Movies – Page 8 – artdiamondblog.com

“Engrossing, Brain-Tickling” Refutation of Al Gore’s Global Warming Assertions

“The Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg in “Cool It,” a documentary based on his book.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT review quoted and cited below.

(p. C8) Debunking claims made by “An Inconvenient Truth” and presenting alternative strategies, “Cool It” finally blossoms into an engrossing, brain-tickling picture as many of Al Gore’s meticulously graphed assertions are systematically — and persuasively — refuted. (I was intrigued to hear Mr. Lomborg say, for instance, that the polar-bear population is more endangered by hunters than melting ice.)
. . .
. . . “Cool It” is all about the pep: playing down the talking heads and playing up the “git ‘er done.” If algae can suck up carbon dioxide and spit out oil, what on earth are we worrying about?

For the full review, see:
JEANNETTE CATSOULIS. “Global Warming and Common Sense.” The New York Times (Fri., November 12, 2010): C8.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date November 11, 2010.)

The documentary is based on the book:
Lomborg, Bjørn. Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.

“Burning Bush” Depicts Communists’ Diabolical Harassment of Jan Palach’s Family

“BURNING BUSH; Tatiana Pauhofova in Agnieszka Holland’s story of Prague under Communism.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT review quoted and cited below.

(p. C6) The Polish director Agnieszka Holland’s magnificent docudrama, “Burning Bush,” is a three-part mini-series made for HBO Europe that remembers the Soviet crackdown in Czechoslovakia following the Prague Spring. It begins with the death in 1969 of Jan Palach, a Czech student who set himself on fire as a political protest, and follows the diabolical attempts of the Soviet occupiers to blacken his name by portraying him as a fraud and right-wing tool. The film’s depiction of the Communist regime’s relentless harassment of his family and its sowing of paranoia within the student resistance recalls the 2007 film “The Lives of Others,” about the Stasi’s operations in East Berlin. In the sophisticated worldview of “Burning Bush,” oppression may win in the short term, but the spark that ignites freedom movements, once lighted, can’t be extinguished.

For the full review, see:
STEPHEN HOLDEN. “CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK; Still Meaty, Film Festival Lightens Up.” The New York Times (Mon., September 30, 2013): C1 & C6.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date September 29, 2013.)

Edison, Not Muybridge, Remains the Father of Hollywood

Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. A13) Wish it though we might, this strangely off-center Briton isn’t really the Father of Hollywood, nor even a distant progenitor of “Avatar.” The famous time-lapse images that he took for Stanford, proving that a horse does take all four hoofs off the ground while galloping–and the tens of thousands of photographs that he went on to make of birds flying and people sneezing or bending over and picking things up–were soon so comprehensively overtaken by newer technologies (lenses, shutters, celluloid) that his stature as a proto-movie-maker was soon reduced to a way-station. His contribution was technically interesting but hardly seminal at all. The tragic reality is that Thomas Edison, with whom Muybridge was friendly enough to propose collaboration, retains the laurels–though, as Mr. Ball points out with restrained politeness, Muybridge might have fared better had he been aware of Edison’s reputation for “borrowing the work of others and not returning it.”

For the full review, see:
SIMON WINCHESTER. “BOOKSHELF; Lights, Camera, Murder; The time-lapse photos Muybridge took in the 19th century were technically innovative, but they didn’t make him the Father of Hollywood.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., February 6, 2013): A13.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date February 6, 2013.)

The book under review is:
Ball, Edward. The Inventor and the Tycoon: A Gilded Age Murder and the Birth of Moving Pictures. New York: Doubleday, 2013.

Tesla CTO Straubel Likes Biography of Tesla

J.B. Straubel, Chief Technology Officer of Tesla Motors. Source of photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 2) J. B. Straubel is a founder and the chief technical officer of Tesla Motors in Palo Alto, Calif. The company makes electric vehicles that some compare to Apple products in terms of obsessive attention to design, intuitive user interface and expense.

READING I like to read biographies of interesting people, mostly scientists and engineers. Right now, it’s “Steve Jobs,” by Walter Isaacson. One of my favorites biographies was “Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla,” by Marc Seifer, which I read even before Tesla Motors started.
. . .
WATCHING I really like the movie “October Sky.” It’s about a guy who grew up in a little coal-mining town around the time of Sputnik. He fell in love with the idea of building rockets and the movie follows him through his high school years when he’s building rockets and eventually he ends up becoming an engineer at NASA. I watch it every year or so. It’s inspirational. I always come out of it wanting to work harder.

For the full interview, see:
KATE MURPHY. “DOWNLOAD; J. B. Straubel.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., April 7, 2013): 2.
(Note: ellipsis added; bold in original.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date April 6, 2013.)

The Difference Between Bogart’s Smart and Sinatra’s Cool

(p. A11) Everyone loved Old Blue Eyes and mourned him when he died in 1998. Everyone except Michael Kelly.
Kelly hated Frank because Frank had invented Cool, and Cool had replaced Smart. What was Smart? It was Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca: “He possesses an outward cynicism, but at his core he is a square. . . . He is willing to die for his beliefs, and his beliefs are, although he takes pains to hide it, old-fashioned. He believes in truth, justice, the American way, and love. . . . When there is a war, he goes to it. . . . He may be world weary, but he is not ironic.”
Cool was something else. “Cool said the old values were for suckers. . . . Cool didn’t go to war; Saps went to war, and anyway, cool had no beliefs he was willing to die for. Cool never, ever, got in a fight it might lose; cool had friends who could take care of that sort of thing.”
It never, ever would have occurred to me to make the distinction until I read Kelly’s column. And then I understood Sinatra. And then I understood Kelly, too.

For the full commentary, see:
BRET STEPHENS. “GLOBAL VIEW; Remembering Michael Kelly; A columnist who hated phonies, stood for truth, and died for his beliefs.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., April 2, 2013): A11.
(Note: ellipses in original.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date April 1, 2013.)

Sometimes There Are Second Acts in American Lives

“In the foreground, Ian Wolfe, Charles Laughton and Clark Gable in 1935’s ‘Mutiny on the Bounty.'” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. D10) In 1947 Charles Laughton’s career, if not quite on the skids, was definitely in the doldrums. Long acclaimed as Hollywood’s foremost character actor, he had made only one film of any artistic consequence, Jean Renoir’s “This Land Is Mine,” in the past seven years. The rest of the time he coasted, frequently indulging in self-parody–and nobody was easier to spoof than the man who played Captain Bligh in “Mutiny on the Bounty” and Quasimodo in “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” He wouldn’t have been the first actor to sell his soul for a swimming pool (or, in his case, an art collection). But with Mr. Laughton the waste would have been unforgivable, since he was, in Laurence Olivier’s words, “the only actor I ever knew who was a genius.”

Instead, Mr. Laughton fooled everyone by returning to the stage for the first time since 1936. Nor did he choose a safe star vehicle for his return: He played the title role in the U.S. premiere of Bertolt Brecht’s “Galileo,” and he translated the play himself.
. . .
Except for “The Night of the Hunter,” Mr. Laughton’s post-“Galileo” career is no longer widely remembered save by scholars. But enough of it survives on sound recordings and kinescopes to prove that F. Scott Fitzgerald was all wet when he claimed that “there are no second acts in American lives.” Charles Laughton, who moved from England to America to seek fame and fortune and came perilously close to losing his soul along the way, had a second act that redeemed all that came before it. No actor could ask for a better curtain.

For the full commentary, see:
TERRY TEACHOUT. “SIGHTINGS; Charles Laughton’s Late Bounty.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., March 2, 2012): D10.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date March 1, 2012.)

Confident Winner Studied Economics at Cambridge and Directed Bronson in “Death Wish”

“Michael Winner, left, and Charles Bronson on the set of the 1974 film “Death Wish.” The two collaborated on several films.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT obituary quoted and cited below.

(p. B8) Michael Winner, the brash British director known for violent action movies starring Charles Bronson including “The Mechanic” and the first three “Death Wish” films, died on Monday [January 21, 2013] at his home in London. He was 77.
. . .
Mr. Winner’s films viscerally pleased crowds, largely ignored artistic pretensions and often underwhelmed critics. He directed many major stars in more than 30 films over more than four decades.
. . .
Mr. Bronson played Paul Kersey, a New York City architect who becomes a vigilante after his wife is murdered and his daughter is sexually assaulted by muggers.
. . .
Michael Robert Winner was born in London on Oct. 30, 1935. The son of a well-to-do business owner, Mr. Winner graduated from Cambridge, having studied law and economics.
. . .
He was confident on set, sometimes bordering on the dictatorial. “You have to be an egomaniac about it. You have to impose your own taste,” he said. “The team effort is a lot of people doing what I say.”

For the full obituary, see:
DANIEL E. SLOTNIK. “Michael Winner, 77, ‘Death Wish’ Director.” The New York Times (Tues., January 22, 2013): B8.
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the slightly different title “Michael Winner, ‘Death Wish’ Director, Dies at 77.”)
(Note: ellipses and bracketed date were added.)

“It’s Kind of Fun to Do the Impossible”

(p. 284) “It’s kind of fun to do the impossible,” Walt Disney once said. That was the type of attitude that appealed to Jobs. He admired Disney’s obsession with detail and design, and he felt that there was a natural fit between Pixar and the movie studio that Disney had founded.

Source:
Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.

The Entrepreneurial Resilience of a Business School Dean

“Mark Zupan is the dean of the Simon School of Business at the University of Rochester. Baggage carts once were his salvation.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. B4) Once I landed in Boston without my wallet or any money, I was able to put into practice what I learned from watching the wonderful movie “The Terminal” featuring Tom Hanks.

Like the character he portrayed, Viktor Navorski, I wandered through the airport and rounded up and returned six baggage carts. I was refunded enough change to be able to afford the subway fare to get to my first meeting. Then, I was able to borrow enough cash from the amused alum I was meeting with to get through the rest of the day and back home to Rochester that night after my assistant faxed a copy of my driver’s license and passport to me.
I have to admit I felt a little idiotic rounding up the carts, but it was one of my finest entrepreneurial ventures.

For the full story, see:
MARK ZUPAN. “FREQUENT FLIER; How to Cope at the Airport Without a Wallet.” The New York Times (Tues., September 4, 2012): B4.
(Note: the online version of the article is dated September 3, 2012.)

The Mockingjay as Symbol and Reality

A burning Mockingjay symbol appears on this movie poster for “The Hunger Games.” Source of poster: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. D4) “They’re funny birds and something of a slap in the face to the Capitol,” Katniss explains in the first book. And the nature of that slap in face is a new twist on the great fear about genetic engineering, that modified organisms or their genes will escape into the wild and wreak havoc. The mockingjay is just such an unintended consequence, resulting from a failed creation of the government, what Katniss means when she refers to “the Capitol.” But rather than being a disaster, the bird is a much-loved reminder of the limits of totalitarian control.
. . .
I asked Joan Slonczewski, a microbiologist and science fiction writer at Kenyon College in Ohio, about her take on the mockingjay. Dr. Slonczewski, whose recent books include a text and a novel, “The Highest Frontier,” teaches a course called “Biology in Science Fiction.” The tools needed to modify organisms are already widely dispersed in industry and beyond. “Now anybody can do a start-up,” she said.
That’s no exaggeration. Do-it-yourself biology is growing. The technology to copy pieces of DNA can be bought on eBay for a few hundred dollars, as Carl Zimmer reported in The New York Times in March. As to where D.I.Y. biology may lead, Freeman Dyson, a thinker at the Institute for Advanced Study known for his provocative ideas, presented one view in 2007 in The New York Review of Books. He envisioned the tools of biotechnology spreading to everyone, including pet breeders and children, and leading to “an explosion of diversity of new living creatures.”
Eventually, he wrote, the mixing of genes by humans will initiate a new stage in evolution. Along the way, if he is right, the world may have more than its share of do-it-yourself mockingjays.

For the full story, see:
JAMES GORMAN. “SIDE EFFECTS; D.I.Y. Biology, on the Wings of the Mockingjay.” The New York Times (Tues., May 15, 2012): D4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date May 10, 2012.)

Lucasfilm Will Build Somewhere “That Sees Us as a Creative Asset, Not as an Evil Empire”

“Lucas Valley in Marin County, Calif., where residents’ objections led George Lucas to abandon a bid to expand operations at a new site near Skywalker Ranch.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A13) SAN RAFAEL, Calif. — In 1978, a year after “Star Wars” was released, George Lucas began building his movie production company far from Hollywood, in the quiet hills and valley of Marin County here just north of San Francisco. Starting with Skywalker Ranch, the various pieces of Lucasfilm came together over the decades behind the large trees on his 6,100-acre property, invisible from the single two-lane road that snakes through the area.

And even as his fame grew, Mr. Lucas earned his neighbors’ respect through his discretion. Marin, one of America’s richest counties, liked it that way.
But after spending years and millions of dollars, Mr. Lucas abruptly canceled plans recently for the third, and most likely last, major expansion, citing community opposition. An emotional statement posted online said Lucasfilm would build instead in a place “that sees us as a creative asset, not as an evil empire.”
If the announcement took Marin by surprise, it was nothing compared with what came next. Mr. Lucas said he would sell the land to a developer to bring “low income housing” here.
. . .
Whatever Mr. Lucas’s intentions, his announcement has unsettled a county whose famously liberal politics often sits uncomfortably with the issue of low-cost housing and where battles have been fought over such construction before. His proposal has pitted neighbor against neighbor, who, after failed peacemaking efforts over local artisanal cheese and wine, traded accusations in the local newspaper.
The staunchest opponents of Lucasfilm’s expansion are now being accused of driving away the filmmaker and opening the door to a low-income housing development. That has created an atmosphere that one opponent, who asked not to be identified, saying she feared for her safety, described as “sheer terror” and likened to “Syria.”
Carl Fricke, a board member of the Lucas Valley Estates Homeowners Association, which represents houses nearest to the Lucas property, said: “We got letters saying, ‘You guys are going to get what you deserve. You’re going to bring drug dealers, all this crime and lowlife in here.’ “

For the full story, see:
NORIMITSU ONISHI. “A Pyrrhic Victory for Foes of a New Lucasfilm Project; In Lieu of digital Studio, Plan for Low-Income Homes.” The New York Times (Tues., May 22, 2012): A13 & A19.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story is dated May 21, 2012 and has the title “Lucas and Rich Neighbors Agree to Disagree: Part II.”)

“Mr. Lucas said Marin needs affordable housing. A resident called his plan “class warfare.”” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.