Hope Tape

An extraordinary campaign to help find long-term missing children in South Korea. 

Here’s a link to the campaign video.

Juggernaut (1974)

It has a well-worn premise: a race against time to defuse a bomb aboard a transatlantic ocean liner.  The craftmanship elevates it to being tense and entertaining.  With a bit more of polish, this could have been a great movie.  Still, it’s a very satisfying, suspenseful thriller that, all these years later, holds up rather well.

The cinematography, the editing, and the action sequences are all noteworthy.  So is the way it keeps a sharp focus on the bomb-squad.  It has a star-studded cast that includes Richard Harris, Omar Sharif, Anthony Hopkins, and Ian Holm.  But it is Harris who is the absolute standout.  As the pipe-smoking, scotch-swilling leader of the bomb squad who mixes courage and discipline with sardonic philosophy, he gets the most screen time as well as the best lines.

Here is a link to a clip.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson

This is an 11-episode, Russian language adaptation that was produced and telecast in the erstwhile Soviet Union in 5 instalments, between 1979 and 1986.  It’s a thoughtful, painstakingly crafted production with a distinctive take on Holmes and his relationship with Watson.  In a nutshell: I think it’s marvellous. 

Compared to the most popular portrayals of Holmes, this imagines him as more down-to-earth and less hyper.  I guess the idea was also to avoid flashiness: something that has come to characterize the most well-known portrayals.  His relationship with Watson is one of deep mutual respect, and affection: he isn’t a sidekick.

The lack of flashiness is also evident in the narrative as well as the design.  But there is no mistaking the attention to detail.  You see it in the costumes, the interiors, the landscapes (it was shot in Riga), and the sound design. 

There’s also something else that one might little expect- a dash of humour, especially in how some of the characters are imagined.  Not in the case of Moriarty, though, let me hasten to add- that portrayal is chillingly sinister.

While the series is generally faithful to the stories/ books, some episodes mix a couple of stories together.   In addition, the first episode takes its time to set up the relationship between Holmes and Watson.  Here’s a link that lists the episodes (matched with the stories/ books).

The series is freely available on the YouTube channel of Lenfilm. 

Fun facts:

• A statue of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, as played by the actors, Vasily Livanov and Vitaly Solomin, in this series, has been erected in Moscow near the British embassy.
• For his portrayal of Holmes, Livanov was appointed an Honorary MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire).
• To commemorate the 120th anniversary of the first Sherlock Holmes novel, the Cook Islands produced a set of 4 silver coins featuring colour vignettes from this series.

Clarins- Naturally Moist Hands

To say that this is an unusual way to promote a hand cream is a colossal understatement.  This commercial is not for everyone, certainly not for someone with a fear of heights. 

In case you wonder, it features no CGI: everything that you see is live action (shot before the lockdown), performed by a single person.  As the agency behind this puts it:

You’ve probably heard expression ‘crazy Russian’ before, so, he is a good example of that. He does this kind of stuff for fun and sticks it to his Instagram. We got in touch with him and asked for his support.

Inventive Social Distancing

A selection of techniques from across the globe: link to video.

Bose- Dear Neighbour

According to the agency that conceived this brilliant ad:

From our own experience working from home, we realized that in a funny way we were getting to know our neighbors more than ever. Not by interacting with them, but by hearing their daily routine through walls.

That observation ties in perfectly with the product they’re promoting.

International Travel Amidst Covid-19

CNN’s Will Ripley documents his trip from Tokyo to Hong Kong.

Alternative link

Exploring Alternatives

This is how the people behind this YouTube channel describe what they do:

Each week, we post a new video about people who are living in tiny houses, vans, RVs, and boats; and people who are exploring long-term travel, minimalism, zero waste living, off-grid living, and more. We also sometimes share videos about our own lifestyle experiments.

Here’s a link to the latest video posted on their channel.

Dark Waters (2019)

Dark Waters tells the story of lawyer Rob Bilott’s multi-decade fight with DuPont over dumping toxic waste in water supplies across the United States.  If you’re not familiar with the case, I suggest first seeing the 2018 documentary, The Devil We Know.  While Dark Waters covers the same events over roughly the same timeline, I think it works better as a companion piece: a character study of the lead lawyer on the case, someone who the New York Times described as “DuPont’s worst nightmare”.

Here’s a link to the trailer of The Devil We Know.

Here’s a link to a trailer of Dark Waters.

Ordinary Love (2019)

In the words of one of the directors of the movie, this is a “love story about the small moments and big challenges that go to make up the journey of a long time love”.  Liam Neeson and Lesley Manville play a couple who have been a long time together, and have seen a number of ups and downs together.  Now, as they face one more big challenge, the movie opens a window to their day to day existence.  As one would expect in real life, there is a lot that is routine and mundane about their interactions and conversations. There are moments of joy and sadness and everything in between.  But through it all, the movie presents a portrait of comfortable intimacy that can only come with deep rooted love that doesn’t have to be demonstrated to be acknowledged and understood.

Here’s a clip from the movie.

Baghdad Central

This 6 hour mini-series is a crime drama set in Baghdad, soon after the 2003 US-led invasion.  The source novel, upon which it is loosely based, is noteworthy in telling a story of that time and place from an Iraqi perspective.  But whereas the novel portrays a vivid picture of the occupation, the adaptation eschews a lot of that in favour of  amplifying the level of drama- at times, a bit too much.  Still, the setting, as well as the performances, make it worth checking out.

Here’s a link to the trailer.

When Eight Bells Toll (1971)

Anthony Hopkins as an action hero?  Unless you are an old-timer or a movie buff, that might be hard to imagine.  It might be harder still to believe that, in this movie, his character was pitched as a James Bond alternative, and at one time, an entire franchise around him was envisaged.  From fisticuffs to gunfights, from wielding a crossbow to weaponising a welding torch underwater, he gets to show off his action hero skills to the hilt.

The curiosity value of that aside, Hopkins is fun to watch, but never more than when he throws around witty one-liners, or gets into waggish verbal exchanges.  And there are plenty of those.  We also get a glimpse of some traits that would become central to his Hannibal Lecter portrayal, twenty years later- the glint in the eye, the effortless switch from charming to ruthless.  In fact, one reviewer made the comparison thus:

Use some imagination, and perhaps this is Hannibal Lecter in an earlier vocation, before he went back to medical school.

Just don’t expect the plot to make much sense.

Here’s a link to the trailer.