Jazzy D's Soul Notes

Taking a leaf from Jon but mine will be more esoteric, some major films yes, but more indie and avant-garde films. Last week I did one - a normal music post - on The Hours with the music of Philip Glass.

Today the film is the seventies classic noirish American film Taxi Driver.

Bernard Hermann - Taxi Driver (Soundtrack Suite)



I love this man's music anyway. Next Monday a film that had a bug typewriter and a man that shot his wife like a William Tell mishap. These are clues.

ENJOY

Alan Bennett for the uninitiated like chocolate_frapp is an English actor, author, playwright, and screenwriter. He was born in Leeds and attended Oxford University, where he studied history and performed with the Oxford Revue. He stayed to teach and research medieval history at the university for several years. His collaboration as writer and performer with Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Peter Cook in the satirical revue Beyond the Fringe at the 1960 Edinburgh Festival brought him instant fame. He gave up academia, and turned to writing full-time, his first stage play, Forty Years On, being produced in 1968.

His work includes The Madness of George III and its film adaptation, the series of monologues Talking Heads, the play and subsequent film of The History Boys, and audio books, including his readings of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Winnie-the-Pooh.

Some trailers relating to his plays turned into films -

The Lady In The Van



The Madness of King George



The History Boys




These are essential readings too -

Last night i watched the 2019 docudrama Official Secrets on Amazon Prime. This film is based on the life of whistle-blower Katharine Gun who leaked a memo from GCHQ detailing that the United States wanted to eavesdrop on diplomats from countries tasked with passing a second United Nations resolution on the invasion of Iraq. She leaked a secret memo exposing an illegal spying operation by the United States of America, looking for information with which to gauge sentiment of and potentially blackmail United Nations diplomats tasked to vote on a resolution regarding the 2003 invasion of Iraq and thus the war would be am illegal one based on false information about WMD's.

The film stars Keira Knightley as the whistle-blower and Matt Smith (ex-Doctor Who) as the newspaper reporter from the Observer that broke the story from the leaked memo.

Thoroughly fascinating and entertaining it was plus a brilliant portrayal by Keira. I highly recommend it.

This is the trailer for this movie.

I just watched this new movie that has gone straight online passing the normal cinema distribution network which has been nabbed by Amazon on their Prime service. The movie is Caitlin Moran's semiautobiographical novel about a working-class Midlands kid from Wolverhampton who blags her way into a career as a music journalist. This has become a funny, good-hearted film that will cheer you up.

Movie trailer -



Actually, Caitlin was born in Brighton. Her father, who is Irish, was a "psychedelic rock pioneer" drummer who "did session work with many well-known bands in the Sixties" later "confined to the sofa by osteoarthritis". Moran lived in a three-bedroom council house in Wolverhampton with her parents and siblings, an experience she described as akin to The Hunger Games. Moran attended Springdale Junior School and was then educated at home from the age of 11, having attended Wolverhampton Girls' High School for only three weeks. She and her siblings received no proper formal education from their parents; the local council allowed them to do so, as they were "the only hippies in Wolverhampton". The children frequently occupied their time with simple games, such as throwing mud at their house. Moran describes her childhood as happy but revealed she left home as soon as she was able to do so at the age of 18.
She is a journalist, author, and broadcaster at The Times, where she writes three columns a week: one for the Saturday Magazine, a TV review column, and the satirical Friday column "Celebrity Watch".

Well, today is one of dullness and showers. At least we need the rain. I can watch more superhero movies and Tv shows that are currently airing or have aired. Using OnionPlay I have finally watched the Crisis on Infinite Earths Arrowverse crossover episode in the Batwoman series. Now that I can actually watch Batwoman I might try other episodes.
For my guilty pleasure I am watching the DC Comics Stargirl series. Thus is also on OnionPlay as well as Agents of SHIELD.

Stargirl takes up the mantle of her dad, Starman, who was part of the JSA that included The Flash or a pre-Crisis multiple universe version of him.

I see that our ITV 2 has taken up the new version of Roswell called Roswell,New Mexico. Not watched it as I feel that remakes are not as good as originals. See the shit they have done with Charmed for example. So my verdict as yet is undecided.

One really fun show was DC's Doom Patrol on the Amazon Starz site. I enjoyed watching that first season as much as the first season of Watchmen.

OnionPlay also had the Spider-Man Far From Home movie, plus Shazam! and the latest Harley Quinn movie. All good fun and not as serious as some of the others by Marvel or DC. Watched all of them as well as I missed these at the cinema before lockdown. In fact I can say that OnionPlay is much better than Shush.se.


I will post some trailers for the geeks who have not seen these shows.

Woken up early yesterday by very loud lightning and thunderstorms. Rain bouncing off the ground again. Unfortunately that pagoda in the garden was trashed by the weather, and was taken away this morning. However they plan to put one up again soon.

The heatwave has subsided and we are back into more milder weather patterns for the time being.

Last night I watched a sci-fi film on Netflix called Freaks. It was brilliant in my opinion and the young precocious lass - Lexy Kolker - was ace in it. Lexy played Robin as a seer in Agents of SHIELD.

Freaks Trailer



Melinda May and Robin "I Was A Mom"(AoS)




Warning - you might need tissues or a hankie watching these mekancholic scenes.

Last night I watched Spelling The Dream on Netflix.
Without no acceptation of what I would expect from this documentary and what might be elided I was pleasantly engrossed in it. These spelling competitions are probably catnip to documentarians and might have been for some time, but this one takes an unusual angle by probing the question as to why Indian- American kids have been national spelling bee champions for the last 12 years. Some of the factors suggested that as Indian kids tend to be multilingual, that includes both English and Hindi as well as less know Indian languages such as Telugu,  helps them to be whiz-kids (sorry for the pun) at spelling.

I also noticed that their grasp of prefixes, suffixes and the roots of words also garnered them to achieve such high degrees of vocabular heights.

Fascinating documentary though.

Eddie Murphy.

He had some of the biggest hits in the 80s with Coming to America, Beverly Hills Cop Part 1 &2, 48 Hours, Trading Places and even Golden Child.

What are your flashback films?

Tonight I watched on DVD from my collection - Enemy of the State - featuring Will Smith which also features Gene Hackman (The Conversation) and then from the MCU - Captain America Civil War.


Looking through my DVD collection I might watch The Lady In The Van or more MCU stuff.

I have been doing some binge-watching via Prime and BBC iPlayer recently.

I caught up with five episodes of Only Connect on BBC.

Watched a series called Primeval New World on Prime. !3 episodes that lasted one season. based on the old ITV Primaeval this Canadain production was just not as good as the Brit original. Mind you, the Brit original was marginally better but not much. It was eye candy. The idea of time portals randomly opening up to the dinosaur age is a good one but the storytelling floundered in the end.

Then there was this weird film called Midsommar. A 2019 film which is a folk horror film written and directed by Ari Aster and starring Florence Pugh, Jack Reynor, William Jackson Harper, Vilhelm Blomgren, Ellora Torchia, Archie Madekwe, and Will Poulter. It follows a group of friends who travel to Sweden for a festival that occurs once every 90 years and find themselves in the clutches of a pagan cult. Anyway, it was okay and apparently got very good critical reviews. I beg to differ.

The best series at the moment IMNHO has to be Pickard, followed by Supergirl and Thre Flash.

Apart from that, I have been engrossed in music and reading.

Some trailers of said drama -

Primeval New World - 2013



Original ITV Version -




On the whole, the first two seasons  of the original version was good.