The King of Kings review – Charles Dickens retelling of the Jesus story does a serviceable job

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The famous author tells his son and their cat the story of Jesus in this mixed-bag family animation, voiced by an impressive cast This syrupy cartoon account of the life of Jesus (voiced by Oscar Isaac) is narrated, with consummate weirdness, by Charles Dickens (Kenneth Branagh). It’s in fact based on a story Dickens wrote for his children (and wasn’t published until 1934, decades after his death). The idea is that Dickens is telling the story of the New Testament to his young son Walter (Roman Griffin Davis) and Walter’s impish cat, explaining to the King Arthur-obsessed Walter how Jesus was the real King of Kings and all that. And so we see Walter and Charles, in their mid-19th-century garb, wandering through scenes of JC’s life nearly two thousand years earlier, from the nativity to the crucifixion – much like Scrooge and his spectral buddies in A Christmas Carol as they wander through past, present and future Christmases. It rather drags out what is already a pretty long running ...
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‘He was always voraciously watching’: Scorsese’s secret life as an obsessive VHS archivist

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The Oscar-winning director has donated over 50 storage boxes of tapes that show a devoted interest in recording films and shows from the '80s to the 2000s

In the basement of the University of Colorado Boulder’s main library, an 85-year-old stone fortress built in the Italian rural style, the archives of the school’s Rare and Distinctive Collections occupy rows of shelves as far as the eye can see. Here, amid yellowed books, historical maps and medieval manuscripts, Martin Scorsese has quietly made public a very private preoccupation. More than 50 storage boxes hold thousands of VHS tapes that contain films and television programs Scorsese recorded directly from broadcast television. The renowned director and film preservationist, it turns out, was also, for decades, a prolific guerrilla archivist.

Long before YouTube and Netflix gave the world instant access to a deep repository of media, Scorsese began the project of amassing his own private on-demand video library. In each week’s TV Guide, he would note the movies and shows that caught his interest. A full-time video archivist in Scorsese’s New York office would then record the telecasts from a kind of audiovisual hub made up of multiple VCRs and monitors, which could often be active at all hours. The tapes were meticulously labeled, cataloged initially using a library-like card system and later a computer, and filed away for Scorsese’s personal viewing and research.

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