Today’s Nova Scotia forecast is for heavy snow tonite — a snow-day tomorrow. If you’re looking for something to watch – read on.
On Kanopy, watch Fremont (2025). Fremont‘s great, it’s humorous and it’s bit absurd. A young woman, Donya, who worked as a translator for the US troops in Afghanistan, is “rewarded” with a new life in Fremont, California. She works in a fortune cookie factory, with an overbearing, and over-creepy boss. He promotes her to writing the fortunes, and cutting the strips of paper to fit into the cookies. This is a dark comedy. Watch the trailer.
Also on Kanopy there is the 2024 film, Thelma. It’s a feel good story about a 90-year-old grandmother who gets scammed over the phone out of $10,000. First she’s sad, then she’s angry and soon she wants to get even – or at least get her money back. In her freewheeling adventure – she uses a disability scooter with a male friend from a nursing home in tow. It’s funny and somehow believable. Here’s the trailer.
On the humour beat, I watched the third season of Fisk on Netflix. Every episode is brilliant and witty. Helen Fisk (played by Kitty Flanagan) is a lawyer in Melbourne, Australia who joins a small law firm to do wills and estate planning. To most viewers, it seems the dullest of legal specialties. Fisk’s clients are mainly people desperate to mine their loved-one’s will for a few extra bucks. In the office there is an anxious male receptionist, George, and the firm’s partners, a wonky sister and brother pair. The timing, the dialogue and the liveliness of the series is unique. Delightful. You’ll laugh for sure –even at the trailer here.
Below: Fisk, with brother and sister law partners, and George. The photo of two IRA women from the 70s are Dolours and Marian Price. Claire Danes looks back in The Beast in Me.
The Beast in Me is a 2025 series on Netflix. Aggie (played by Claire Danes), a writer, lives a quiet– if depressed– life in a town near New York. A wealthy real estate moghul, Niles (played by Matthew Rhys) and his second wife move in next door. Aggie has a few skeletons in her closet including the death of her young son, and the breakup of her marriage. But intrigued by Niles, his secrecy, his money and his flattery she decides to write his biography. His closet skeleton is the death of his first wife; some say he killed her. The series is in the “good enough” category. The first few episodes are better than the last few; the plot gets a bit crazy but overall on a cold, dark night – watch it with the door locked. The trailer’s here.
Jay Kelly is summed up by this commenter on the movie’s Youtube site
“Oh my goodness, this is my life exactly! MInus the looks, the money, the women, the traveling, the cars, the clothes and the charisma. Other than that, one hundred percent relatable.”
Except that George Clooney plays the rich and ageing movie star, Jay Kelly on Netflix. He is followed around by Ron, his long-suffering agent, and Liz, his short-tempered publicist. They have to push him harder and harder to ensure he both shows up on time and behaves well on film sets. Kelly has midlife a crisis over having missed his daughters’ growing up years; they are increasingly pulling away from him. In parts, the movie is funny – but somehow Kelly manages to have an epiphany or two before the end. Here’s the trailer.
“…of course painting is also not a coincidence that the word painting consists of the word pain.” Barbora Kysilkova
The Painter and the Thief is absolutely worth seeing. The trailer is here. It’s wonderful! In 2015, thieves break into a prestigious Oslo art museum and steal two paintings by Czech-born artist Barbora Kysilkova. When she finds out she’s at a loss – she fears the paintings would never be recovered. However, the thieves were sloppy and got caught on security cameras. Kysilkova wanted to know why they took these two paintings, and where the paintings were? After one thief, Karl Bertil-Nordland was released from a Norwegian prison, Kysilkova meets with him and asks if he’s willing to let her paint his portrait. Will he sit for several sessions so she can paint him? He agrees; they become friends. Kysilkova is skilled at setting him at his ease and dealing with his anxiety, drug/alcohol dependency and more. By the end of the film we find out more about the missing paintings, and Nordland tells her how much he appreciates her art and her intervention. It’s on Kanopy.
Finally, on CBC-GEM I highly recommend Say Nothing (2024). This is a 10 part Anglo-US series based on the best selling book of the same name by Patrick Radden Keefe. The series traces four decades of “the Troubles” in the north of Ireland and focuses on Gerry Adams, the Price sisters and other well-known (and well respected) IRA comrades. Here’s the trailer. Say Nothing: A True Story Of Murder and Memory In Northern Ireland was a fascinating book (2018) which I reviewed in my blog here.
Another book that I think is essential to understanding Northern Ireland is Where Grieving Begins- a Memoir by Patrick Magee (2021). was a bomber and bomb maker in the IRA bomber Patrick Magee’s 2021 autobiography, Where Grieving Begins, a Memoir (building bridges after the Brighton bombing). Now at age 74, Magee once again lives in Belfast. He served more than 14 years in prison for multiple murders in the 1984 Brighton hotel bombing. He was released in 1998 as part of the Good Friday Agreement. For more, read a longer review in my newsletter here.
Never Stop Talking About Gaza
If there is one film to see this winter, it’s Oscar-nominated The Voice of Hind Rajab, by Tunisian woman director Kaouther Ben Hania. The film takes place in a call centre or a high tension situation room at the Palestine Red Crescent Society in Ramallah, the West Bank. Omar gets a phone call and begins to speak with six-year old Hind Rajab. She is trapped in a car in Gaza City. Her aunt and uncle as well as four cousins have been killed. Their bodies lie inside the same car; they were hit by shelling from a nearby Israeli tank. Only Hind survives.
The film is disturbing but not in the way you imagine– here’s the trailer. You worry about seeing a six-year-old girl amid blood and guts in a re-enactment of the IDF tank destroying her and everyone in the car. But the film’s “action” takes place in the call centre. The aid workers are desperate to get Israel’s clearance for an ambulance to rescue Hind. What should have been an eight minute trip from one part of the now destroyed Gaza City and another part of town ends up to be a three-hour nightmare.
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad is a sobering look at what is going on in Gaza, and how many people refuse to speak against Israel’s genocide. A former Canadian Giller book prize winner himself, El Akkad was invited but did not attend the Giller Gala in 2024. He writes he could not stomach the duplicity and double standard around discussions of Gaza and the Palestinians. He rages about the fact that when pro-Palestinian demonstrators disrupted the Giller ceremony, not one writer (he estimates about 200 Canadian authors were in the room) spoke up for the Palestinians and in support of the demonstrators.
There are other gems in the book. He writes about his experiences as an Arab, as a Muslim when he was a journalist at The Globe and Mail. This is an excellent and pointed book – one which must not be missed. And nothing is truer said than the title. In five years’ time, will everyone claim they always opposed Israel? Where are they today??
Another ruined dinner party... 