Catch Me If You Can

Not bad at all, although nothing outstanding either. Oddly perhaps, I found myself siding not with Leonardo DiCaprio's character but with Tom Hanks's one - not because I wanted the former to fail, but because I wanted the latter to succeed. After all, take away the former's physical attractiveness and there's hardly anything likeable left (although it's maybe not as bad as with his father, who seems to feel genuinely ashamed for having to do some honest work as a 'mere' employee).

Tommy's 30

Incredible. I still remember him as that post-adolescent young man in his early twenties that he was when we were staying close enough to see each other ... Incredible too (but marvellous!) that we still keep up with each other at least by emails after all those years.

HyperNormalisation

A film lasting almost three hours - throughout which I was unable to make out what the author [Mr Adam Curtis, as I then found out] wanted to say, except perhaps that he knew and/or cared nothing about history prior to his adolescence. It begins with the idea that plutocracy was more or less invented in 1975 New York, and it gets no better: apparently, doublethink in the USSR only developed in the 1980s and so on. At times it almost looked as if the film-maker believed that mankind waited for him to be born before politicians began to lie, media began to distort facts for propagandist purposes et cetera. Towards the end I actually began to wonder whether I wasn't watching something put together by a talented 13-year-old, still only discovering the basics of how this world turns round.

There are some faint hints the film was meant to say that politicians find the real world too complex and create a simplified picture of it. But then if that was true, surely the author wouldn't do the very same thing by presenting a world which is all about the US, the Arab countries* and Russia, and competely ignoring China?

 

* But not Afghanistan, which is ignored as well, it seems that after the 9/11 Americans went straight after Saddam Hussein without being bothered with Osama bin Laden.