Anne's Arts & Activities Blog

 Most people who are scratching their heads about Kristen Stewart's Oscar nomination probably haven't seen the movie “Spencer” in which she embodies the spirit of Princess Diana. The film, which tells us it's “A fable from a true tragedy,” is a fictionalized account of the three-day Christmas holiday at Sandringham during which Diana realizes she can't stay married to Charles and keep her sanity. It features several dream/fantasy/hallucination sequences, including a few with Anne Boleyn, with whom Diana begins to identify. Another is when Diana is forced to wear the pearls Charles gave her for Christmas, knowing that he gave Camilla Parker Bowles the same necklace. At dinner, with the royal family staring at her, she pulls the necklace off and the pearls fall onto the table and into her soup. She spoons them up and crunches them. Weird, but an understandable analogy knowing what we know now about what she went through during that time. The film focuses quite ...

  If Hulu gives it a chance to catch on, I think “How I Met Your Father” will start growing on people, as soon as word gets around that it's not a sequel to or companion to “How I Your Mother.” The format and premise are almost the same and one of the main characters lives in Ted Mosby's old apartment, but (after two episodes at least) that's where the similarities end. Hilary Duff is likable and relatable as younger Sophie. Kim Cattrall as older Sophie, who is telling the story, is as wonderful as she always is. Whereas Bob Saget was heard but not seen in HIMYM, we do see Cattrall in her luxurious home in the year 2050. So far, we haven't seen the son to whom she is telling the story. I'm assuming that's because the father prospects are of different ethnicities and showing the son may reveal who the father is. Chris Lowell is charming in a goofy kind of way as Jesse, the mail lead, as is Suraj Sharma as Sid, Jesse's roommate. Tien Tran is over-the-top...

Dopesick intrigued me, but I knew I needed to be in the right frame of mind to start watching it. I was the news director of a small radio station in Appalachia and reported on the increase in overdose deaths, crime, child abuse and everything else that went along with the opioid crisis. There were more drug store break-ins and robberies during that time than in the two other decades I was a journalist combined. And all they took was Oxycontin. The incidents in which toddlers were found wandering the streets alone in just diapers became common. Domestic violence incidents rose dramatically. And if you think reporting on these things daily doesn't do a number on you, you'd be wrong, More important and impactful that any of that, however, was the death of a friend and co-worker at the age of 30. I still think of him every time I hear a Beatles song. The Sackler Family – who ran Purdue Pharma, creators of Oxycontin – is the villain in this story, as in real life, and th...

  If you've ever wondered what "Rocketman" would have been like without Sir Elton John's blessing or what "Bohemian Rhapsody" would have been like without Brian May and Roger Taylor, watch the David Bowie biopic "Stardust." It's the story of Bowie's 1971 road trip across America when his manager didn't get him a work visa so he could perform in the U.S. His publicist Ron Oberman (played by Marc Maron -- pretty much the brightest spot in the movie) does manage to get him some gigs -- like singing at a vacuum cleaner salesman convention -- and interviews with radio stations. But even when Bowie (Johnny Flynn) is singing, he's not singing Bowie songs. The filmmakers were not able to secure the rights to Bowie songs, it seems. We do see how the filmmakers imagine Bowie came up with Ziggy Stardust, which has to do with his half brother's schizophrenia and Bowie's fear that he will be the next person in his family to suffer from i...