Robert Redford is sleeping in his yacht when he hits something. The only dialogue happens in a brief voice over at the start of the film where he tells someone he is sorry and tells them that he did his best, for what that’s worth. What at first appears to be minor damage soon leads us from one disaster to another. While our hero has all the skills he needs to survive, his will to live is sorely tested. We watch for eight days, never seeing him away from peril, feeling his depression as he runs out of water, faces…
Category: movie review
Inside Llewyn Davis
“It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.” – Mark Twain Inside Llewyn Davis is an interesting film with a great soundtrack. Our hero Llewyn is a starving artist type in 1961 who sleeps on the couch of anyone who will let him crash with them for a night or two. He sings depressing songs about things like the death of Queen Jane Seymour and how he’s looking forward to being hanged. His manager might have been a success in Vaudeville, but he’s not good at picking talent now. We follow Llewyn around as he preforms, looks for places…
Philomena
A movie that makes you want to find a nun and bitch slap her into next week. Then go to next week and bitch slap her again. Philomena is the story of a woman looking for her son. We’ve kind of gotten used to the I Put My Child Up For Adoption, But Now Want To Find Them stories. Maybe there was a moral element to those stories as well, like Lady Edith Crawley on Downton Abbey. Many of these stories have a woman going away for a bit and then returning later, it seems to be more a matter…
Saving Mr Banks
Saving Mr Banks tells two stories, one about the horrors a writer goes through as her book is turned into a movie script, and one about the horrors of growing up with a drunk for a father. Both stories are a bit sad. I never read any of the Mary Poppins books, but I did like the Disney film. Great music, a fun cast, and arguably the last of the great Disney films. Since Saving Mr Banks is a Disney movie, Walt is shown to be Saint Disney who has to deal with the ridiculously demanding P.L. Travers who won’t even…
12 Years A Slave
About a hundred and fifty years ago, when Moby Dick and A Tale of Two Cities were popular books, slavery was all the rage in the Southern United States. The defining characteristic of slaves was the color of their skin. A slave might sell for $1000 dollars, which translates to about $27,000 today-give or take. So this means that poor white trash who see Free People walking around in the Northern States would be highly motivated to capture these people and ship them South. This is what happens to our hero here. He is a free man who is sold…
Kill Your Darlings
Once upon a time, people who wanted to be writers read books. As opposed to today, where they tend to watch TV and movies. The phrase Kill Your Darlings means to cut out all the flowery prose that sounds like Shakespeare or Keats or Chaucer or Proust. Little enough chance of that happening these days. This is due in part to a number of rebel rousing Beat writers-including our heroes here-Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and the star of the movie who inspired them all to greatness-Lucien Carr. Hmm, what’s that you say? You never heard of Lucien Carr?…
Nebraska
Bruce Dern is a doddering old man who thinks he won a million dollars because he received a Publishers Clearinghouse type letter. Nebraska tells the story of his quest to get his million dollars. The story is pretty simple. He and his son go on a road trip. Our hero is a little dim witted, but people want to believe that he has won because they want him to give them some of the money. All he really wants is a new pickup truck and a compressor. Like a Hitchcock film, that’s just the McGuffin. Nebraska isn’t really about winning a…
Blue Jasmine
About half of Woody Allen’s movies are pure and simple masterpieces. The other half are movies that I feel would have never been made if Woody Allen’s name wasn’t attached to them. Blue Jasmine falls clearly into the vanity project category. The all star cast does a good job of being angry and desperate, with Cate Blanchett doing the bulk of the heavy lifting acting insane and looking shell shocked. Maybe my lack of affection for Blue Jasmine has to do with my expectations from Woody Allen, I expected humor and at the very least some people I might care…
We’re The Millers
A small time drug dealer, who happens to be a middle class white guy, is robbed by three other middle class white guys. Our hero-the drug dealer-doesn’t have a gun and keeps all of his money and drugs in one spot so he can be completely wiped out when he is robbed. His Boss, a rich white guy who owns a whale and does ice sculptures in his spare time, tells our hero he has to go to Mexico to pick up some drugs. Our hero then decides that what he needs is a fake family to pull the whole…
The Butler
I’d never heard of Lee Daniels, so I thought that the Butler’s name was Lee Daniels. Turns out Lee is one of those Hollywood director types that thinks he made The Butler single-handedly without the help of writers, actors, or camera operators. I’ve been reading The Devil’s Guide to Hollywood by Joe Eszterhas and agree with his view of people who lay claim to a film the way Lee Daniel uses the possessive on The Butler-it’s wrong. Joe took to referring to any movie he wrote the script for as a Joe Eszterchas film, so I think this should be…