FILM REVIEW: The Iron Lady

The Other Half and I finally saw Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady, on the MLK holiday. As expected, it is an acting tour de force from La Streep, definitely worthy of an Oscar. As expected, Streep was received her record 17th Oscar nomination (14th as Best Actress) this week. She already has two Oscars (1982's Best Actress, Sophie's Choice; 1979's Best Supporting Actress, Kramer vs. Kramer) at home but it's been nearly 30 years since her last win. Come on, people, she's the greatest actor of all time, so she should have the highest award for excellence in film acting, the Academy Award.

Anyway, the particular vehicle which Meryl Streep is using to attempt to win her 3rd Oscar is a biography of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. It really is pretty incredible source material. It seems like a cliche, but sometimes truth is really harder to believe than fiction. A person who was the daughter of the owner of a greengrocer becomes the first female head of state of one of the countries who have a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, in other words, one of the world's superpowers. And she ends up becoming the longest serving Prime Minister of her country in the 20th century.

The screenplay is by Abi Morgan, and is somewhat unconventional. Most of the story is told as flashbacks from an elderly (and clearly mentally infirm) Lady Thatcher after she is no longer Prime Minister and is still daling with the death of her longtime husband Denis Thatcher from a decade before.
Denis is played well by Oscar-winner Jim Broadbent. The make-up on Meryl is stunning, so that not only is she doing an incredibly accurate impersonation of Margaret Thatcher as we remember her from the 1980s, but also a very believable look as a very old woman. We are used to seeing Meryl disappear into her characters, so one doesn't think one is seeing Meryl Streep on screen *acting* but instead one is following the travails of her character. The Iron Lady is another one of those cinematic experiences.

The sections of the film which follow Thatcher's rise to power and depict some of her important  moments in power are the high points of the film and are quite exciting. The problem is that they are bookended by returns to the present day with a portrayal of a feeble-minded, depressing Thatcher as a lonely, needy old woman. The acting is impeccable throughout, despite despising Thatcher's politics, Streep makes your empathize with the humanity of her situation. In fact, the film is surprisingly apolitical, mainly including politics to show Thatcher's consistent philosophy without ever really questioning its impact on people and effectiveness.

Overall, The Iron Lady is worth seeing for Meryl Streep's astonishing performance as well as an  interesting excursion through 1980s Great Britain.

Title: The Iron Lady.
Director: Phyllida Lloyd.
Running Time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.
MPAA Rating: Rated PG-13 for some violent images and brief nudity.
Release Date: January 13, 2012.
Viewing Date: January 16, 2012.

Plot: B-.
Acting: A+.
Visuals: A-.
Impact: B+.

Overall Grade: B+ (3.50/4.0).

Celebrity Friday: Alan Turing Gets Honored With British Stamp

Alan Turing, the gay mathematician who helped the British win World War II by breaking the German's Enigma code, is being honored by his country with an official stamp in their "Britons of Distinction" series. 

The first-class stamp tribute, naming him as one of 10 ‘Britons of Distinction’, comes at a time when there is still a campaign running seeking a posthumous pardon for his conviction for homosexuality in 1952.

The stamp will be released in Britain on 23 February from Royal Mail. Today, there are an estimated 2.5 million stamp collectors and gifters in the UK and millions more worldwide.

Turing was a mathematician and computer scientist, whose work with the code-breakers at Bletchley Park helped to speed up the end of the Second World War.

The Cambridge don had invented the Turing machine, a calculator capable of solving any mathematical problem, which was created in his head many years before the technology existed to build the actual computer.

Interestingly, in researching this blog post I discovered that Turing was also a staunch atheist, which in my book is another excellent reason that he is such a great person!

GODLESS WEDNESDAY: Ricky Gervais

Ricky Gervais appears on the cover of New Humanist magazine where he is very explicit about his godlessness.

Here's a delightful excerpt from the interview but you should really go there and read the entire thing:

Did you lose your faith or never have any?

I used to believe in God. The Christian one, that is. (There are a few thousand to choose from. But I was born in a country where the dominant religion was Christianity so I believed in that one. Isn't it weird how that always happens?) Luckily I was also interested in science and nature. And reason and logic. And honesty and truth. And equality and fairness. By the age of eight I was an atheist. (That word shouldn’t even exist. It shouldn’t be needed. But it does. And it is.)

You studied philosophy at university – which philosophical idea has turned out to be most useful?

A few spring to mind. Bertrand Russell said, “No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.” That became more profound once I’d become famous. Ha Ha. And I love “There is no god higher than truth” – Mahatma Gandhi.

I wish there were more celebrities were open and honest about their atheism or agnosticism.

FILM REVIEW: Tinker, Sailor, Soldier, Spy

I saw Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy at the Landmark Theaters E-Street Cinema in Washington, D.C. with some co-workers. I had never read the John Le Carrré’s classic bestselling novel on which the film is based or seen the classic BBC adaptation starring the great Sir Alec Guinness but I had heard a radio interview with Gary Oldman  which intrigued me.

The basic outline of the story is about the search for a possible Russian double agent at the very top echelons of the British Intelligence Service (called M.I.-6) in the mid 1970s at the height of the Cold War between the West and the Soviet Bloc. There are four main suspects, codenamed (you guessed it) "Tinker," "Tailor," "Soldier," and "Poor Man" with "Beggarman" being the codename given to the main protagonist portrayed by Oldman, whose character's name is George Smiley.

The movie is set in London in the 1970s and the filmmakers have taken their charge very seriously, meticulously re-creating a 1970s workplace with a striking lack of racial or ethnic diversity, ubiquitous smoking and inappropriate social situations. Watching the movie in 2011 one is also immediately struck by the lack of technology we take for granted: no computers, no cell phones (not even cordless phones!), no satellite/GPS technology.

The investigation into the mole involves a lot of examination of papers and starts off incredibly slowly. For the first ten minutes of the movie there is almost no dialogue and almost no action to speak of. I believe the film makers are trying to put the audience in the position of the characters where both groups are starting with no information and trying to piece together what is going on from various cues and small, disconnected bits of information.

In fact, communication and the movement of information (or intelligence) between individuals is a central theme of the film. Multiple times, a question is asked of one character to another and the director cuts to a different scene without explicitly depicting the answer to the question being given. The audience is required to infer the answer to the question from subsequent scenes and actions by the characters. This is similar to how Oldman's Smiley has to infer the answers to questions he has about the motivations behind the actions of his four "old friends" who are now his main suspects for betraying their country.

Oldman's Smiley is a quiet, horn-rimmed glasses and tweed-jacket wearing middle-aged British bloke. He looks more like an accountant than an international spy with a license to kill. Most of the "action" per se is in watching Oldman's reactions as he doggedly chases the truth and he sifts through the responses people are giving him to his questions. However, as the movie unspools the pace accelerates faster and faster, like a ball of twine rolling down hill. The audience has to pay more and closer attention to keep hold of the thread.

The rest of the cast is also stellar, featuring John Hurt, 2011 Best Actor Oscar-winner Colin Firth, Inception's Tom Hardy and PBS's Sherlock Ian Cumberbatch.

Title: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
Director: Tomas Alfredson.
Running Time: 2 hours, 8 minutes.
MPAA Rating: Rated R for violence, some sexuality/nudity and language.
Release Date: December 9, 2011.
Viewing Date: December 16, 2011.

 Plot: A.
Acting: A.
Visuals: B+.
Impact: B-.

Overall Grade: (3.5/4.0).

Godless Wednesday: Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011)

This week on Godless Wednesday we are commemorating the untimely passing of Christopher Hitchens, who has been the public face of godlessness for a decade at least.

Here's an excerpt of part of an obituary of Hitch from Slate magazine:

Born in Portsmouth, England, in 1949, Hitchens studied at Oxford before launching his journalism career in the 1970s with the magazines International Socialism and the New Statesman. In the early 1980s, he emigrated to the United States, where he was a regular columnist at The Nation for two decades before parting ways with the liberal magazine after proudly disagreeing with its editors about the Iraq war.

Hitchens won the National Magazine Award for commentary in 2007, the same year that he became an American citizen on his 58th birthday. Foreign Policy named him to its list of the top 100 public intellectuals the following year, and Forbes magazine labeled him one of the 25 most influential liberals in the U.S. media in 2009, a distinction that took some by surprise given Hitchens's vocal support of George W. Bush's war on terror.

He was a frequent guest on news programs and at public debates, and rarely passed up the opportunity to defend his positions when given the opportunity to do so. He was the author of nearly 20 books, including God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, Hitch-22: A Memoir, and Arguably, a collection of his more recent essays that was published earlier this year.

Hitchens remained steadfast in his criticism of religion even in the face of his grim prognosis. In an August 2010 interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, his colleague at The Atlantic, Hitchens made it known that even if he were to somehow recant his devout atheism on his deathbed, any apparent conversion would be a hollow gesture. "The entity making such a remark might be a raving, terrified person whose cancer has spread to the brain," he said. "I can't guarantee that such an entity wouldn't make such a ridiculous remark. But no one recognizable as myself would ever make such a ridiculous remark."

Eye Candy: Daniel Louisy

Daniel Louisy is a Black British model who was a finalist in an international Calvin Klein underwear modelling competition and who has been featured on blogs such as Dark Flex and (of course!) David Dust.

I especially like these black and white images of Daniel. You would never be able to tell he is nearly 6-foot-5-inches!

You can see more shots of Daniel (in color) or follow him on Twitter or Facebook.

Celebrity Friday: Theo James

Every once in a while I am channel surfing and come across the show Bedlam on BBC America. I always stay and watch it for awhile, hoping for glimpses of stunningly gorgeous British actor Theo James who plays Jed. According to his Wikipedia page, Theo James was born Theo Taptiklis in December 16, 1984, which makes him 26 years old.

He apparently has decent role in the next Underworld movie and was recently named a "Star of Tomorrow." Remember where you saw him first!

BOOK REVIEW: Blackout & All-Clear by Connie Willis

Connie Willis is one of my favorite science fiction authors, having written the incredible Doomsday Book (see my A+ review). Last year she returned to the time-travelling universe of Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing Of The Dog with the duology Blackout/All-Clear.

The diptych Blackout/All-Clear was immediately critically acclaimed and became Willis' second book to win both of the top awards in science fiction, the 2011 Nebula award and the 2011 Hugo award.

The books use the assumption that by 2060 time-travel is possible, although due to the chance of changing the future by changing the past, it is mainly only used by academics. The books are set in Oxford University and generally involved graduate students who need to go back in time as part of their "field research" for their studies on particular historical events.

The first thing to realize about Blackout/All-Clear is that it is really not two books, it is one book split into two parts, so you should not expect a conclusion at the end of Blackout. In fact, I would strongly recommend that however you procure Blackout to read it, you should save yourself the anxiety and just get the second half of the book as well, All-Clear.

The main characters are Michael Davies, Polly Churchill and Merope Ward who are sent back into World War II Britain as Mike Davis, Polly Sebastian and Eileen O'Reilly, respectively.

One of the most interesting things Connie Willis does is depict what life really was like to live through the Blitz, one of the most important and harrowing time periods in history, for any civilization. She does this through the seemingly insignificant details of how The War affected everyday, unknown people every day. Of course, what is also amusing and entertaining for the reader is that she also includes people who are famous now but who were not necessarily so famous then (Agatha Christie comes to mind).

Another important feature of the book to me was its depiction of gender. The fact that two of the main characters are women (really barely more than teenagers) in the mid-1940s decades before the equal rights movement allows Willis to really reveal the contours of sexism behind the veneer of polite British society.

One thing all time-travel stories have in common is that they have rules, generally the rule is that the time travelers can not produce a paradox (like going back in time and killing your own father or grandfather before you were born because then how could you be alive to go back in time in the first place?). Willis plays on this fact, and the idea tat no author would ever kill of one of her three central major characters to raise the level of suspense to heart-pounding levels.

In the end, the books end on something of an emotionally manipulative note, but that decision really ensures that readers of Blackout/All-Clear will not forget the experience any time soon.

Title: Blackout
Author: Connie Willis
Length: 512 pages.
Publisher: Spectra.
Published: February 2, 2010.

PLOT: A-.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: A.
WRITING: A.



OVERALL GRADE: A- (3.83/4.0).

Title: All Clear

Author: Connie Willis

Length: 656 pages.

Publisher: Spectra.

Published: October 19, 2010

OVERALL GRADE: A- (4.0/4.0).


PLOT: A.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: A+.
WRITING: A.

Ab Fab, Sweetie Dahling!

All the gay blogs are a buzz with the news that nearly 20 year after the first episodes aired in the United Kingdom, the classic comedy Absolutely Fabulous starring Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley is shooting new scenes for a Christmas special episode.

US OPEN 2011: Kvitova Upset 1st Round, Sharapova Survives Scare

2011 Wimbledon champion Petra Kvitova was unable to continue her momentum in grand slam matches, hitting more than 50 unforced errors to lose in the first round of the US Open to Alexander Dulgheru 7-6(3) 6-3. Kvitova's disappointing loss eas the biggest upset of the day as the #5 seed on the women's side departed.

#3 seed Maria Sharapova gutted out her 12th consecutive 3-set match of 2011 against British phenom Heather Watson who seemed unfazed by the 3-time major champ's firepower. Sharapova won 3-6 7-5 6-3.

Venus Williams won her 1st round match winning 6-4 6-2 hitting 1 more winner than  unforced errors, looking in pretty good form even though she had not played a single hardcourt tour match this summer.