Posts Tagged ‘movies’

Jonathan & Jesus Let’s Talk REAL Pressure

Posted: January 8, 2024 by datechguy in catholic, entertainment
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Abraham Lincoln: [speaking to a old freed slave who dropped to his knees before him] Don’t kneel to me, that is not right. You must kneel to God only, and thank Him for the liberty you will enjoy hereafter.

Richmond April 4th 1865 surrounded by a group of newly freed slaves

This trailer dropped from the folks at the Chosen:

In one respect this isn’t odd, you might recall from your movie history Cecil B DeMille’s silent movie King of Kings, the first movie adaption of the Gospels. It’s available at Youtube:

At the Turner Classic movies the lengths that DeMille took to keep things on the “right” path:

Cecil B. DeMille did not want to take any chances with the film. His two stars, ‘H. B. Warner’ and ‘Dorothy Cummings’ , were required to sign agreements which prohibited them from appearing in film roles that might compromise their “holy” screen images for a five-year period. DeMille also ordered them not to be seen doing any “un-biblical” activities during the film’s shooting. These activities included attending ball games, playing cards, frequenting night clubs, swimming, and riding in convertibles.

and Turner also reports that DeMille had some serious damage control to do:

Lead actor H.B. Warner, who played Jesus, was involved in an off-camera scandal with anonymous woman who was determined to blackmail Cecil B. DeMille by ruining the production. It is believed that DeMille paid the woman on the condition that she leave the U.S.

IMDB.com claims the woman was made to back off after being threatened with arrest. It also states that the pressure that Warner felt playing Christ was so intense that it brought back his drinking problem.

Now consider, this was one movie released in 1927 at a time when movies were not universal. Warner was already an established actor with a ton of credits behind him and decades of credits ahead of him (you might best remember him as Mr. Gower the druggist in It’s a Wonderful Life)  

The Chosen has now been around for over four years. It has been seen by hundreds of millions all over the world. It is a global phenomena. Furthermore if you look at IMDB you will find that while Jonathan Roumie has credits dating back to 2001 you will see nothing in a significant staring role that might cause him to be memorable before the Chosen. His entire fames comes from playing Jesus and there are, I suspect, many particularly in a post Christian culture that have not known the Gospel before and are rediscovering faith for the first time, for whom he is the only Jesus they have ever known in their lives.

Imagine the pressure of playing the son of God under those conditions and add to that the aditional pressure when you consider Jonathan Roumie is a devout Catholic who is very conscious of the dangers of the sin of Pride and that his performance and how he carries himself in public could have a huge oversized effect on people trying to find God. An actor might worry about the effects of his words and actions hurting a production, a devout Christian would worry about his actions and their effect on souls.

And we haven’t even touched on those who despise this message and the messengers who deliver it, both natural and supernatural. I’ve written and spoken about how the clergy and particularly the higher ups are targets for the devil, that comes with the job. Jonathan Roumie is an actor. I suspect that Satan has painted a target on his back bigger than the one on any Bishop.

That he is able to function at all, let alone as a man of faith and devotion speaks volumes and by the time the final season of the Chosen has wrapped, if he didn’t have a complete understanding of redemptive suffering he’ll know it first hand.

I admire him for this task which I would not want for all the gold in the world.

I haven’t watched this documentary yet, but you can bet I’m going to.

Update: Apparently it’s in four parts and available on Amazon. Watching now

Speaking of Gold in the world this is the final day of Christmas and thus the final day of our fundraiser: We remain stuck $2345 away from our goal. I suspect we won’t manage that today but I’d be really delighted if we could get that number below $2000 before I get home. If you would like to help please hit DaTipJar below or to the left:

Varoom! Varoom! Review: Radical Wolfe

Posted: December 10, 2023 by John Ruberry in culture, media, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics
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By John Ruberry

For many Netflix subscribers, their focus is on the next week’s release of the second part of the final season of The Crown. While I have enjoyed the series, the first batch of Season Six of The Crown was a huge disappointment for me.

A more enjoyable use of your time–75 minutes to be precise–can be found by watching Radical Wolfe, a documentary about the legendary writer Tom Wolfe, a pioneer of the New Journalism movement of the 1960s who later, and seamlessly, made the transition into fiction, penning one of the greatest novels ever, The Bonfire of the Vanities.

Radical Wolfe, which had a brief theatrical run this autumn, is directed by Richard Dewey. It is filled with interviews of Wolfe; Jon Hamm narrates passages from Wolfe’s work. The documentary is based on an Esquire article by Michael Lewis.

Gay Talese, Tom Junod, Christopher Buckley, and Lewis are among the writers interviewed for Radical Wolfe.

Buckley’s father, conservative firebrand William F. Buckley, says here. “Tom Wolfe is probably the most skillful writer in America. I mean by that is that he can do more things with words than anyone else.”

“If you want to be a writer,” Wolfe, who died in 2018 said of himself, “you’ve got to be standing in the middle of the tracks to see how fast the train goes.”

“Nobody is writing like Tom Wolfe today,” Junod says in Radical Wolfe. “And no one has written like Tom Wolfe.”

Wolfe is someone America needs now. Oh, to have seen him running loose among the hypocrites at COP28.

The title of the film comes from Wolfe’s 1970 essay for New York magazine, Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s, when Wolfe, after co-opting an invitation to a fundraiser for bail money for some Black Panthers held at Leonard Bernstein’s Park Avenue home, skewered the liberal virtue signaling culture, even before that term existed.

Oh yeah, phrases. Phrases!!! Besides “radical chic,” Wolfe coined the terms “the right stuff,” the title of his of his rollicking yet informative bestseller about the early days of the space program, and “masters of the universe,” the group that Sherman McCoy, the lead character in The Bonfire of the Vanities, placed himself in. 

Not mentioned in the documentary while Wolfe didn’t create the now-common phrase “pushing the envelope,” which is used repeatedly in The Right Stuff, he popularized it.

Wolfe began his career as a who-what-where when-why–journalist in the northeast. After convincing Esquire in the early 1960s to let him write an article about the California custom car culture, Wolfe suffered writer’s block. Which was the best thing, career-wise, that ever happened to the author. Eventually the floodgates opened, Wolfe brought sound effects to print journalism, shown in the title of that piece, There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy-Kolored (Thphhhhhh!) Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (Rahghhh!) Around the Bend (Brummmmmmmmmmmmmmm)…

The repeated use of ellipses (…) and multiple exclamation points (!!!) are a trademark of Wolfe’s early work.

As with the fetid film version of The Bonfire of the Vanities, Radical Wolfe tiptoes around race. Wolfe was a master storyteller and, strictly in the storytelling sense, race presents a crucial ingredient for any narrative–conflict. The Reverend Bacon character in Bonfires, an Al Sharpton knockoff, is a comic foil. Fareek “The Cannon” Fanon, an African American college football star in Wolfe’s 1998 novel, A Man in Full, comes across as a boor when he confuses lead character Charlie Coker’s old moniker as a 60-Minute Man, not as a football starter on both defense and offense, but as a man who could, let’s say, “do it” in bed for 60 minutes.

Black people can be boors in Wolfe’s world. As can white people. As can everyone. That’s the way it ought to be. Because that’s the way society is.

In Wolfe’s takedown of ugly glass-box and faceless architecture, From Bauhaus to Our House, he gives a rundown of the horrors of public housing, and joyously recalls the response when tin-eared bureaucrats in St. Louis–after decades of failing the residents of the city’s housing projects–finally did the unthinkable. They asked the tenants of the notorious Pruitt-Igoe homes, most of them Black, what they wanted done to the buildings. Their response? They chanted, “Blow it up.”

And the bureaucrats did just that. Why isn’t this poignant story in Radical Wolfe?

Wolfe was always coy about his political stance. “I belong to the party of the opposition,” he says in the documentary. But I suspect he was a slightly conservative, with a strong libertarian bent.

Despite the quibbles I mentioned, I loved Radical Wolfe. Oh, one more thing. To capture the Varoom!!! Varoom!!! uniqueness of Wolfe’s genius, a surreal mashup, along the lines of the one in The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, would have been a welcome addition.

Last year, Netflix sent a message to its workers that not all of its programming–not these words of course–will kowtow to wokeism. Radical Wolfe is a big step in the right direction for the streaming service. Next year Netflix will stream a six-episode limited series based on Wolfe’s A Man in Full. It will star Jeff Daniels and Diane Lane.

Keep it up, Netflix.

But I have one more quibble. Radical Wolfe is rated TV-MA for–wait for it–language and smoking.

Really? TV-MA?

Yep.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

An Amazon Prime Streaming Invoice Story or a Matter of Trust

Posted: August 11, 2023 by datechguy in business
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4th Doctor: Sit down. Sit down. What did you call those robots?
Leela: Creepy mechanical men.
4th Doctor: Yes. You know, people never really lose that feeling of unease with robots. The more of them there are, the greater the unease and of course the greater the dependence. It’s a vicious circle. People can neither live with them nor exist without them.
Leela: So what happens if the strangler is a robot?
4th Doctor: Oh, I should think it’s the end of this civilisation.

Doctor Who: The Robots of Death 1977

I’m a great believer in the idea that there is no point in buying a movie if you don’t watch it regularly.

So when I started buying movies on Amazon Prime I got into three different rotations on watching them

  1. Watching them in order that I bought them
  2. Watching them in order that they were released
  3. Watching then in the order of the year that the movie takes place in (for the LOTR movies I consider it pre-history)

I’ve been doing this for a couple of years now, it was a great time killer during the COVID lockdowns but it got a tad interesting a year or so back because I bought the TV series The Time Tunnel so I keep having to jump back into that series when they jump into a particular year comes up.

Yesterday I finally go to the 20th century and went to put on the 1938 version of Dawn Patrol staring Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone which I bought back in 2019.

So imagine my surprise when instead of the propeller that opened the credits of the 1938 Errol Flynn movie I suddenly saw an opening announcing the 1930 version of the movie staring Richard Barthelmess in the role Errol Flynn would replace him in, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. in the role that David Niven would grab and Neil Hamilton who would gain worldwide fame as Commissioner Gordon in the 1960’s batman TV series in the role Basil Rathbone would take over 8 years later.

Now I had never seen the 1930 version so I began watching it but found myself a tad put out by the idea that I had bought one movie and had another one switched on me without my knowledge or permission.

I tried to search for the 1938 version on Amazon and found it was no longer offered as a streaming movie in the US (but it was still offered in England) which does me no good of course. I suspected that for some reason Amazon lost the rights to the Errol Flynn version and substituted the other.

And while all of the flight scenes (except the closeups) and all of the scenes of the Germans and 2nd unit stuff were actually identical I wanted the movie I purchased so I contacted Amazon and had them call me back.

This was quickly escalated beyond the basic guy and the advance tech I got had me look up my initial order from 2019. The screen shot looked like this:

You’ll note that while the description shows the cast of the movie I ordered the photo is from the one I didn’t but when I clicked on Order details: it got well interesting

As I had suspected they lost the streaming rights to the 1938 version and substituted the Howard Hawks 1930 one. That this was done is was bad enough but not only did they substitute the 1930 version of this movie in my movie library but they edited my invoice after the fact to say that the 1930 version of the movie was what I ordered.

That really pissed me off.

Well the guy did the best he could. He refunded the price of the picture and left the 1930 one in my library with the assurance that if the 1938 version became available to Amazon Prime for streaming again it would restored to my library automatically, but there is no way this should have been done without notification and even if I had been noticed the editing of my existing invoice to indicate a purchase I never made is beyond the pale.

Now in fairness the act of substituting the 1930 version might have been (and likely was) some kind of global edit in their system so they might not have realized it would have edited the invoices of old purchases, but they SHOULD have known.

There are three lessons to this story

  1. When you “buy” a movie or TV show from Amazon prime make sure you know you’re not “buying” a movie in the same way as a DVD, you’re buying a license for unlimited streaming of the movie for as long as Amazon has the rights to it, nothing more. Make sure you know this before you buy.
  2. When you have a digital order or any order from amazon for that matter look up the invoice and when it says “Print it for your records” do so the very day you made the purchase because you can not trust that the records in the Amazon system stored digitally will be the same as the day you bought.
  3. If you actually want to be sure that you will own a movie that you want BUY A HARD COPY

For myself Trust is gone I have made my last streaming purchase from Amazon, it will be BluRay or DVD’s or VHS tapes (I have my old Dawn Patrol copy around here somewhere) for me and when it comes to any other purchases from Amazon you can be damn well sure I’ll print out a physical copy of the order the moment I make it.

I can’t think of a greater incentive to go to your local department store and buy your goods in person.

Closing thought: Given what we’ve seen from other digital services like Youtube I think rules 1 & 2 should concerning Amazon should always apply across the digital world, particularly if you’re a conservative as I would not trust any of these services to refrain from creating a false digital trail for their own ends.

Disney has another flop on its hands

Posted: July 30, 2023 by John Ruberry in business, entertainment, media, News/opinion
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By John Ruberry

“There it is, dear,” I whispered to Mrs. Marathon Pundit last Sunday during the seemingly endless parade of movie trailers as we awaited Oppenheimer (great film, by the way), at AMC Village Crossing in Skokie, Illinois last Sunday, “that is Disney’s next flop.” 

“That” was Haunted Mansion, which is yet another movie based on a Disney theme park attraction. Disneyland, Walt Disney World, and Tokyo Disneyland all have Haunted Mansions. The last time I was visited Disney World, Little Marathon Pundit and I went on the Haunted Mansion ride, way back in 2001, neither of us were impressed. 

And do you know what? Barring an unexpected flocking to the Haunted Mansion movie turnstiles, I have already been proven right about the film, which stars LaKeith Stanfield Tiffany Haddish, and Owen Wilson, and it includes appearances by Jamie Lee Curtis and Danny DeVito.

Disclosure: Other than the below trailer, I haven’t seen Haunted Mansion, nor the 2003 Disney film, The Haunted Mansion, which starred Eddie Murphy. Nor do I ever intend to see either. However, I might take a look at Muppets Haunted Mansion, a Disney Halloween television special which first aired in 2021.

You know when a movie is in trouble when a two-minute-long trailer can’t make it look appealing.

The Murphy vehicle made money, but it was critically panned. The new Haunted Mansion is currently receiving a 41 percent Tomatometer at Rotten Tomatoes. 

Here is the opening sentence of Manohla Dargis’ New York Times review: “There is a mansion, it is haunted, boo, blah, the end.”

Disney’s woke remake of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, which featured an African American Ariel, at best will make a modest profit for the studio. Other recent House of Mouse family-oriented flops include Elemental, Strange World, and Lightyear. The latter includes a same-sex kissing scene.

Back to the new Haunted Mansion: Its director, Justin Simien, who is African American makes note of the setting of the movie, New Orleans. “I felt it was really important for the lead to be Black, because this is set in New Orleans and it’s an 85% Black town,” Simien told Yahoo Entertainment. Adding, “I wanted to make [the movie] as Black as I can because that’s New Orleans.” Oh, while New Orleans has been a majority African American town for decades, it is currently has roughly a sixty-percent Black population. 

Okay, Simien and Disney can make any kind of movie it wants. But instead of focusing on a movie that is “as Black as I can,” why not, instead produce a movie with a compelling storyline and great performances from actors, regardless of their race? While it’s impossible for any entertainment endeavor to please everyone, even with family-oriented projects, why not try to attract as many people as possible?

In defense of New Orleans, it is widely considered to be the most haunted city in America–again, regardless of race, so it is a good choice for the setting of Haunted Mansion.

Does Disney want to keep making bombs? It appears that it does.

Next year, in yet another remake, a live action version of Snow White will hit theaters. In the Grimm Brothers tale, the authors make it clear that Snow White had “skin white as snow, lips red as blood, and hair black as ebony.” A Hispanic woman will play the lead in the 2024 film. As for her seven dwarves, they’ve been recast with a multi-racial group of six men of average height–with just one dwarf to aid her in her struggles, which presumably will include battling the patriarchy, represented by the Huntsman, and maybe every once in a while, the Evil Queen. And in the new Snow White, will we learn why the Queen turned evil? I’m predicting the patriarchy will be at fault. Oh, don’t forget that Huntsman.

Walt Disney had many gifts, and a crucial one that made his studio a success is that he knew time-tested stories were also solid material for movies, which is why Walt made animated versions of classic fairy tales, including Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, and of course, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. And Walt didn’t rehash the same movies.

Contemporary Disney movies are diverse in casting, but not diverse in regard to imagination.

What’s next, besides a new Snow White, for Disney’s movie wing?

Back to Dargis’ New York Times review:

She looked back to NY Times critic Elvis Mitchell’s rundown of the Murphy Haunted Mansion, where he wrote that it was “only a matter of time before Parking Lot: The Movie and People-Mover: The Motion Picture” would hit the local cineplex. Well, that hasn’t happened. Yet.

On the other hand, there are over 150 Grimm Brothers tales, most of which haven’t been made into feature films.

Oh, one more idiotic thing about the new Haunted Mansion. Why was it released in July, instead of October? You know, when Halloween is? I know what stupid looks like–it has big mouse ears.

Meanwhile, the Sound of Freedom, made with a modest budget, is a financial success.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

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