For Your Consideration (2006)

Christopher Guest comedy about the cast of a small independent film (called Home for Purim) whose egos run amok after the film garners some pre-mature Oscar buzz. Occasionally amusing this is one of Guest's weaker films. I thought that John Michael Higgins and the ventriloquist Nina Conti were the most consistently (dryly) funny people in this thing. **

Death Wish (2018)

Death Wish is essentially a 107 minute commercial for the NRA staring Bruce Willis. The casting is what the movie got right, if your going to remark the 1974 Charles Bronson classic there is really no reason to do so if you don't cast Willis in the lead. The update changes Paul Kersey from a New York architect to a Chicago doctor, but the plot is basically the same, a good man is driven to vigilantism when the police fail to prevent the murder of his wife and severe injury of his daughter. I had expected director Eli Roth to make this movie crazier, but its actually pretty conventional. Movie contains multiple appearances by Mancow Muller, to make it relevant I guess? **

The Breakfast Club (1985)

Somehow I had never seen The Breakfast Club before. I do however have kind of a funny story vaguely related to the movie. Some years ago my nephew got really into chess and my mom remembered that my dad had kind of a fancy chess set and asked him to get it out of storage to show their grandson. My dad claimed he did not remember this set, perhaps because he didn't want to look for it. Well a year or so after he died we finally found it in the attic. It had been boxed up and wrapped in newspaper, but not from our family's 1987 movie from Utah to Idaho, no from an earler 1985 move from our first house in South Jordan to the second. The newspaper that it had been wrapped in was a February 1985 issue of the Salt Lake Tribune which contains stories about Reagans State of the Union Address and Bill Clintons democratic response to it, as well as a positive review for The Breakfast Club.

Like the paper before me I to must give The Breakfast Club a positive review. Made during that period where John Hughes could do no wrong The Breakfast Club tells the story of five kids of different high school types, jock, nerd, princess, criminal and basket case, who spend a Saturday detention together and bond, something their respective cliques would not have allowed in a weekday high school setting. Weightier then the typical high school movie fair, The Breakfast Club has a been selected for preservation by the National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." This is also the movie that the term "Brat Pack" owes it origin to, as a magazine story about the cast was the first to use the term, one that would later be spread to include that whole young crew of actors who made there name in John Hughes and similar movies of the 1980's. The Breakfast Club is rated R, which I had not expected it to be, but is probably approrate for children over 13. ***1/2

Annihilation (2018)

Annihilation has a lot in common with its directors previous film Ex Machina, even though it is based on a pre existing novel and not an original composition like the earlier work. Both movies are science fiction films that aim to play with their viewers minds and feature actor Oscar Isaacs. Both films focus on issues of identity, something which director/writer Alex Garland has been interested in at least since his screenplay adaption of the novel Never Let Me Go in 2010, a story that is pretty literally about the search for ones identity. This all makes for an appropriate and satisfying theme for the work of a science fiction director.

Annihilation stars Natalie Portman as Lena, a former solder in the U.S. army turned Johns Hopkins cellular biology professor (there can't be many of those), whose special forces husband (Issacs) returns home after having been missing for around a year, lost on a secret mission. Shortly after his return Issacs gets really sick and the couple are relocated to a military facility in costal Alabama and Lena is brought up to speed on what her husband was doing. Around three years previous something fell on the cost from outer space and has subsequently grown into a large semi-translucent bubble that is gobbling up increasing amounts of land and sea. The government has succeeded in evacuating the area under ruse of a chemical spill, but with the rate the bubble keeps growing that is not a cover story they will be able to keep going much longer. Issacs had been lost as part of a group exploring the bubble, and the government is not sure how he got home. As the bubble has altering effects on biological life within its radius, Lena is a natural pick to join another, this time all female (refreshing) scouting party, as its makes its way inside to search for the objects impact sight.

The bulk of the films is Lena's group sojourn inside this bubble, which the army has taken to calling "the shimmer". There are some interesting visuals and scares along their journey, but in basic form the movie is a conventional special mission story, that is until towards the very end, when it becomes a kind of mix of LSD trip and David Lynch's odder work. This is a satisfying movie and smarter then average for a big tent science fiction adventure. Recommended for those who like that sort of thing. ***

Andre The Giant (2018)

Documentary on 7 foot 4 inch actor and wrestler Andre the giant. I didn't know much about him, it was really neat to learn. The film also gives you an interesting over view of pro-wresting's evolution from regional fiefdoms in the 1970's, to a McMahon family run national enterprise and cultural phenomena in the 1980's. ***

Good Morning, Vietnam (1987)

Good Morning, Vietnam is loosely adapted from events in the life of Adrian Cronauer, an armed forces radio DJ in Vietnam in 1965. This is a perfect serio-comic vehicle for (a youngish) Robin Williams as the lead, he improvised all of his comic radio segments, but the actual story here was more substantive then I had expected. Ably directed by Barry Levinson and with good supporting parts for Forest Whitaker, J.T. Walsh and others. I think this movie would serve as a good introduction to the conflict for teenage viewers, yet it is still very enjoyable, and even a little enlightening, for people who may already feel well versed in the conflict. ****

The Beguilded (1971)

The Beguiled, the original film version of Thomas P. Cullinan's 1966 novel A Painted Devil was released in 1971, directed by Don Siegel and starred Clint Eastwood as a wounded Union solder taken in at a private girls finishing school in 1864 Virginia. The film was remade by Sofia Coppola and released last year and comparing the two versions of the story is really quite interesting. Coppola seemed primarily interested in the idea of the handsome young solder (in her version played by Colin Farrell) and the disruption he unleashes on this small world of isolated women, cut off from male contact by the war. Now that is the central theme of both films and no doubt the source material, but Coppola cleaves off a lot of the secondary elements of the story to focus, in some vaguely feminist way, on that central theme. She in effect makes the story cleaner in a lot of ways as well.

In Coppola's version all the slaves have run off, in Siegel's there is still one loyal female slave left, a figure that would complicate the theme of female solidarity that the latter director seeks to emphasize. The headmistress (Geraldine Page in the original and Nicole Kidman in the remake) has a disturbing backstory in the original that sheds her character in an entirely different light from the largely benign version in the remake. You also find out quicker in the original film that the solder is not that good of a guy, though about all you find out of his background is he is from New York, in the remake he is made a recent Irish immigrant and is on the whole a more (but not much more) sympathetic figure then his cinematic predecessor. This is not to speak ill of Coppola's version, I thought both versions were quite good as individual takes on the story, they compliment each other more then they detract from one another, much like the two versions of True Grit. *** for both versions.

Bests of the Southern Wild (2012)

Directed and co-written b Benh Zeitlin and adapted from Lucy Alibar's one act play Juicy and Delicious, Beasts of the Southern Wild tells the story of a (roughly) seven year old girl named Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis) who lives with her father Wink (Dwight Henry) on a bayou island known as 'The Bathtub' on the wrong side of the Louisiana levee's. I've not seen a place quite like this on film before, though Conrack comes closest. It's a poor, wet, slowly rotting world but a home whose residents have deep attachment to it. Most of the story takes place in the aftermath of a sever storm that devastates the island, residents forcefully evacuated later stage a break out to get back to the island, even though there seems to be nothing worth going back to. Hushpuppy's father is an alcoholic prone to mysterious disappearances and the questionable state of his health, vague at first, gets increasingly clear as the movie goes on. Hushpuppy is a little hard to pin down, her sense of the world limited and skewed, her teacher on the islands one room school house is also a local witchdoctor so that does not help her sense of reality much. There is a scene where Hushpuppy and some friends run away and through course of events end up staying for a short while at a floating restaurant/ brothel where she becomes very attached to one of the cooks, the poor girl has never had a mother before (her's running off just after she was born) and the ache and need she has for a mother figure is just devastating. Kind of a hard watch at times. ***1/2

WarGames (1983)

I decided to watch this as kind of a companion piece to Ready Player One. I had seen parts of this film before, some multiple times, but had never watched the whole movie through. WarGames is of course the movie where a young Matthew Broderick almost causes World War III when he hacks into what he at first thinks is a video game but is actually a government computer and starts playing a thermonuclear war simulation. A likable flick, it hold up pretty well despite being very dated technologically, Broderick's bedroom computer set up is both quaint and pretty sweet. Also featuring Ally Sheedy at the start of the Ally Sheedy cycle. ***

Ready Player One (2018)

Ready Player One is better then it has any right to be. Based on Ernest Cline's popular 2011 novel of the same name about a virtual reality video game, a little light dystopianism and plenty of fan boy servicing, the film version is directed by Steven Spielberg and pays arguably obsessive tribute to the pop culture of the 70s, 80s and 90s, pop culture that the director himself was a major contributor to. Yes even Steven Spielberg has been sucked into our current self referential nostalgic pop culture matrix, which is also a good description of the VR 'Oasis' most of this movie is set in. The plot concerns a group of young people, anchored by the likable Tye Sheridan and Olivia Cooke who compete/ work together to find a hidden 'Easter egg' left by 'The OASIS' late eccentric creator (Mark Rylance). They must find said 'egg' to save the digital public square from excessive commercialization by stuffed shirt Ben Mendelsohn, which is a little ironic in that 'The OASIS' is made up pretty much entirely of commercial pop culture, the property licensing involved in this movie must have required a heck of a lot of lawyers and paper work, there is even a Silent Running reference so it casts a very large net. Still the movie works as an appropriately 80's style youthful adventure film, something Spielberg runs at the top of the scoreboard in his ability to play out.  ***1/2

The Kennel Murder Case (1933)

William Powell stars as Philo Vance, his first appearance in the role for Warner Brothers after playing the part three times for Paramount. This is a well put together mystery of its type and time, where everything is strangely complicated, there are too many likely culprits, and a clever hobbyist is given a remarkable degree of latitude by the legal authorities to bring the suspects together and ferret out the murderer. The case gets its name because events are set in motion by the murder of a show dog. ***

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)

Film adaption of the 1974 novel of the same name by John le Carré, an author (still working in his 80's by the way) well known for his more 'realistic' spy novels. Tinker Tailor Solider Spy had been adapted for the screen before, as a mini-series for the BBC in 1979 staring Alec Guinness as George Smiley, a British intelligence officer who shows up in many of le Carré's novels, and here is played by Gary Oldman who was Oscar nominated for the role. Set in the mid-70's Smiley is a recently retired agent who is secretly brought back in by the government to investigate the possible presence of a Soviet mole in the top levels of the British intelligence apparatus. The movie has a excellent cast of supporting character players including Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, Toby Jones, Ciarán Hinds, Benedict Cumberbatch, and the late John Hurt (I miss John Hurt). Smart, well constructed, but also so low key that at times it all blends a little too much together. ***1/2

Popye (1980)

Arguably the oddest directorial choice in the career of Robert Altman, a man with a long history of odd directorial choices, Popeye has the distinction both of being Robin Williams first lead role in a film, as the titular sailor man, and the first live action film adaption of a cartoon series (not counting comic book or comic strip adaptations). The costume and set design is spot on, as are the lead performances by Williams, Shelley Duvall as Olive Oyl, and Paul L. Smith as Bluto. Even much of the music (yes this a musical) by Harry Nilsson is good, but the movie, its really really slow, painfully slow, takes about an hour to get going. I liked parts of this film, but would be hard pressed to recommend it, save to Williams and Altman completists for whom it is a must. After watching this film I learned that I had infact seen it, or at least much of it, before. Popeye was among the first movies my parents rented after getting our first VCR in 1983. **

The Child in Time (2017)

While I don't know if Ian McEwan's 1987 novel The Child in Time would have worked as a feature length theatrical film, as a 90 or so minute BBC telefilm it has proven to be the perfect visual medium in which to tell its story. Superbly cast Benedict Cumberbatch and Kelly Macdonald play Stephen and Julie Lewis, a happily married couple until their four year old daughter Kate is abducted from a local market while out with her dad. This event estranges the couple and leads to a deep painful despondency for both, which would seemingly require a miracle to transcend. Stephens grief is particularly deep as he was the one out with the child when she disappeared, and as he also makes his living as the author of childrens fiction, the lost child is never far from his mind. The lost child, lost children, lost childhood, the 'child' as concept and its place in time, in memory, is at the thematic heart of this work, not just in its central narrative but in side plots concerning Stephen's long time friend and agent Charles, and the government commission on children's education which Stephen sits on, in large part as a way to fill the time. Though the running criticism on Thatcherism that pervades the novel is not here, replaced instead with a general disquiet about government efforts to help children, the core of the original novel is very much present and very powerfully connived. Beautifully sad The Child in Time is a worthy rendering of some of McEwans best work. It made me cry, again. ****

Men in Black III (2012)

To no apartment demand came this the third Men in Black movie. While arguably an improvement on the sequel the franchise was long past cultural relevance, yet all the big names including the director came back save for Rip Torn, whose characters memorial service we see at the beginning of the film, and given that much of the plot revolves around time travel back to the late 1960's I'm surprised we didn't see Zed show up again played by another actor (1960's Tommy Lee Jones is played by Josh Brolin by the way). This movie made like a ton of money, $624 million box office on a $215 million budget, so we may get a Men in Black 4, though we shouldn't. Blah. **

The Death of Stalin (2017)

The Death of Stalin is an appropriately dark comedy about the passing, and subsequent power struggle to succeed the Soviet leader. Directed and co-written by Armando Iannucci, the man behind such contemporary comedies of political dysfunction as Veep and The Thick of It, The Death of Stalin has been called by some critics the perfect political comedy for the Trump era, not because the man is a ruthless dictator, but because everyone below him seems scared of him and there is a lot of general bumbling and jockeying for position in his orbit. The movie very successfully navigates a place between dryly comic absurdum and the horror of what these Soviet leaders did, so the overall tone of the piece is not quite like anything I've ever seen before. The cast is good, particularly Steve Buscemi as Nikita Khrushchev, and Jeffrey Tambor as Georgy Malenkov, in this later case both actor and character ended in career exile. Strangely this movie is based on a French graphic novel. A smart and a unique piece of filmmaking. ***1/2

Reds (1981)

John "Jack" Reed was born in Portland, Oregon in 1887, he died in 1920 and is buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis in Moscow, the only American so interred. A journalist best know for his 1919 book Ten Days That Shook the World about his first hand experience observing the Russian revolution of 1917, the movie Reds chronicles the last five years in his life. The film both stars and is directed by Warren Beatty who won the best directing Oscar for it, best picture that year going to Chariots of Fire, which was directed Hugh Hudson whose best known film subsequent to that win was Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan in 1984, so his carrier didn't go as planed. But I digress.

Being directed by a left leaning Hollywood pretty boy I was expecting this film would unduly white wash its subject, it didn't. While applauding Reed's courage of his convictions, an advocacy journalist who joined the revolution he was covering because he believed in it, the film non the less shows how that conviction was misplaced, and how while the Soviet experiment was clearly not working as planed, Reed could not bring himself to see it. Ironically his wife and fellow journalist Louise Bryant (nicely played by Diane Keaton) could see it, but could not convince her husband. The film works chiefly because it is a love story set against an epic backdrop, the scenes about internal political divisions among American communists are less universal in their appeal.

One of the more interesting stylistic elements of the film is its uses of "witness", people who knew Jack and Louise back in the day inserted throughout the film (chiefly in its first half) as "talking heads", commenting on the story. Some of these "talking heads" were quite prominent, including ACLU founder Roger Nash Baldwin and New York Congressman Hamilton Fish III (who went to Harvard with Reed), and all of them are very elderly, the writer and activist Scott Nearing would have been 98 when he was interviewed. The actual cast of the film is padded with impressive names as well, including Edward Herrmann, Paul Sorvino, Maureen Stapleton (who won an Oscar as Russian anarchist Emma Goldman), Gene Hackman and Jack Nicholson as Eugene O'Neill. Reds, a film about the radical leftists of 60 years previous was actually the 13th highest grossing American theatrical release of 1981, its hard to imagine a film of this type duplicating that performance with todays audiences, not so much because of the politics but because they would find it boring, I found it fascinating. ****

Meet the Hitlers (2014)

Documentary on how having the name Hitler, well it's not helpful in life. Film follows about a half dozen Hitler's, including a Salt Lake retiree Hitler, a teenage girl Hittler, a socially isolated German Hitler, an Ecuadorian carpenter whose first name is Hitler, and a skin head who changed his name to Hitler. This diversity of Hitler's is complimented by a non Hitler who does satirical art about Hitler, and another non Hitler, a journalist trying to get Hitler's grandnephews to go on record with him. Yes Adolph Hitler has three living (as of 2014) grandnephews in Long Island under changed names.  Adolph's older brother Alois Hitler, Jr. married an Irish woman and their son William Patrick Hitler would immigrate to the United States and actually serve in the Navy during World War II. William Patrick (died 1987) had four sons, one of whom died around 1990 and the remaining three evidently covenanted amongst themselves never to marry, feeling that the family line needed to die out. Subsequent to the release of this documentary the British newspaper The Daily Express (not to be confused with The Daily Mail) reveled that one of the surving Hitler's works for the IRS. So there's that, make your jokes. I mostly felt sorry for these Hitler's, it was a perfectly serviceable last name until one guy ruined it for everyone. ***