Finally,

"Vengeance" tells the story of what happened across Eastern Europe as the Nazis were pushed back: the Germans' scorched-earth withdrawals and Stalin's purges led to ethnic cleansing on a scale never before seen.

Movie Review: SELMA (2015) AA and B-

SELMA could have been a great movie. It tells the universal story of man's struggle for basic human rights and the courage and tenacity of people who played a part of this major struggle in the history of  the United States.  In my view, LINCOLN produced by Steven Spielberg and starring Daniel Day Lewis met that test of a great movie.

The AA rating is because the content of the story is about an extremely important part of American history.  The B- rating is because the drama and the vast dimension of the civil rights struggles never came through in the screenplay, acting or in the cinematography. I wonder whether I would have understood the interplay of the political players if I didn't know the history beforehand.

From Rotten Tomatoes:

SELMA is the story of a movement. The film chronicles the tumultuous three-month period in 1965, when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. led a dangerous campaign to secure equal voting rights in the face of violent opposition. The epic march from Selma to Montgomery culminated in President Johnson signing the Voting Rights Act of 1965, one of the most significant victories for the civil rights movement.  SELMA tells the real story of how the revered leader and visionary Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his brothers and sisters in the movement prompted change that forever altered history.

PS. The Conservative Roberts Court recently negated a portion of the Civil Rights Act.  See http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/26/us/supreme-court-ruling.html

CASABLANCA (1942) A

I am not a fan of (classic) movies because of my early experiences in the children's section of movie theaters. Many of the "classic" dramas I watched at that time were unbelievably and painfully boring. Watching Casablanca may change me.

Back to 1942, when I was nine years old, the comedies and action adventure movies were not boring. Abbot and Costello, Frankenstein and all the rest (except Bob Hope) were wonderful. However, one drama did stand out because of the profound effect it had on my thinking. " I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1932)". was a gritty, uncompromising, critical look at the unjust and barbaric treatment of criminals in southern state's prison system following World War I. The harsh and grim film was one of the first of Warner Bros.' films of social conscience, reform and protest during the early 30s (at the height of the Depression-era). 

 But again, a couple of years ago I was turned away from the "classics" after viewing a snippet of the Chain Gang movie on TV. I found the story still good but the acting, direction, cinematography and music, horrid.

But Casablanca is different. The acting, especially by Claude Rains, was great. It moved fast and the story (considering the time it was written) wonderful. However, It was a little heavy handed and predictable, especially after 65 years. The camera shots of Ingrid Bergman, Humphrey Bogart being "bogey', good guys vs bad guys, lovers separated by war . . . a tear jerking selling point in 1942. I'm crying even as I write this review. Even the music was somewhat integrated with the plot . . . "you must remember this, a kiss is still a kiss". *(see below)

Casablanca won the Oscar for the best movie but was not popular immediately after release. The director of the movie was Michael Curtiz. Curtiz was a Hungarian Jewish emigre; he had come to the U.S. in the 1920s, but some of his family were refugees from Nazi Europe. Other movies by Curtiz include:

Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) with James Cagney and Walter Huston
Mildred Pierce (1945) with Joan Crawford and Ann Blyth
Night and Day (1946) with Cary Grant as Cole Porter
The Breaking Point (1950) with John Garfield and Patricia Neal
I'll See You in My Dreams (1951), a biopic of composer and lyricist Gus Kahn, with Doris Day and Danny Thomas
White Christmas (1954) with Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney
The Egyptian (1954) with Jean Simmons, Victor Mature and Gene Tierney
We're No Angels (1955) with Humphrey Bogart and Peter Ustinov
King Creole (1958) with Elvis Presley and Walter Matthau
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1960) with Eddie Hodges, Tony Randall and Patty McCormick
The Comancheros (1961) with John Wayne and Stuart Whitman



* "As Time Goes By" is a song written by Herman Hupfeld for the 1931 Broadway musical, Everybody's Welcome. In the original show it was sung by Frances Williams. It was recorded that year by several artists, including Rudy Vallee.
The song was re-introduced in 1942 in the film Casablanca, sung by Dooley Wilson. Wilson never released a single of the song because of a musicians' strike at the time of the film's release — but a re-issue of Rudy Vallee's 1931 recording became a major seller in 1942.

TV Documentary: AUSCHWITZ: INSIDE THE NAZI STATE (2005) (AA)

This well done BBC documentary series about the Holocaust and the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp tackles one of history's most horrible but super important subjects that has to be told so people can think twice before they decide to HATE another group or tribe: (AA) not for joy but for the importance of the subject matter.

From Wikipedia: Auschwitz: The Nazis and 'The Final Solution' is a BBC six-episode documentary film series presenting the story of Auschwitz through interviews with former inmates and guards to include authentic re-enactments of relevant events. It was first televised on BBC One on 11 January 2005. In the United States, this series first aired on PBS television stations as Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State in early 2005 and was released, under that title, in a 2-DVD box set (Region 1), by BBC Warner, on 29 March 2005.^[1][2]

The series uses four principal elements: rarely seen contemporary color and monochrome film from archives, interviews with survivors such as Dario Gabbai and former Nazis such as Oskar Gröning, computer-generated reconstructions of long-demolished buildings as well as meticulously detailed and historically accurate re-enactments of meetings and other events. These are linked by modern footage of locations in and around the site of the Auschwitz camp.

Laurence Rees stressed that the re-enactments were not dramatisations, but exclusively based on documented sources:

There is no screenwriter… Every single word that is spoken is double — and in some cases triple — sourced from historical records.^[3]

This reflects the conception of the earlier BBC/HBO film Conspiracy, which similarly recreates the Wannsee Conference (an event briefly portrayed in programme 2 of this series) based on a copy of the minutes kept by one of the attendees, although that film also includes speculative dramatised sections.

The computer-generated reconstructions used architectural plans that only became available in the 1990s when the archives of the former Soviet Union became accessible to Western historians. The discovery of these plans is described in the 1994 BBC Horizon documentary Auschwitz: The Blueprints of Genocide.

Episodes

Episode number	Title	Original UK broadcast
1.	Surprising Beginnings	11 January 2005
2.	Orders and Initiatives	18 January 2005
3.	Factories of Death	25 January 2005
4.	Corruption	1 February 2005
5.	Frenzied Killing	8 February 2005
6.	Liberation & Revenge	15 February 2005

Movie Review: THE PHYSICIAN: (2103) B-

An Action Adventure formular movie that takes place in the middle ages.  In this epic, a medical apprentice in 11th-century Persia disguises himself as a Jew to study at a school that does not admit Christians. Never really got-into-it (suspend disbelief).

Good special effects.  However, I would not invest my money in this one. Story is a a little too far fetched.

Other Reviews : When nine-year-old Rob Cole felt the life force slipping from his mother he could not foresee that her death  would lead him from the ugly life of 11th-century London to small villages throughout England and finally to the medical school at Ispahan in Persia. (A big, big trip). Though originally apprenticed to an itinerant barber surgeon, it is the excellent surgery of this physician trained by the legendary Persian physician Avicenna that inspires him to accept this gift and to commit his life to healing the sick. 

The adaptation of Noah Gordon's best selling book about a British boy who travels to the medieval East to learn about medicine. The settings, the camera work, production design, everything's all top notch and in Hollywood's league. Some of the visuals are strikingly beautiful and take you to a different time and place, like every good film. The film can rely on a couple of acting veterans . The film's ambition is nothing less than telling a story of adventure, love and drama on the scale of Lawrence of Arabia. Of course it can't entirely live up to that. Still, the effort and great work that went into this shows and make for a very entertaining film. The only complaint would have to be how ham-fisted the commentary on current religious struggles that made it into the film feel. Those aspects of the story may have a couple of very true things to say about how religion, prejudice and fear-mongering has made life more difficult for centuries, it all feels a bit forced, though. The result is still fine adventure cinema