The Faculty Lounge

A Guide to Watching "Gaslight" (1944)

Last fall, I hosted an online discussion about the movie Gaslight, the 1944 thriller that gave rise to the pop psych term gaslighting, which typically refers to psychologically manipulative and controlling behaviors in interpersonal relationships, the political realm, and our workplaces.

This session was part of a film discussion series hosted by the University of Chicago’s Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults, an intensive, non-credit, four-year course of study of the Great Books of the Western canon. The film night discussions are among the program’s complementary activities. (I’m a student in the Basic Program, having just completed my 3rd year. I hope to share some of that experience in future posts.)

Despite the growing popularity of the term gaslighting, it’s quite possible that many folks have never watched the movie. In fact, prior to agreeing to host the film night session, I hadn’t seen the movie in years and wondered if it would hold up as a dramatic story, rather than simply being the inspiration for the term as used today. Fortunately, Gaslight gave us plenty to talk about, and we didn’t spend a lot of time on its contemporary relevance.

If you'd like to do your own viewing of Gaslight, the following notes are slightly edited from what I posted for those attending the film night:

How to Watch

• Search “Gaslight 1944 streaming” for options. You will likely pay a small rental fee, around $3.
• Gaslight is also available on DVD. Look for the WB Archive Collection print.
• Don’t confuse an earlier, 1940 British production with the 1944 American production. The 1944 production has received the most critical attention.

Short Intro from imdb.com

“Ten years after her aunt was murdered in their London home, a woman returns from Italy in the 1880s to resume residence with her new husband. His obsessive interest in the home rises from a secret that may require driving his wife insane.”

Main Cast, Director, and Honors

• Charles Boyer as Gregory Anton (Academy Award nominee)
• Ingrid Bergman as Paula Alquist (Academy Award winner)
• Joseph Cotton as Brian Cameron
• May Whitty as Miss Thwaites
• Angela Lansbury as Nancy (Academy Award nominee)
• Barbara Everest as Elizabeth

Directed by George Cukor.

Gaslight won an Academy Award for “Best Art Direction – Black and White” and received Academy Award nominations for “Best Motion Picture,” “Best Screenplay,” and “Best Cinematography – Black and White.”

A Starter List of Questions

Light Years: Documentary Film Aging (Positively and with Creativity)

A few weeks ago, I was lucky to attend a screening of a new documentary film, Light Years. Director Claire Marie Panke has put together a beautiful and worthwhile documentary about three older adults and how they approach aging.  The film would make a great supplement to classes in Elder Law or Estate Planning. Here is the film synopsis:

Light Years celebrates positive aging, creative aging, conscious aging ~ and the power and potential of midlife and beyond. 

The film introduces Dee, a writer and professor who savors her life-long passion for African dance; Anita, whose work as an actress, dancer, playwright and poet spans eight decades and a host of adventures; and Paul, who started painting at 51 and helps  redefine “retirement” to be more about service than shuffleboard.

Dee, Anita and Paul know that whether eighteen or eighty, we all need meaningful relationships, a sense of purpose, and an outlet for personal and creative expression.  They reveal that the second half of life can yield profound rewards, modeling the ways Baby Boomers have reframed what our later years can look like.

This is the heartbeat of Light Years: the choice to remain engaged in community, to continue learning, giving back, and growing as we grow older.

As their stories evolve over several years, Dee, Anita and Paul face physical challenges and threats to their independence. Each responds with a resiliency that transcends those challenges and affirms our potential for renewal at any age.

More details are available here.

In a talk-back after the film screening, the director spoke about some of our own negative stereotypes of the elderly as "prejudice against our future selves." That was a new way (for me, at least) of thinking, and definitely made me sit up and take notice of my own attitudes and experiences. As a Trusts & Estates lawyer and teacher, I talk often about death and dying. I work with older people all the time. And now that I've turned 50, people who are 70, 75 and older don't seem that "old" any more....This film was inspiring.

Long Shadow

Last weekend I recommended David Reynolds’s excellent documentary on the Armistice of 1918, which is available on Netflix. If you are interested, Prof. Reynolds is also host of an outstanding 3-part BBC documentary on post-war Europe called Long Shadow. It is based on his award-winning book, The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century.

The Long Shadow documentary is absolutely superb and quite timely. Reynolds shows how the chaos unleashed by World War I gave rise to a high-stakes ideological competition between three diametrically-opposed systems: communism, fascism, and liberal democracy. The competition was reflected in the revealing diversity of the various national war memorials, from the Cenotaph monument in London to Mussolini’s Redipuglia memorial in northeast Italy. 

One of the documentary’s many interesting themes is how Britain managed to avoid the self-destructive ideological extremism that plagued continental Europe after World War I. Stanley Baldwin and Ramsay MacDonald may not be household names today, but those two prime ministers helped Britain chart a middle course at a time when the other major European powers veered off into fascism or communism. As Prof. Reynolds explains in his book:

“Mass democracy exploded across Europe in the wake of the war, inspired in very different ways by [Vladimir] Lenin and [Woodrow] Wilson. But its destabilizing effects were soon being channeled by new political elites—the Bolshevik concept of a vanguard supposedly preparing the way for eventual proletarian control, the fascist response in the form of a ‘superman’ leader directing a dominant party. By the mid-1930s much of continental Europe was polarized between left and right, even in Britain’s co-victor, France.”  

But unlike its continental neighbors, Britain pursued a centrist path:

“In Britain, by contrast, the sudden tripling of the electorate in 1918 was successfully absorbed within parliamentary politics. The threat of a crippling general strike never materialized. Under Ramsay MacDonald the Labour Party was desperate to prove it did not pose a threat to the Constitution, the empire or pound. The party’s ideology drew less on continental Marxism than on indigenous traditions of nineteenth-century radicalism and nonconformist Protestantism. At the same the Tories, led by Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain, won the support of many of the newly enfranchised women and skilled workers, attracted by policies such as a ‘property-owning democracy.’”  

The dull pragmatism of British centrism paid off in spades in the years after World War I. In foreign affairs, Britain served as a critical bulwark against Nazi fascism in World War II and Soviet communism in the Cold War. At home, Parliament’s middle-of-the-ideological-road policies gave rise to a growing economy, a stable democracy, and a diverse society, especially in the metropolis of London. The British record of achievement in the twentieth century should not be forgotten, even amid the economic uncertainty created by the impulsive Brexit vote in 2016. Now more than ever we live in an age of charismatic politicians, but boringly competent leaders in the tradition of Baldwin and MacDonald have much to recommend them.

The series is filled with fascinating insights and observations. The third episode begins with Prof. Reynolds describing how, during the 90 years between 1914 and 2004, an Upper Silesian coalfield began as part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, then became part of Poland, later fell under the control of Czechoslovakia, then went back to Poland, only to subsequently come under the military domination of Nazi Germany, then reverted after WWII to Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia, and finally ended up in the new Czech Republic, and now the coalfield is part of the European Union. The tumultuous history of the twentieth century is thus encapsulated in the history of a single piece of coal. 

Long Shadow is a great series and it is available for free on YouTube (in High Definition). You can find Part I (“Remembering and Understanding”) here,  Part II (“Ballots and Bullets”) here, and Part III (“Us and Them”) here. 

Active Measures

My movie recommendation for the weekend is “Active Measures,” a new documentary by Jack Bryan. The title refers to the Russian government’s use of covert warfare against its adversaries, especially in the United States but also in Britain, Estonia, Georgia, and Ukraine.

The film’s focus is on the three-decade-long financial relationship between Donald Trump and Russia, which Bryan argues is the key to understanding the connection between Moscow and the Trump campaign during the 2016 election. The documentary is riveting, fast-paced, and includes interviews with John McCain, Hillary Clinton, Evan McMullin, Michael McFaul, and many others. It is available on Amazon Prime and the movie trailer for Active Measures is available here.

On a related note, the Justice Department on Wednesday filed yet another indictment of Russian military intelligence officers. Here is a copy of the latest indictment, which charges 7 GRU officers with conducting “persistent and sophisticated cyber criminal intrusions” that targeted American, Canadian, and European entities for hacking and disinformation campaigns. According to the Justice Department, the Russian government attacked a range of western institutions, including the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Interestingly, the Justice Department filed the indictment in the Western District of Pennsylvania, which reflects the expansion of the Russia investigation beyond the Special Counsel’s office to include a number of U.S. Attorneys’ offices. 

Here is FBI Director Christopher Wray’s statement regarding the most recent Justice Department indictment of Russian government officials:

“The actions of these seven hackers, all working as officials for the Russian government, were criminal, retaliatory, and damaging to innocent victims and the United States’ economy, as well as to world organizations. Their actions extended beyond borders, but so did the FBI’s investigation. We worked closely with our international partners to identify the actors and disrupt their criminal campaign - and today, we are sending this message: The FBI will not permit any government, group, or individual to threaten our people, our country, or our partners. We will work tirelessly to find them, stop them, and bring them to justice.”

And here is a link to the Justice Department page that includes all of the indictments filed thus far by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office in its investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. 

Our Man in Tehran

If you are looking for something to watch this holiday weekend, I highly recommend “Our Man in Tehran,” a two-part PBS Frontline documentary. It provides an absolutely fascinating window into Iran, unlike anything I have ever seen before.

The film is narrated by Thomas Erdbrink, a New York Times correspondent based in Tehran. Erdbrink’s long and unique experience in Iran gives him an extraordinary perspective on the country, one unmatched by any other western journalist. In 2003 he married Newsha Tavakolian, an Iranian artist and photojournalist, and they have lived in Tehran ever since. The loving but argumentative relationship between Erdbrink and Tavakolian is worth the price of admission, but so too is the remarkable range of personalities and stories in the documentary. I have never before seen such an intimate portrait of Iran.

The film’s central theme is the heavy human cost of the Iranian theocracy’s use of law as a bulwark against social change. The whole documentary is unforgettable and often quite moving. Part One is available here on the PBS website and Part Two is available here.    

The First World War from Above

A fitting film for Memorial Day is “The First World War from Above,” a short but engrossing BBC documentary hosted by the Irish journalist Fergal Keane. 

The Thin Blue Line

If you are looking for something to watch this weekend, the classic Errol Morris documentary The Thin Blue Line is available on Netflix and Amazon. It tells the story of Randall Dale Adams, who was put on death row in Texas after being wrongfully convicted of the 1976 murder of Dallas Police Officer Robert W. Wood.

When The Thin Blue Line premiered in 1988, Peter Applebome of the New York Times called it an “eerie cinematic evocation of a Texas frameup.” Although Morris’s film predated the internet and social media, and initially only had a limited release, it created a national outcry over the outrageous miscarriage of justice in the Adams case. Just one year after The Thin Blue Line premiered, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned Adams’s conviction and he was released from prison, having spent 12 years behind bars. 

Groundbreaking in 1988, The Thin Blue Line still exercises a deep influence on documentary filmmaking. In 2016 Morris did a fascinating interview with Slate, discussing how he made the film as well as his reaction to the 2015 documentary Making a Murderer, which bears many of the hallmarks of The Thin Blue Line. Here is the 1988 original trailer for The Thin Blue Line, courtesy of YouTube. It gives a nice taste of the film and its haunting soundtrack.

Follow the Money

The phrase “follow the money,” which seems ubiquitous lately, is one of the most famous and enduring legacies of the Watergate scandal. It was popularized by the classic Alan Pakula movie, “All the President’s Men,” which itself was based on the book of the same title by the Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

The phrase is used in one of the movie’s best scenes. With Woodward and Bernstein’s investigation stalled, a frustrated Bob Woodward (played by Robert Redford) meets with his secret Nixon Administration source, Deep Throat (played by Hal Holbrook), for guidance on how to proceed. The movie shows them meeting in the middle of the night in a Washington parking garage, just as Woodward and Deep Throat did in real life. In a scene filled with tension and mystery, Deep Throat explains to Woodward that the key to solving the riddle of Watergate is to “follow the money.”

Ever since then, the phrase “follow the money” has been synonymous with Watergate. But there is just one catch: Deep Throat probably never said “follow the money.”

Finding Vivian Maier

In 2009 an 83-year-old, destitute former nanny named Vivian Maier died in Chicago without a will and with no known heirs.

Vivian Maier’s story might have ended there, but it turns out she was no ordinary nanny. In battered suitcases and jam-packed storage lockers, she left behind more than 100,000 photographic prints and negatives that she took during her long and outwardly unremarkable life. Through an almost unbelievable sequence of fortuitous events, her photographs miraculously escaped a Chicago landfill and eventually became recognized as important works of art, leading Maier herself to achieve posthumous acclaim “as one of the 20th century’s great photographers.”

Nixon's Legal Battle with the NY Times and Washington Post

On Saturday afternoon I saw the outstanding new Steven Spielberg movie, "The Post." I highly recommend it, even though there is one important historical omission in the film.

The movie tells the story of the Washington Post's famous 1971 decision to publish the Pentagon Papers, a top secret study of the Vietnam War that exposed the government's long history of lying to the country about the stalemated nature of the conflict. Daniel Ellsberg, a former Marine officer and Rand Corporation analyst, leaked the classified study to the New York Times and later to the Post. The Times was the first to publish, setting in motion a dramatic showdown with President Richard Nixon.

The acting is terrific, particularly Meryl Streep as the Post's publisher Katherine Graham, the hero of the story. Against the advice of her lawyers, but with the enthusiastic support of her editors and reporters, Graham decided to publish excerpts of the classified study. The decision was legally and financially risky because, just two days earlier, the Nixon Administration had succeeded in securing a court order to enjoin the Times from continuing to publish its bombshell stories on the Pentagon Papers. Moreover, less than 24 hours after the Washington Post began to run its own Pentagon Papers stories, the Nixon Administration secured a temporary restraining order against the Post. 

Movie Review: Law School Confidential

There is a new documentary just out about law schools by the documentary film makers T and B Owen.  The video is available on Amazon Prime Video here for $2.99 HD or $1.99 SD if you want to save a buck.  The film features Colorado Law Professor Paul Campos and myself, and also tells the story of a Georgetown law graduate who has struggled to find a decent job, and another student who was admitted to Charlotte Law School through an "admission by performance" program with a 127 LSAT (bottom 1%).  Not surprisingly, she later flunked out.  There is a hilarious reenactment of my infamous Florida Coastal dean presentation using Legos and featuring a toy T-Rex as President Dennis Stone. (That alone should be worth the price of admission.)  The movie effectively explains how some law schools are taking advantage of students with poor aptitude for the study of law while advising students considering law school to be savvy about where they go and how much they spend.  While it can fairly be characterized as a cautionary tale about attending law school, the filmmakers avoid making overly broad generalizations popular in the "law school scam" movement, and overall, I think they weave a fair, compelling and entertaining narrative.  The film is 40 minutes long, and several parts of the film (or perhaps the whole thing) would serve as excellent material to generate discussion in a course on legal or business ethics.

And no, I was not paid to appear in the film, nor will I profit in any way from sales of the film.

Since I try to be a stickler for accuracy, let me note that there are a couple of minor factual errors in the movie, including one made by me. The narrator states that the median LSAT score is 150.  That is incorrect.  The median LSAT score is actually between 151 and 152, even though the range is 120-180 and 150 would logically be the median.  A 150 score is actually in the 44th percentile. 

In the film, I state that Charlotte Law School and Florida Coastal were, at one point, the two largest law schools in the country.  This is not accurate.  However, these schools did, at one point, have the largest 1L entering classes of any single campus law schools in the country. Florida Coastal had the largest 1L class for a single campus school in 2011 with 671 matriculating students.  Only Cooley, with four or five campuses, matriculated more 1L students overall.  In 2012, Charlotte had the largest 1L class in the country (again, other than Cooley), at 626 entering students, with Florida Coastal just behind with 580 students.  Because of high attrition and transfer rates, neither Florida Coastal or Charlotte ever had the largest enrollment overall.  While I regret my overstatement, I don't believe that it detracts from my point which is that these schools grew too large, too fast, and admitted many students who were destined to fail.

I welcome your comments on the film.

See the trailer here: Law School Confidential

Star Trek Copyright Infringement Claim Settles

I usually try to keep my geekery off the blog, but I've been watching the recent litigation involving the AXANAR (Star Trek fanfiction) film with interest in recent weeks. After the District Court for the Central District of California found on January 3 that the fanfiction film could not avail itself of the fair use defense to copyright infringement, the case went on to settle last week. The settlement reportedly includes the stipulation that the defendant adhere to a new set of fanfilm guidelines put forth by Paramount (which owns the relevant copyrights). These guidelines will likely affect future fanfilms. Presumably, if you adhere to the guidelines, you're working under a license from Paramount and won't have infringed copyright. The guidelines state that fanfilms have to be less than 15 minutes long and cannot use "Star Trek" in the title, among other things.

In some ways, it's actually helpful to fans when copyright holders set out guidelines like this, to make it clear precisely what fan activities are allowed with the copyright works. The Kindle Worlds program set up by Amazon a couple of years ago takes a similar approach to promulgating guidelines set out by the copyright holders of works included in the program to allow fans to make their own fanworks without infringing copyrights i.e., effectively under license from the copyright holders.

The downside is that it's possible, and indeed likely, that many of the guidelines now being put forth by copyright holders about fanfiction are actually more restrictive than, say, the fair use defense to copyright infringement might allow, but with the guidelines in place, many fans may take the path of least resistance (resistance is futile?) and comply with the guidelines for avoidance of doubt.

Creators of fanworks have not had much clear guidance from the law about when, and whether, their works are fair use - it's very difficult to make such determinations in the abstract and copyright law really requires these issues to be decided on a case by case basis. Several law professors (notably Rebecca Tushnet) have done a lot of extremely useful scholarly work over many years on fanfiction and copyright infringement, but we still have a long way to go in educating fan creators about their rights and obligations.

What kind of impact might the Star Trek infringement settlement have on the scope of fanfiction and fair use, if any? Or are we just seeing more of the same in the battle between content owners and fans?

With 13th, Netflix May Be Relaxing Its Streaming Policy a Little, Which is Good for Educators

Hi - I'm excited to be guest blogging this month about a few topics that I find engaging. I hope they are also relevant to many of you. Thank you to the moderators for this opportunity.  

Like many people, I scroll through Twitter looking for comments and articles about things that interest me. Last week, I saw the following exchange between film director extraordinaire Ava DuVernay and Alex Lauth, an employee of Villanova Law School:

@AVAETC I work at Villanova Law School and we want to have a showing of #The13th for students in our MLK programming week. Is that allowed?

— Alex Lauth (@AlexLauth) November 29, 2016

Yes. Public screenings of @13THFilm are allowed by Netflix in a first-of-its-kind general waiver ever made by the company. Show + share. ✊🏾 https://t.co/PnpSIefBiU

— Ava DuVernay (@ava) November 29, 2016

 

My interest was immediately piqued for several reasons. First, as a law professor committed to social justice, it is encouraging to read that law schools around the country are providing space to screen 13th, the Netflix documentary film directed by DuVernay centering on racial inequities in the American criminal justice system.

Second, I’ve been planning a January 2017 screening of 13th at my own law school, outside of my standard classes, that I'd like to be open to the full campus. I have a Netflix membership and could easily stream the film from my personal account. One of the items on my to-do list has been to figure out whether such an approach is permissible under both Netflix policy and current copyright law. This proved to be more challenging than I thought, so DuVernay’s announcement was quite timely.

I had experienced some difficulty determining Netflix’s full policy on streaming films for educational purposes, either inside or outside of the classroom. The Netflix terms of use state that the service is for personal use only, and users “agree not to use the service for public performances.” A public performance is basically a showing open to anyone other than family or a small group of friends. As the copyright owner of 13th, Netflix can limit how members use its service to watch the film and restrict larger performances. Section 106 of the Copyright Act gives copyright owners the exclusive right to, among other things, display and perform (show) films publicly. This arguably means that streaming for educational purposes is prohibited by Netflix's terms of use.

The Geography of Legal Thought

Each year I spend the first few minutes of my Civ Pro class, as I expect so many other profs must do, showing my students the death cage match from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. The battle between the “man with no name” and the baby-faced giant, all to decide who really owns a vehicle, sets up a lively discussion about procedural justice and modes of dispute resolution.

The second day I turn away from no-holds-barred adversarial battles and towards topics that are less traditional for Civ Pro classes. For reasons that at first clearly perplex my students, we take our second day in Civ Pro to discuss a book called The Geography of Thought, written by a psychology professor named Richard Nisbett. The book collects the results of decades of research by Nisbett and others, in which experiments are run on the cognitive styles of different cultures. In particular, he contrasts the cognitive style of east Asians – such as my students – with the cognitive styles of Europeans and Americans, such as myself.

The first interesting thing about Nisbett’s results is that cognitive differences are notable in very early childhood. They are in no way genetic – Chinese Americans, for example, test as Americans after a generation or two – but they are sufficiently deeply rooted in cultures that they show up before philosophies or dogmas can be taught with any sophistication.

12 Years a Slave: Race in Supreme Court Decisions

The second in a two-part post on my reaction to the movie "12 Years a Slave." See Part One Here. 

 How much of slavery’s dreadfulness do we see in our law and history? Is it enough? Americans in the founding era owned slaves. They sexually assulted slaves. They whipped slaves and they watched idly as child slaves were torn away from their mother slaves.

    To be sure, our history and jurisprudence do not have to be protracted atonements for the sins of our Fathers. We have come so far since three-fifths. But as we lionize the American Founders, it becomes too easy to argue that slavery was legal and moral in its day, or that the Constitution eventually became a blueprint for equality for blacks.

    In 1772, Great Britain’s highest court held that chattel slavery was unlawful in England. Revolutionary heroes must have feared England would take away their freedom not just to buy taxless tea, but to own and sell slaves.

    Fast forward to the present. In a mere twenty-five years from its 2003 decision limiting affirmative action in Grutter v. Bollinger, the United States Supreme Court told us that the day of racial equality would be upon us. That is now fifteen years from today. After two and a half centuries of African slavery in America and another century of active, overt injustice, is fifteen more years enough?

    In 1978, the Supreme Court mentioned slavery forty-one times in its seminal decision upholding race-conscious admissions in Bakke. Just this past year in Fisher v. Univ. of Texas, which again put the practice under strict scrutiny, that number dropped to ten, all in a concurrence penned by Justice Clarence Thomas. And in Shelby County v. Holder, the 2013 case dismantling the Voting Rights Act, the Court referenced slavery but once. That number may dwindle to zero the next time the Court takes on race.

    We will find out soon, when it passes judgment on Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, which examines Michigan’s constitutional ban on race considerations in public university admissions. The Court, which heard oral argument in this case on October 15, will likely hold that such bans are constitutional.

    The ablution of slavery from our legal precedents explains our Court’s evolution on issues of race. But have we come far enough to justify turning this bloodstained page?

    The level of satisfaction we convey with our history, our Constitution, and the state of race in America may represent its own kind of “unspeakable happiness.” I cannot yet say what we must do now, except, of course, remember. Nevertheless, I feel confident that if we see this movie we might share the same answer to a most pressing question. Is this enough?

12 Years a Slave: Unspeakable Happiness

Thanks for having me in the Faculty Lounge! For my first piece, I wanted to post something I wrote soon after seeing the movie, 12 Years a Slave, which deeply affected me. It's a bit charged, but it captures well how I felt after viewing the film. I hope you enjoy it. I'll post it in two parts; the next installment will come tomorrow.

Unspeakable Happiness


    Patsy is her master’s favorite. She picks over five hundred pounds of
cotton a day. Her beauty radiates obstinately through all of her sweat and
suffering. How does her master show his favor? He barely flinches when his
wife throws a whiskey decanter at Patsy’s forehead. He holds Patsy down
outside while he rapes her. When he’s finished, he slaps her hard across
the face.
    One day he finds that Patsy’s run off to a neighboring plantation. She
returned with a bar of soap, which the mistress had denied her. For this
transgression, he orders Patsy whipped. Finally, he finishes the deed
himself, flaying Patsy’s back until there’s little skin left.
    All Patsy can do is ask her fellow slave, Solomon, the protagonist of this
story, to end her life. She asks him to hold her head down in the nearby
river until she stops struggling, until she gets the only kind of freedom
that seems within reach.
    Solomon’s story, while replete with similar indignities, ends more gladly
than Patsy’s. He calls his eventual reunion with his family “an unspeakable
happiness.” After all, he lived to write the tale–Twelve Years a Slave–that
director Steve McQueen adapted for one of this year’s most acclaimed films.
I’ve never seen a film like it. More than any other historical movie I’ve
viewed, Twelve Years a Slave left me with a sense of being there.  For
anyone who cares about American law or history, I would venture to call it
required viewing.
    How did so many bystanders stand by and do so little? How could all these
people chant of freedom on Saturday, pray to a Christian god on Sunday, and
then on Monday, watch one human being lead another by chains on the cobbled
streets?
    Our understanding of American history, in particular the Constitution, must
account for this. Surely we try. Watching a movie like this one cannot help
but make me think we have largely failed.

Peter O'Toole Dies at 81

I know this isn't law related, but because "How to Steal a Million" with Peter O'Toole and Audrey Hepburn is one of my favorite films, I wanted to note O'Toole's passing. Story here.

Scarlett, Tara, and the Personality Theory of Property

Like Al, I also watched several hours of “Gone With The Wind” on Thanksgiving Eve (don't judge - there was a marathon!).  GWTW has fascinated me for as long as I can remember, but this time, I was most struck by Scarlett's pitch perfect demonstration of the personality theory of property.  This is evident throughout the film, and most notably in the last scene, where Scarlett hears the voices of her dearly departed father and Ashley Wilkes in her head.  After Rhett abandons her, she asks aloud, "What is there to do? What is there that matters?" and the following exchange ensues:

Mr. O'HARA: You mean to tell me, Katie Scarlett O'Hara, that Tara doesn't mean anything to you? That land is the only thing that matters. It's the only thing that lasts. 

ASHLEY: Something you love better than me, though you may not know it.

Mr. O'HARA: Tara - this is where you get your strength.

ASHLEY: Tara - the red earth of Tara.

Mr. O'HARA: That land's the only thing that matters, it's the only thing that lasts.

ASHLEY: Something you love better than me, though you may not know it, Tara.

Mr. O'HARA: ...From which you get your strength... 

ASHLEY: ... the red earth of Tara.


Mr. O'HARA: Land's the only thing that matters... 

ASHLEY: something you love better than me...

BOTH:  Tara...Tara!... Tara!... Tara!

SCARLETT: Tara! Home. I'll go home..... 

Tara is the place where Scarlett achieves self-realization.  It is the place where her memories and ambitions are rooted.  It is also the place over which Scarlett asserts an entitlement that is superior to that of either of her sisters (and fellow heirs) Suellen and Carreen (recall the great scene where Scarlett bosses the sisters around, forces them to pick cotton, and then slaps Suellen for yelling "I hate Tara" in the fields).  I know there are some GWTW fans out there - what other theories of property are on full display in the film?

Reboot City

I must admit to having succumbed to seeing the new Spiderman movie and enjoying it although I still don't think it beats the Toby Maguire version.  And of course the Total Recall reboot is imminently upon us and I've heard rumors of a Jumanji reboot as well.

Why are there so many reboots of relatively recent films coming out at the moment?  I understand that the Spiderman franchise was shaken up by various creative disagreements with the team involved in the previous series of movies.  But what about the others?  Is it cheaper to rewrite a relatively recent script than come up with new material? 

And if the studios are going down the 'reboot the 80s and 90s' path, what other movies would you like to see rebooted?

And are there any that definitely should be left alone?

Puzzled by Prometheus

With thanks to an unnamed source who drew this article to my attention, here's a link to a piece in The Guardian that attempts to explain some of those plot holes in Ridley Scott's Prometheus.  I was relieved to see I wasn't the only person stumped by the meaning of that first scene.

The Movie was Better than the Book?

I've just read an interview from The Paris Review with Gabriel Garcia Marquez in which he states that:  "I can't think of any one film that improved on a good novel, but I can think of many good films that came from very bad novels."

He doesn't give any examples of the latter ie good films from bad novels.  Can anyone think of any?  Usually I think films aren't as good as the books they are based on.