movies Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

“The Librarians” FILM SCREENING

Big Jim and the White Boy

Purloined from the NYS Writers Institute email

“The Librarians” FILM SCREENING, 7 p.m., Friday, February 20, 2026

Page Hall – University at Albany Downtown Campus
135 Western Avenue, Albany, NY 12203 See map.

(United States, 2025, 92 minutes, color. Directed by Kim Snyder)

Join us for a screening of this surprise hit documentary film, followed by a conversation and Q&A with a panel of local librarians, including:

Alicia Abdul of Albany High School
Roger Green of the Friends and Foundation of the Albany Public Library
Amanda Lowe of the University at Albany Libraries.

The film profiles librarians across America as they face and combat book-banning— defending intellectual freedom on democracy’s frontlines amid unprecedented censorship in Texas, Florida, and beyond. The film features librarians who have been fired for refusing to remove books from the shelves, or simply for questioning the directive to do so.

The New York Times said, “From its superb opening-credits sequence paying tribute to card catalogs of yore to its sharp selection of vintage clips and intimate reportage, ‘The Librarians’ is as well-crafted as it is profoundly alarming.”

Cosponsored by the Capital District Library Council (CDLC)

FFAPL

Speakers for the Friends and Foundation of the Albany Public Library, Tuesdays at 2 pm at the 161 Washington Avenue branch.

January 27 | Book Review | These Truths: A History of the United States by Jill Lepore. Reviewer: James Collins, PhD, Prof. emeritus, Anthropology Dept, Program in Linguistics & Cognitive Science, U. at Albany, SUNY.

February 3 | Book Review | The Trial, the 1925 German novel by Franz Kafka. Reviewer: Joshua Bovee, copy editor and local author.

February 10 | Book Review | An Afternoon with the “Slow Horses,” Mick Herron’s Spy Thriller series in Books and TV. Reviewer: John Rowen, former president, Friends of APL.

February 17 | Illustrator Talk | Marcus Kwame Anderson, Deputy Director, Underground Railroad Education Center, discusses his most recent graphic novel, written with David Walker, Big Jim and the White Boy: An American Classic Reimagined.

February 24 | Author Talk | Avery Irons, prize-winning author, now a local but born & raised in central Illinois, discusses & reads from her new book, Belonging to the Air.

First Pres, Albany

Beacon In The Park is a two-day arts celebration at First Presbyterian Church of Albany, featuring a juried art show, a Gershwin concert, docent-led tours, and a special lecture on Tiﬀanyʼs inﬂuence in the Capital Region.

Free and ticketed events welcome all ages.

Movie review- Wicked: For Good

My wife suggested we see the musical Wicked: For Good in early January. It was down to two shows a day in one of the smaller rooms at the Spectrum 8 in Albany. (In fact, the sign outside suggested it was showing Zootopia 2.)

I did see the first film, which I liked well enough. Still, as I wrote, ” I will probably see Wicked For Good, but it will make me cranky.” Yeah, I was feeling a bit manipulated about seeing another film.

So I’m here to report that, much to my surprise, I liked the second film a bit more than the first. Maybe it was my lowered expectations. Perhaps it’s because the film’s first half felt padded. I liked the darker tone and the unhurried pace.

In the sequel, Glinda and Elphaba were estranged and even antagonists for a time. So it was satisfying that their friendship survived the stressors, perhaps how real-life friendships sometimes work.

Even more than the first movie, it had a political subtext. Was Glinda selling out or working through the system? Should the animals rally around Elphaba’s leadership? It’s challenging to change the power of public perception, even when it’s based on lies.

There’s Dorothy!

There were some good songs that I was unfamiliar with. But mostly, I liked how the 1939 Wizard of Oz film timeline was grafted onto this film. Sometimes, it was at arm’s length; you never saw Dorothy in closeup. The storylines for the Tin Man and Scarecrow worked, though the Cowardly Lion, less so. And the movie explained some storylines involving the Wizard, one of which gutted the wondrous one.

The critics were so-so about the movie (67% on Rotten Tomatoes), though the fans were more forgiving (93%). Ultimately, the film lives on the passions of Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, which generally carry the day. Unfortunately, Michelle Yeoh’s singing as Madame Morrible was subpar; one is pleased with her character’s fate.

Movie review: Marty Supreme

Timothée Chalamet

My wife and I went to see the new movie Marty Supreme at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany in late December. It’s on many Best Picture lists. Rotten Tomatoes, which gives the film a 94% positive rating, says the director/co-writer Josh Safdie had “the uncanny gift of crafting extraordinary stories from life’s most mundane moments.”

This is a movie about “Marty Mauser, a young man with a dream no one respects, who goes to hell and back in pursuit of greatness.” His greatness lies in his skill at ping-pong or table tennis. His “hell and back” is almost entirely of his own making.

It is very loosely based on a guy named Marty Reisman. Reisman acknowledged that some elements in the movie were accurate, including the scenes with the Harlem Globetrotters.

You want to root for the underdog in a sports movie, and ultimately, this is one. Rudy should make it on the Notre Dame team. Ray should have people come to his Field of Dreams.

Or maybe it’s not. Critic Alan Zilberman wrote: “Safdie’s film is less of a sports drama and more of an anxiety-fueled nightmare, a sustained effort to put the audience into the mental and physical space of a fast-talking operator who only tells the truth when it is convenient.” True enough.

Unfortunately, I found I didn’t care if Marty “made it” or not because Marty is an ass who uses his friends, his family, women, and total strangers to achieve his goal. The fact that he hates his job as a shoe salesman, which he’s pretty good at, might have made him more likable. But no.

Shark Tank!

The character I liked the most is rich guy Milton Rockwell, played by the Shark Tank investor Kevin O’Leary, who serves a demeaning yet oddly justified punishment. There’s a New York Times article, How Kevin O’Leary Made His ‘Marty Supreme’ Character More Cutthroat, which is an interesting read.

Director Josh Safdie likes to use non-actors in his films. He’d watched a TED Talk Pico Iyer delivered on Ping-Pong as a guide to life and “came away thinking that no one might be better suited to playing a humorless, uptight, domineering British table tennis official in 1952.”

I will say that the table tennis play was reasonably entertaining.

But at the end, with the seeming payoff, I didn’t care. I didn’t believe that the final event transformed Marty. Partly, the 2.5 hours were too long. The late, great Roger Ebert noted that “no good movie is long enough and no bad movie is short enough.”

My blogging buddy J. Eric Smith wrote that he hadn’t seen Marty Supreme and won’t “Oscar voters (and the marketing shills who serve them) fall in love with certain performances/actors/musicians in ways that are absolutely inexplicable to me, often creating eye-rolling results in their awards. Currently/recently, among my film peeves, I’d say that the deeply, smugly, annoying Timothée Chalamet appearing as an Oscar contender/fave multiple years in a row is madness.” Sure, even though he spent an hour a day to get his acne-scarred face.

As someone who liked Chalamet in the Dylan film A Complete Unknown, I nevertheless get Eric’s point. The Rotten Tomatoes audience was only 83% positive about Marty Supreme. If you see it and like it, please let me know why.

Movie review: Hamnet

director Chloé Zhao.

My wife and I looked forward to seeing the new movie Hamnet. So in mid-December, we went to the Spectrum 8 in Albany.

This is what I liked: the mysterious nature of Agnes (Jessie Buckley), who is a healer and a bit of a mystic. Unsurprisingly, Will (Paul Mescal) is captivated by her. There’s definitely serious chemistry there. After she becomes pregnant, and despite resistance from both their families, they marry.

Wait. Do you know what this sounds like? The actual courtship of Anne Hathaway and William Shakespeare, who got married in 1582. The story is based on Maggie O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet. Due to the non-standardization of English in 16th and 17th-century England, Anne/Agnes, and for that matter Hamnet/Hamlet, are essentially the same.

This is something we unfortunately did not like: the dialogue was often hard to follow. Sometimes, it was volume, sometimes the words, occasionally both. And it wasn’t just us; I could hear other people in the theater whisper, “What did they say?”

Language barrier

I have a working theory about this. From the Times of London: “Chloé Zhao…, said she understood only a third of the language and depended on [Mescal] to guide her on set.” She said: “When I was on set of Hamnet, when Paul was delivering his speech, I only understand a third of it, technically, because I don’t understand what those words mean.”

Further, she noted, ” Paul said to me, ‘Listen, if Shakespeare is performed right, you don’t have to understand what they’re saying. You feel it in the body, the language is written like that.’”

I think there is an element of truth in that. Still, I’m more aligned with Adrian Chiles in the Guardian. “You know what that is, don’t you? That’s balls, that’s what that is. Of course, you need to understand what’s being said and what’s going on. At least I do. I’ve often been told not to trouble myself with such trifling details. Just let the artistry wash over you, I’m told, and consider how it makes me feel. Well, I’ll tell you how it makes me feel. It makes me feel confused, rather inadequate, frustrated, even angry, ultimately disengaged, and therefore bored. Just plain bored.”

I was confused and frustrated, for sure. Yet there was enough in the two crucial moments to sustain me. One is mentioned in the IMDb description and on Anne Hathaway’s Wikipedia page. (Yet there were people in the theater who were audibly confused.)

The other critical moment is the play’s production, which, interestingly, was MUCH easier to hear.

It was good enough that I might watch it again at home. Young Jacobi Jupe as the title character was quite good. But I would turn on the captions. Critics were 86% positive on Rotten Tomatoes, with audiences at 93% thumbs-up.

Movie review: Grand Hotel (1932)

Garbo, Crawford and TWO Barrymores

A few weeks ago, my wife and I went to the Spectrum Theatre in Albany to see the film Grand Hotel. I didn’t review it then because I was struggling for a narrative.

It came across, at least early on, as stagey and melodramatic. From Wikipedia: “Alfred Rushford Greason of Variety, comparing the film to the stage production, wrote, “[it] may not entirely please the theatregoers who were fascinated by its deft stage direction and restrained acting, but it will attract and hold the wider public to which it is now addressed.”

Once the story started revealing itself, it became more interesting. Doctor Otternschlag (Lewis Stone), a permanent resident of the Grand Hotel in Berlin, observes, “People coming, going. Nothing ever happens.” He is proven wrong on the latter point.

Felix von Gaigern (John Barrymore) has the title of baron, but the assets from his position are spent. He survives as a gambler and sometimes a thief. Otto Kringelein (Lionel Barrymore) has a fatal condition and decides to enjoy his remaining days at the luxurious hotel.

General Director Preysing (Wallace Beery) seems to be a decent industrialist trying to close an important deal. He hires aspiring actress Flaemmchen (Joan Crawford) as his stenographer.

Russian ballerina Grusinskaya (Greta Garbo) is no longer packing theaters, causing her despair.

Most of these folk interact. As we get to know them, we find that the thief has a conscience and that the industrialist is not as nice as he initially seems.

Kael says

The Times of London wrote: “Even all this brilliance of acting and even the remarkable ingenuity of the production cannot disguise the simple artifice of the whole construction, which seems all the more obvious in a plotless story designed to show a section of life.” I wouldn’t say plotless. It was more that the strands began to overlap.

The late, great Pauline Kael (1919-2001) wrote in the New Yorker: “There is every reason to reject Grand Hotel as an elaborate chunk of artifice… But if you want to see what screen glamour used to be, and what, originally, ‘stars’ were, this is perhaps the best example of all time.”

Notice the word “artifice” in both quotes. Yes, the acting seemed, at times, overly affected. Then I remembered that this movie was released in the early days of film with audible dialogue.

So I was glad I saw it. It has Garbo’s “I want to be alone” quote. Two brothers in the legendary Barrymore family are represented; Drew Barrymore is John’s granddaughter.