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Art and Craft documents forger's fictions

A while back a story appeared about an art forger who'd pulled the proverbial wool over hundreds of art curator's eyes over a time period spanning several decades. The forger, Mark Landis, had been exposed, was still at it, and no legal body could jail him or force him to cease and desist because no transaction took place; Landis donated his forgeries, dressing up the con with a superbly crafted narrative about family inheritance, blue blooded ancestors wishing to give charitably to museums, and in many cases disguising himself as a (freakin!) priest to sell the lie. A fabulous moment in Art and Craft shows Landis blessing a passerby. We laugh and laugh some more. Anyway........cut to Brooklyn and a group (Sam Cullman ,  Mark Becker ,  Jennifer Grausman) of indie doc makers. There begins the longitudinal filmmaking process spanning - I believe - nearly three years. The resulting film, Art and Craft, is a must see. Mark Landis, as we learn, ha...
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Guardians of the Galaxy, Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and more.

Let's begin with the posters. True to space opera form, heroes (and heroines, and animals) in crisis/action poses. Robots, spaceships, good vs. evil. Standard stuff. Moving to shot comparison, the inevitable, obvious one, referencing Raiders, clearly done less as plagiarism and much more as homage. Moving back to Star Wars, Han Solo and Star Lord are mercenaries. Both are - at first - in it for the money. Indiana Jones has a higher calling/purpose - which will end with him never knowing what's inside the box/ark - just like we don't learn (until the very end) the meaning of Kane's "Rosebud" (some claim it's not about the sled but about Marion's sex). The parallels between Raider's closing shot and Citizen Kane's closing shot have been well established. Here are the two closing shots, just in case. Which brings us back to Han and Star. Heroic. Ready. Gunslingers. In another era, say fifty eight years ago, J...
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BY ORDER OF THE PEAKY BLINDERS

The Peaky Blinders were a criminal gang based in Birmingham, England during the late 19th century and, to a lesser extent, in the early 20th. Allow me to impose a break from the insane reality of American electoral politics and invite you to take a fictitious trip back to Birmingham, England, 1919. The obvious heir to Coppola's Godfather epic, with a dash of DePalma's Scarface, mixed together with Soprano-style family values gone hopelessly and blissfully wrong, Peaky Blinders is easily one of the most entertaining, well crafted, expertly written long form series I've seen in a very long time! I'd forgotten there was a genre called "epic gangster family saga" - yet here it is, the brainchild of writer/director Steven Knight (Locke, Dirty Pretty Things, and - yes - the creator of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, but that's another story - 'Millionaire was his day job until the high end work took over).  Playing the sociopathic...
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