Skizzerflake's Movie Ramblings - Reviews of the Stuff I See

Bridge of Spies - Spielberg directing and Tom Hanks in top form.

If you are ignorant of these events, some spoilers follow here, so read up on the Cold War. This stuff is history and you should know the story already and most of the story is in the trailer anyway. This movie isn’t about not knowing what happened; it’s about just how intense these events really were. If you’re the least bit familiar with the late 50’s and early 60’s, you know about the darkest days of the Cold War and the various incidents that almost set civilization back to a radioactive version of the stone age. One of the most publicized of the events was the shooting down of an American U2 spy plane. For those that don’t know, at the time the US was ahead of the Soviet Union in technological spying, but the USSR usually bested the US in ground-level human spying. The U2 spy plane was a slow, ungainly, long winged aircraft that was designed to have near invulnerability by virtue of being able to fly higher than anything the Soviets could use to shoot it down. It took high resolution photographs from the near stratosphere, until, however, one WAS shot down, in 1960. The pilot, Francis Gary Powers, was supposed to detonate the plane and use a suicide device hidden in a coin to kill himself, so as to not be taken prisoner. Unfortunately for the US, Powers didn’t or couldn’t kill himself, was captured and put on trial for spying. Meantime, a Soviet spy, Rudolph Abel, captured in the US several years before, was rotting in jail.

Abel had escaped the death penalty in part due to his lawyer James Donovan and in part to put him “on ice” in case of the need to have someone to swap with the USSR in the future. Abel’s lawyer, Donovan, is the focus of Bridge of Spies. An insurance lawyer, Donovan was convinced to defend Abel back in 1957, in spite of venomous antipathy from many Americans who would have preferred that Abel be eaten by rabid jackals in a public square. In 1962, Donovan was called on again to negotiate a swap between the US and the USSR….Abel for Powers. This film tells the story of those two time spans, the Abel trial and the prisoner swap. Politicians on both sides wanted “their guy” back in order to lessen peripheral damage but could not be seen negotiating with each other, so unknown back channels were used, hence Donovan, being handled by the CIA. As we all know (or maybe not?), the swap was completed in 1962 and the prisoners were exchanged at the border between West and East Berlin. This was only a matter of months before the even more horrifying Cuban Missile Crisis, while the Berlin Wall was being constructed and while people from East Germany were routinely being shot dead in the streets, trying to escape the country.

One of the great skills of Spielberg as a director is his ability to have a movie that calmly tells a story, in a way that’s easy to understand and that brings things down to a personal level. That skill is quite evident in this story. Being told in several time periods, involving Cold War intrigue, the story could have been very complex, but ends up being quite easy, intended for an audience that might not know the horror of these events. None of the existential drama is lost. The grimness of that post WW II period of time in Germany is made visually and emotionally clear. By the time the movie is over, you feel relieved to just walk out of the theater without an imminent nuclear threat hanging over your head or uniformed goons waiting to cart you off to a prison camp.

Tom Hanks is really in his element in this story. He’s a lawyer, not a politician, has no real interest in dabbling in Cold War machinations, but he’s also a guy who considers it his duty to do the job when he’s called upon. Just why HIM, is no clearer in the movie than it is in real history, it’s like being hit on the head by a meteor, one of the breaks in life. Throughout the second half of the movie, Hanks portrays Donovan as a guy who is scared to death, having to cross into East Germany as people are being shot or sent to the Gulag, but also as a guy who never loses his wits and manages to bring off the swap.

This is a fairly straightforward history movie, done really well. The direction is good at every point and Tom Hanks excels. It’s mostly a one character movie, although Mark Rylance, who portrays Abel, is excellent in this supporting role. Other cast members are as good as they need to be but their roles don’t stand out like Hanks and Rylance. Visible effects are at a minimum; it’s mainly a dramatic movie, but the cold, gray awful-ness of the Berlin Wall and East Berlin in 1962 is really palpable. Bridge of Spies is well worth seeing, both as history and to see Hanks and Spielberg really pull out the stops. Don’t miss it.

Steve Jobs - What a story!

So…I’m sitting here writing this movie review on a sleek, shiny, light-speed Mac Pro laptop, using Apple’s Pages software, and occasionally looking up fact items on IMDB with my iPhone, using the “World Wide Web”. Why does that matter? It’s a disclosure. I admire the products produced by Apple, although I know enough to realize that behind the scenes of all those staged product rollouts, the media ads with their 5 word sentences like “It just makes things easier” and the print ads with lots of white space and a simple picture, there’s a wealth of angst, stress and contention behind the scenes. The author of a lot of that stress and contention, as well as the innovator, visionary, behind the scenes despot, promoter and media celebrity was Steve Jobs. In addition to co-inventing the Apple I and II, the first boxed-up desktop computers, the early Mac was the first graphical computer, the overpriced Lisa gave us the first graphical powerhouse, the Next computer gave us adaptable web pages like this web site, the iPod gave us “thousands of songs” and the iPhone gave us a library full of information in our pocket. Jobs’ popular persona evolved from the hippie entrepreneur to the manic corporate schemer and, before his death, to something approaching an information technology saint.

The new movie, “Steve Jobs”, isn’t really a conventional biopic narrative at all, but several capsule views of Jobs, mostly taking place in the moments leading up to three of those epic, staged product rollouts, in this case, the original Macintosh, the Next computer (during Jobs’s exile from Apple) and the iMac, the one piece Macintosh that brought the company back from life support, after Jobs’ return to the company he co-founded. It also fleshes out those three moments with flashbacks and flash forwards that add context to the intense dialog of the movie. It shows his reprehensible inability to acknowledge his out-of-wedlock daughter and his lack of financial support for her mother, in spite of his huge wealth. It also shows Jobs driving his employees, partners and original co-founder, Steve Wozniak, nearly crazy or reducing then to tears as he gets ready to go on stage, where he will appear relaxed and calm. We see Jobs hiring and eventually replacing John Sculley as Apple CEO, confronting his ex and daughter, verbally abusing his product developers but somehow managing to inspire enough loyalty that they stick with him and the company for a long time. It helps that they all became extremely rich too.

The screenplay for this movie was written by Aaron Sorkin, an interesting and inspired choice. Sorkin was also the writer behind The Social Network, but he is not a guy who revels in technology. In an interview I heard some months back, he admitted that he mainly writes on paper, only recently bought a computer and really has little interest in the IT world. In a way, that makes him a good choice as a writer. If he can understand the machinations of the IT world enough to write about it, the audience will probably understand too. The script for Steve Jobs is extremely rapid fire and intense, being wordy in the extreme, from beginning to end, with few lingering gazes, musical interludes or non-verbal scenes. There’s nothing in the way of action or noteworthy FX; it’s a dialog movie to its core.

Direction by Danny Boyle is just as intense as it was in films like Trainspotting and 28 Days Later. Scenes are fast moving, camera work is so close up that you see moisture in characters’ eyes and pores in their skin. The film doesn’t let up for a minute. It’s dramatic from the first moment until the credits roll. At that point, you’re exhausted. I don’t really know how much of this verbal conflict took in place in real life before a Jobs rollout, but as a dramatic device it really works. It brings you right into the conflicts that made Jobs what he was and illustrates the stress of making things look cool and easy, like an Apple ad.

The acting was excellent, high-voltage and intense. Michael Fassbender is amazing as Jobs. The portrayal doesn’t try too hard to make him physically look like Jobs, but that works and you get dragged into the drama in spite of it. Kate Winslet as Joanna Hoffman, his product development executive, and, in the movie, his pre-rollout “handler”, is also excellent as one of the few people who could live with Jobs’ intensity without withering. Seth Rogan is Steve Wozniak, Apple co-founder, who bailed out early in Apple history, making an easier life for himself with his wealth, but who remained as part of Jobs’s behind the scenes life, at least in the movie script. Jeff Daniels also rises way above “Dumb and Dumber” as John Sculley, alternately challenging and being bullied by Jobs until he was also fired when Jobs returned to the company. This is really a fast moving 2 hours that encapsulates a lot of Job’s biography and computer history. You don’t get a more concise, dramatic, rapid fire story like this very often. If you like either computers or Jobs, this will be fascinating. If you hate computers but like intense, face to face drama, this film is also excellent. I hate to use such cliches but, I can sense some Oscars on the way.

Loved your review of Jurassic World...maybe not necessarily the review, but I love the way you write. Made me want to read your entire review thread.

Thanks!

Spectre - The latest in the never-ending James Bond series

Having lived with this franchise for a long time through various portrayals of James Bond, I have to admit that my favorite of the actors who has played him is Daniel Craig. He seems to have the right combination…he’s not excessively good looking, he carries his athleticism well and he seems psychologically edgy enough to be believable in his characterization of a guy who, basically, is a sociopathic killer who has found employment in the British spy agency.

As Spectre starts, Bond has gone semi-rogue, attempting to kill a guy from his past, causing a big ruckus in Mexico City during a Day of the Dead parade. Bond’s pursuit of the character leads him to a clandestine group, known as Spectre and the predicable encounter with the gussied-up widow of another villain. The shadowy head of Spectre, Oberhauser, has old ties to Bond that are revealed as the plot unfolds. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, in London, Bond’s MI6 handlers are trying to reel him back into the organization, just at a time when traditional spying is under threat from a new head of Intelligence, who wants to replace “feet on the ground” spying with a pervasive, real time surveillance regime that can see anybody, anywhere.

It’s about this time in the story, when Bond usually meets up with the “Bond Girl”, in this case, Madelaine Swann (Lea Seydoux). She’s the daughter of a former associate of Bond, younger and better looking than the widow. He meets her when he delivers the news of her father’s death. Questions about her father follow, as do furtive glances, romantic sparks and eventual high adventure.

What would a Bond flick be, however, without some sort of sneering, criminal super genius? In this case, it’s Oberhauser, creator of the electronic spy system that’s about to be sold to and implemented by the British government. Oberhauser has been conspiring with a bunch of mysterious guys with fast cars and expensive suits and arranging for strategic terrorist attacks that would convince the world that a global surveillance network is needed. He and his criminal buddies can manipulate it to their own nefarious ends, tightening the noose, threatening global control and obviously collecting the profits. Oberhauser is played by Christopher Waltz, one of filmdom’s more recent, soft-talking, creepy Germanic guys, a guy who reminds you of some combination of Dr. Strangelove and a sadistic Nazi.

Well…it is worth the hype? If you like these sort of movies, I’d definitely say yes. We all know, going in, that there’s going to be lots of action, shooting, blowing up stuff, car chases with super fast, expensive sports cars, as well as the inevitable romance with the Bond Girl. As I mentioned, I do like Daniel Craig as Bond and he does nothing to ruin his reputation here. Craig has said, in real life, that this is his last Bond movie. Is that true, or is this story out there to boost ticket sales? I don’t know. I guess time will tell. As for Lea Seydoux as the new Bond Girl, she does fine, isn’t bad on the eyes and brings something to the action aside from just set decoration. Christopher Waltz seems like a variation on the other characters I’ve seen him play and does nicely as a depraved villain. Ralph Fiennes plays M, Bond’s boss as well as the minor character needs to be played, as does Ben Wishaw as Q, Bond’s geeky friend in the agency, who sticks with Bond when he’s out of the loop on his rogue missions. The rest of the cast is fairly minor, consisting of bad guys, fall guys, scary assassins and other Bond associates.

Direction by Sam Mendes, who also directed Skyfall and The Road to Perdition, is on target. Action never lags, the pace is fast, but not frantic and the suspense continues to build, right up to the end. The cinematography is quite good, even with the large amount of digital FX that was need to juice up the conventional movie stunts. I never had the feeling that I was watching a pixellated version of reality…it all fits together quite well. If you’re looking for action, noise and lots of it, and don’t care much for subtlety, this is a fun movie. There are enough nods to the past to keep continuity. The only thing I didn’t like was the usual song, performed by Sam Smith. His voice is “fingernails on the chalkboard” to me, but at least it was over at the beginning. All told, the audience was quite engaged, as was I. There's nothing profound here, but it's enjoyable entertainment, in great form.

Room - A truly remarkable “little” movie, worth seeing.

Our latest cinematic excursion was to see Room, currently showing in some theaters, probably art houses. This movie is completely unlike anything else showing during the holiday movie season. It’s small, creepy and cringy, but not a horror movie. It’s dramatically intense, completely lacking in special effects, it has no big stars, only a small cast and it’s not for kids, even though one of the main characters is a young kid.

The movie stars Brie Larson as a young mother, “Ma” and Jacob Tremblay as her 5 year old son Jack. Ma was kidnapped at 17 and has been imprisoned in a small room for 7 years by the extraordinarily creepy “Old Nick” (Sean Bridgers). Her 5 year old son, apparently the son of Old Nick through rape, has never been outside that room. In those years Ma has done everything she can to give Jack some sort of life inside that 10 foot room, while dealing with Old Nick, who is both her captor and the person that supplies Ma and Jack with the necessities of some sort of life. Jack only knows Nick as a voice, who opens the door while Jack hides in the closet and Ma does what’s needed to keep Nick at bay.

The first half of the movie centers on Ma and Jake’s life inside Room, which for Jake is the entire world, with Room as its name. In mid-movie, Ma enlists Jake in a scheme to escape from Room and they succeed. Police swarm in on Nick’s house, arresting him, removing his threat and releasing Ma and Jake into a huge, confusing, scary world, like nothing Jack has ever seen. Ma, released from the need to be the entire world to Jack, 24 X 7, has to re-adjust to life outside and figure out how to go on. The world has changed over 7 years, the media jackals are hounding her for the “inside story” and she has to find a way to explain to Jack how Room has now been replaced by World. Her parents have moved on too and need to find away to bring Ma and Jack back into the family, after having given up hope. Jack, however, has had his universe suddenly expand and seems to be ready to move on, eager to see World.

It’s hard to know exactly what to say about this film. The basic plot is extremely creepy and sometimes it seems downright voyeuristic to be watching it. The story is SO personal and you get so engaged in the characters, that it’s hard to turn away, even though it seems like you should not be watching it as Friday night, movie and popcorn entertainment. Room is based on the book of the same name by Emma Donohughue, who also wrote the screenplay. It is fiction, not apparently based on anything true, although the story does have a distinct plausibility that adds to the creep factor. It was directed by Lenny Abrahamson, an Irish director not familiar to me. The acting performances by the main characters, Ma, Jack and her parents, are remarkable. I know that the Oscar committee doesn’t usually consider a best actor award for actors who don’t already have a track record, but Brie Larson definitely should be on a short list and the kid, Jacob Tremblay deserves something, because his ability to make a movie so dark and dramatic seems downright uncanny for a kid of his age.

Do you want to see this? It’s not an easy movie, not a lite-night out, but you will only rarely ever seen dramatic acting performances this good or intense. I recommend seeing it, prepared for what it is. When it was over, after I de-compressed and re-entered World, I remarked that, in a way, it reminded by of The Road, the only other similarly intense single parent and child story that I can recall. Unlike The Road, Room doesn’t bring us to the brink of extinction and does have a benign ending, but it is as close-up and personal as The Road. I have to give Room both a high and a qualified rating, an excellent movie, but not one to be taken lightly. My qualification doesn’t diminish it as a film, but does require a warning… “Not movie for easy entertainment”

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2 - Also Known as “How to Stretch a 3 Book Franchise into 4 Movies”.

Most revolutions are started by idealists but are finished by despots - quote from My History of the World.

We knew, going in, that we’d be running the gauntlet through a horde of caffeinated 15 year old girls on opening weekend, but what the heck. At least it got the series over for me, unless the usual rumors of a sequel, prequel, Mockingjay on Mars, or whatever, comes true. It’s time for the 4th movie in a 3 book series to come to its conclusion. The Hunger Games series, in case you were hiding under a rock, left us at the point where the the revolution against the rule of the wicked President Snow was getting serious. Our hero, Katniss Everdeen, was chafing at being used as a media icon by the dubious and creepy Alma Coin, president of one of the districts, a leader who emerged with a hidden subterranean complex full of rebels and weapons in the last half-book of the series. The ever cute Peeta Melark had been retrieved from Snow, brainwashed to kill Katniss; he nearly finished the job.

As the new chapter begins, Katniss is nursing choke bruises, a damaged voice, and general trauma, but wants to get back in the fight. Things have gone really bad in the districts (bombings) but the revolution is starting to make people in the capitol nervous. Snow has a defensive plan to allow the revolutionaries into the outer part of the city, withdraw his supporters into the center and mine everything at the periphery, destroying the invading army. The mines are like a computer game on steroids, every sort of flamey, choppy, crushy, blow-upy thing that can be thought up will be used against the rebels who will try to run, shoot and jump past all this.

There’s a lot of latin in this story so, I’ll use one expression - “deus ex machina” to describe the fact that there’s also a set of creepy subterranean passageways that lead right to the capitol and Snow’s palace (why in the world would they build that?). Katniss’s plan is to take a small unit in there and get to the palace. Early in the movie she states quite clearly that her main goal is to kill Snow…plain out dead. She wants to avenge her dead family and friends and wants to end this thing here and now. Once all of these forces are set in motion, the rest of the movie is the playing of the game. If you notice, my quote from History is that MOST revolutions are finished by despots. Will that happen here? You know if you read the books but I’m not telling. You might also notice that the whole series is specked with references to ancient Rome, like a lot of names…Castor, Pollux, Cressida, Messala, Antonius, Caesar, Pugnax and Arelius. This story seems to have its parallels in the rise of the Empire and the end of the Roman Republic, but I think we’re hoping that it will go the other way in this movie

Well…all that aside, did I like it? Well…sorta. I enjoyed the endless action, which is well staged. The FX are well integrated into the story and the whole thing looks really good. You don’t get the feeling of a lot of animation stuck on top of green screen human action. The visuals are really good. It’s really a visually fun movie, that should look good in any format, well worth all the money spent on it. The film will certainly return boat-loads of tickets to the company. My admiration ends there, however. The script is padded and inflated. Making two movies out of one book seems like mainly a way to get all those legions of fans to cough up two ticket charges…not in service of the story. As for the acting, the main characters, Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence), Peeta (Josh Hutcherson), Snow (Donald Sutherland), Coin (Julianna Moore), Gale (Liam Hemsworth) and Haymitch (Woody Harrelson) are is about the same as in the other films, not doing themselves any disservice. It’s definitely a movie that’s about action, not acting. Most of the acting is about someone making a preachy speech or running and screaming, all the stuff of a TV series…professional craft, but nothing exceptional. My biggest question is about Plutarch (another Roman name), played by Philip Seymour Hoffman. Was this shot before his death or virtualized on film? I don’t know, but if he WAS virtual, real actors should be very nervous. Direction was by Francis Lawrence, who keeps the pace about right, knows how to construct a movie like this and who did no harm to his career. There was one sequence which really make me chuckle. In the tunnels, the group ran into some sort of mutants and had a big fight. It all seemed very familiar to me and then I realized that it looked like a zombie fight on the Walking Dead. Seeing that HG was shot in Georgia, I could not avoid wondering whether a Walking Dead crew did the mutant fight too. There was a lot of grabbing, biting and head stabbing…the usual components of a zombie attack.

So, this was my week’s piece of pop entertainment. I don’t think it was bad, but I wasn’t crazy about it, and I am glad that it’s over now and I really hope that it won’t spawn sequels. For better or worse, let the series stand. Judging by the noise in the theater, the Hunger Games fans were quite pleased, so I guess the producers did their jobs right. I give it a solid 3. Everybody did their jobs, the look was good, the fans were pleased, but it would not rise above that.

Trumbo - Trouble in Hollywood

Our latest outing was to see Trumbo, an excellently witty film about the eccentric writer Dalton Trumbo, a prolific movie writer who was driven out of Hollywood and blacklisted during the McCarthy era for communist associations. It follows his years “ghosting” movies and his eventual return to being credited under his own name. Trumbo, like many idealistic people in the 1930’s, had dallied with communist sympathy at a time when many in the US were in sympathy with the communists during the horrific Spanish Civil War in their losing fight against the Facists, who were a proxy for the Nazis. Some years later, Trumbo joined the Communist Party USA when the US had an alliance with the Soviet Union during WW II, but he was never really very interested in global politics.

A few years later, however, when the Red Scare hit, Trumbo found himself being written out of Hollywood by the likes of Hedda Hopper, John Wayne and other actors who “gave up names” and wrapped themselves in flags in order to save themselves. In a moment, Trumbo found himself unemployable, disgraced and in federal prison. Ultimately, the purge netted exactly zero people convicted of any crimes like espionage or sabotage, but many people’s lives were ruined by the blacklisting and publicity. During his ban, however, Trumbo and a number of other writers made a modest living by writing movies that were credited with fake names, often low-budget cheapies. This film re-enacts that period, up to when Trumbo got his name back with visible support from Kirk Douglas and Otto Preminger. Trumbo went on to write some of the classics of that era, including Spartacus, Exodus, Roman Holiday and Hawaii.

Trumbo is portrayed quite accurately, doing most of his writing in the bathtub with an IBM typewriter on a platform, accompanied by cigarettes, a 5th of whiskey and a bottle of amphetamine. He was a six pack per day smoker. He wrote in marathon, sleepless binges and could crank out a film in several days. To call him eccentric would be an understatement.

Portraying a character like this would be an interesting challenge. The job went to Bryan Cranston, a guy who’s been around in a lot of movies and TV shows over the years, but is best known for his troubled father roles, where he’s a smaller than life/larger than life kind of guy. We’ve seen him change from the hen-pecked dad in Malcolm in the Middle to the cancer-ridden business failure Walter White and then seen him morph into the uber-badass Heisenberg, king of the New Mexico meth market in Breaking Bad. In Trumbo, once again, he’s trying to keep his family supported while he indulges his eccentricity, seemingly a perfect role for Cranston who jumps in and chews the scenery. I do hope he gets an Oscar nomination. The supporting cast includes Diana Lane as his long-suffering, but loyal wife Cleo, Helen Mirren as the disgusting harpy Hedda Hopper and Louis C. K. as a fellow blacklisted writer Arlen Hird. Real characters portrayed include Edward G. Robinson, John Wayne, Otto Preminger, Louis B Mayer and Kirk Douglas, often interspersed between actual cuts from their movies. Jay Roach was the director, who’s known for producing and directing comedies like the “Fockers” movies, Austin Powers, Borat and others.

I really enjoyed this movie. It could have been a preachy morality tale, but I can’t imagine how you would do that with such an irreverent character as Dalton Trumbo. He seemed to think of life as a bad movie script, maybe a comedy or tragedy but also maybe trashy junk, best taken without too much high drama but a lot of booze and tobacco. It would kill his spirit to make him into a heavy character or a victim. Roach and Cranston really make that work. The film keeps the tone light, while not missing the inherent horror of those times, keeps up the pace and is quite enjoyable. It had the feel of a story that needed to be told; you want to applaud at the end; some people in the theater did. Most of the blacklisted characters in the movie are largely forgotten now, and mainly were writers. Most of the actors of that time managed to do what they needed to do to stay in the business, often at the cost of betraying friends in sworn testimony. It was not a good time, but it makes for an excellent movie that never loses its light touch.

Good write ups. have you thought about starting your own blog?

Never even heard of this movie, but your review has piqued my interest and the subject matter sounds really interesting I may have to add it to my watchlist.

Thanks. I just started doing this and it took me by surprise, don't have a plan.

Spotlight - A movie in the tradition of newspaper expose movies

Spotlight is the latest in a series of one-word-title, excellent, late year movie releases that have included Trumbo and Room. Newspaper and broadcast expose movies have a long history in film. If the expose is about a real story, as in this case, they have inherent drama and often are a gift to a script writer who can take a dramatic story that’s pretty much already written and “rip it from the headlines”. These movies can be fact based like All The President’s Men, Good Night and Good Luck, or can be somewhat inspired by a version of truth like Network, Citizen Caine, Front Page and The China Syndrome. The latest offering is Spotlight, sadly, a true story about reporters at the Boston Globe who uncovered the pervasive scandal of child sex abuse by Catholic clergymen that was covered up by higher officials in the church. Spotlight was an investigative reporting unit at the Globe that had the luxury to spend a lot of time and effort on a big story, in this case the 2001 story of an individual Catholic priest who abused a minor and the subsequent cover-up of the incident by Cardinal Law (names are named in this movie). As the investigation progresses, Spotlight finds that this story is just tip of a huge iceberg, a pattern of abuse by priests in different places, as far back as the information goes.

Hints and small stories about abusive priests had surfaced for many decades, but had been treated as isolated events to be dealt with internally by the church, which made a practice of transferring the priests to different cities and parishes, covering the story in layers of church hierarchy and doing nothing else. It didn’t help that citizens and police didn’t intervene, having spent their lives being told about how virtuous the church was. There were a lot of people with dirty hands. Settlements were made with individual victims, documents were sealed and gag orders were signed. Lawyers, victims and people who knew victims were kept in the dark, thinking that their case was unique.

In this movie, a new boss at the Globe, Marty Baron (Liev Shreiber), assigns the four reporter Spotlight unit to investigate the story. The unit consists of reporters Mike Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo), Robby Robinson (Micheal Keaton), Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams) and Steve Kurkjian (Gene Amoroso). Resistance starts immediately. Baron is from New York, is Jewish, and doesn’t appreciate just how essential deference to the church is in heavily Catholic and Irish Boston; he’s seen as an outsider with a grudge. The unit, however, is a known factor in Boston and their work commands respect. Once the facts, denials and innuendoes begin to pile up, the story, which is not public yet, starts to acquire momentum among Globe management, including publisher Ben Bradley Jr (John Slattery) who realize that they are on to something really big that goes way beyond a few abusive priests in Boston, as if that were not bad enough. Eventually, a number of newspaper staff realize that they had hints and small stories about this for many years, but the pieces had not been assembled and the practice continued unreported.

A movie like Spotlight has built-in drama. Any of us who were not hiding under a rock in 2002 recall what a shocking story this was, so a film like this doesn’t have to do much other than stay on course and tell the story. Spotlight does that very well. It has many of the long-used elements of newspaper movies like reporters telling their bosses, “this is a big story”, reporters running for cabs and stacks of newspapers running through printing presses. It is missing boys in nickers shouting out headlines on the street corner, but other than that, it could be a news movie in almost any era. The fact that the story is told so conventionally works well since you don’t have to figure out where the movie is going and can focus on the numerous details, names and events of the conspiracy.

Director Tom McCarthy has a short list of films to his name. The only other one I have seen was The Visitor (2007), an excellent small movie about a New York college professor who gets involved in the lives of 2 illegal immigrants. Direction and dialog is concise and well paced, and the development of this complex story is kept simple enough to not overwhelm a viewing audience. Acting is not excessively dramatic, but, like the rest of the movie, develops as the characters begin to realize just what they have uncovered. The performances are not virtuoso, but everybody is as good as they need to be. They don’t distract from the story with high levels of acting dramatics. There’s no action or FX in the movie. Most of it is dialog, close up cinematography and basic well done drama. I’m not seeing Oscars among the actors, but nobody needs to be ashamed. Spotlight is currently sitting at an exalted 98 on Rotten Tomatoes and 8.6 on IMDB. I have to admit that I would not put it that high, but I do think it’s an excellent movie of a sort that can be very dreary or preachy. If you’re tired of predictable holiday fare or overdone action movies, (or is that predictable action movies and overdone holiday fare), Spotlight is an excellent alternative.

In The Heart of the Sea - The Latest Ron Howard Film

Spoiler Alert - In case you never heard of this story…

When I was in school, I remember being twice assigned to read Moby Dick, one of the great American novels. It’s one of those books that stuck with me, but I don’t recall being taught that the quest for the great white whale was based on a true incident. The source this film was Nathaniel Philbrick’s book, In The Heart of the Sea, published in 2000. This story (well known at the time) was also adapted by Melville in Moby Dick. Back in 1820, whaling was a very profitable enterprise that could make ship owners, captains and crewmen a lot of money by supplying bright burning, smokeless whale oil to the lamps of Americans. It was also breathtakingly dangerous and difficult. Captains and crew members could retire at a young age, but only if they survived. The whaleship Essex was a small, fairly old ship, commanded by Captain George Pollard, an inexperienced scion of a family that had gotten rich from whaling, and his more experienced first mate Owen Chase. In the Heart of the Sea is the story of their voyage on the Essex, the sinking of the ship by an enraged sperm whale and the horrifying tale of the survival of some of the crew who resorted to cannibalism to stay alive for 3 months in small, open boats. Back in those times, cannibalism on the part of shipwrecked sailors (the “Custom of the Sea”) was a something that was well known in the trade, but NEVER discussed. The Essex crew survivors carried this with them for the rest of their lives.

For this movie, the story of the Essex is wrapped in a fictional narrative in which Herman Melville pays a visit to the cabin boy of the Essex, Thomas Nickerson, decades later. Nickerson has been traumatized all these years, has never told his entire story in public and seems to be ready to give it to Melville.

Like Moby Dick, much of this film is spent giving the audience a quick orientation to the work of a whaleship 200 years ago. Voyages lasting as long as two years consisted of long periods of boredom and bad food, punctuated by hours of horror killing whales, a “Nantucket Sleighride” that you survived if lucky and then days of fighting sharks for the carcass, which was boiled down for oil. It’s in one these hunts that a huge sperm whale attacks the ship, smashing the hull and forcing the crew to take refuge in the small rowboats, 2000 miles from South America. Fearful of cannibals on Pacific Islands, the crew tries to get to South America, with disastrous results. The rest is a tale of survival.

Ron Howard, who has done a lot of movies I liked over the years, took on the task of filming this and I think his success was mixed at best. This is a movie that seemed like it needed a prerequisite, like in college when you had to take History I before you took History II. In this case, a viewing of the old 1956 Moby Dick would have sufficed, so this movie would not have spend half of its run-time instructing a contemporary audience in just what an awful way whaling was to make a living. The real story in Heart of the Sea is not about killing and cooking whales, but just how bad it was for the crew when that all went wrong and in the dreadful story of how 8 of the 20 crew members survived. I guess that would have been just too grim for the audience to watch, hence the added plot element of Melville’s visit and the time spent on Whaling 101.

Another reservation I had about this film was the decision to make it in 3D. There really isn’t much in the movie that benefits from 3D and the usual image degradation imposed by the 3D process seemed like a detriment to film. The extensive digital processing used to recreate the stormy ocean and the whale attack also degraded the visuals. In my recollection of having seen it several times, the 1956 Moby Dick movie looked better with no technology. The acting in the movie is pretty standard action movie stuff, punctuated by a lot of inscrutable sailing ship slang like “lower the shivers”, “raise the spar laps”, “chock the booms”, or whatever. A glossary (presented in Whaling 101?) would have helped. Chris Hemsworth (first mate Owen Chase), Benjamin Walker (Captain Pollard) and Brendan Gleeson (the old Thomas Nickerson) are decent. Cillian Murphy (one of the crewmen) is nearly invisible under grime, blood and whale fat, and has a minor role. The rest of the cast is functional but unremarkable.

In the end, the most dramatic part of the story, the survival of the 8 crew members, and their fates after their rescue, is a relatively small part of the movie. I don’t think that an audience would have reacted well to a focus on what they had to do to survive, but the fictional elements that were added obscure the real story, what was that they survived and HOW they did it. The rest is Whaling 101 and elements added to the story in order to make the writing of Moby Dick seem pre-ordained. Some of that was not in the original book at all. I enjoyed the movie but often found myself confused about what was history and what was fiction added to make the history more palatable. There’s no Ahab-like character to give focus to the plot and a factual re-telling of the crew’s tale would have left little popcorn in the stomachs of the audience. The story of the Essex might have done better as a History Channel hour than a popular movie. I can give this one a 3 star rating, but no more.

some very solid reviews for both dramatic and action faire.
A few of these films I'm looking forward to seeing; such as Mr. Holmes, Trumbo, Bridge of Spies, Skyfall and Man from UNCLE.

Thank you so much for some excellent reading.

Thanks for your comment. I hope you enjoy some of those movies!

pretty sure I will, keep the reviews coming - they really are some great reads!!

Forgot to mention seeing your review on The Conspirator and growing very curious about it.

Also, loved your review of In The Heart of the Sea, very keen to see that one as well.

on a funny note, the crew of Essex's terrible survival seems to bring this lil monty python skit to mind



I'm mental that way

Love it!

Macbeth - A New Film Adaptation

There’s a long history of film versions of Shakespeare plays, including 8 versions of Macbeth, another coming next year and even a Japanese version by Kurosawa, Throne of Blood. This year’s adaptation was directed by Justin Kurzel, a director that I’m not familiar with, stars Micheal Fassbender as Macbeth, Marion Cotillard as Lady Macbeth and Paddy Considine as Banquo. I refer to it as an adaptation because, like most film versions of plays by The Bard, it’s been pared down from the original. The difficulty of filming Shakespeare is that his plays are too wordy for a cinematic world where we expect movies to use minimal dialog and 5 word sentences. Macbeth, as a play, has about as many words as a brick has atoms. Shakespeare had an outrageous verbal facility; he must have added 75 pages to the English dictionary all by himself. He coined so many common expressions that entire web sites are dedicated to all of the contemporary expressions first found in Shakespeare. In the case of Macbeth, you might recognize the crack of doom, one fell swoop, a sorry sight, sound and fury, what’s done is done and many others. It’s hard to imagine Game of Thrones or The Lord of The Rings without Macbeth and Shakespeare.

In case you were asleep in English Literature, Macbeth is a dark, semi-historical play about a medieval warlord. He’s fierce, but not all that bright and is urged on by his ambitious wife to advance his career by murdering the King of a grim, dark, violent corner of the Scottish Highlands. Murder begets murder, however and it doesn’t end there. The end result of ruthless ambition is tragedy for most of the characters. The king is dead, long live the king, and so it goes, on and on. The stage is littered with bodies by the end of the story. There are witches, vague prophecies, betrayals, armies, stabbings and swords.

In my life I have seen Macbeth several times on stage, and I have seen a couple of the movie adaptations as well as many other staged plays by The Bard, so I’m used to the language, but it’s a challenge for many people who don’t have that experience. The task of the filmmaker is to manage to convey the verbose 400 year old language but not overwhelm the audience. Modern “translations” are a travesty in my opinion since half of the enjoyment of Shakespeare IS the language. In this case, the producers decided to stick with the original language and setting without serious historic revisions. Their condensed version keeps the movie within the usual 2 hour time limit for movies that don’t expect huge ticket sales but eliminates a lot of dialog, including all of the comic relief segments and snide remarks by servants. The result is a fairly unremitting tension and grimness that’s not over ‘till it’s over. The setting is minimal, mainly the cold, dreary, snowy, rainy highlands, and the interior of a cold, stony, hard castle and leaky wooden buildings.

Macbeth is currently sitting at 80% on Rotten Tomatoes and 7.4 on IMDB. In my opinion, it’s pretty good but somewhat aggravating. The cinematography is really close up and detailed, with actors spraying each other when they expound. Scenery is minimal and dreary, costumes are tattered and war-worn and nobody seems to have the likelihood of an enjoyable life, just a struggle until their inevitable violent death. I would have liked the movie a whole lot more but for the speech of the actors. Most of the movie is done in what I call “whisper-talk”, like Alec Baldwin in 30 Rock, except with a huge dose of pro-wrestler steroid voice. Much of the male dialog is very difficult to comprehend, being composed grunts and whispers. Like it or not, one of the features of Shakespeare is just how articulate and profound these brutes are, not how they grunt and spit at each other. Because I am familiar with the story (it could have been done in mime for me), I didn’t lose the plot, but for the uninitiated, it would be a difficult movie and the glory of The Bard’s poetry would be lost. This brought it down by a star. The acting is visceral, strong, and physically excellent and the visuals really transport you to this place; you wonder why ANYBODY would fight for this.

I wish that Kurzel had made different choices for the speech. For centuries, actors have spent their careers working on perfect diction in order to perform Shakespeare. One of the first ever voice recordings was done by Thomas Edison, a recording of my avatar, Edwin Booth, performing a couple minutes of Othello in 1890. In spite of the miserable sound of this recording, you can get an idea how musical this actor’s voice must have sounded in person -

https://archive.org/details/OthelloByEdwinBooth1890

All that is lost with these voice characterizations. Sometimes, all’s well that ends well (Shakespeare) and to most people in the working day world (Shakespeare again), the long and the short of it (The Bard), is that anything that gets butts in the seats, will help to keep these stories alive. My recommendation is to see it. Be sure to read the wiki version of the plot over a couple times before you go (if you’re not familiar already), enjoy the visceral acting and the amazing visuals and ignore the dialog.

Loved to hear about the dialogue aspect of this movie. When I get the opportunity, I'll be seeing this one. And I DEFINITELY rent it so that I can use subtitles lol

I did you feel about the little run they did with placing shakespeare plays in modern times? Some have hit, many haven't.
I thoroughly enjoyed Richard III set during the beginning of the 20th century but then that also had a lot to do with the amazing actors; especially Ian McKellen as a brilliantly deliciously evil Richard. When I first saw the opening speech at the cinema, I was utterly hooked.

I'm not a purist on Shakespeare at all. I've seen adaptations that put the stories in a bunch of time frames, some better, some worse, but I am disappointed when an adaptation loses the language. So much of Shakespeare IS the language that losing the language is like seeing Avatar in grainy black and white. As much as I enjoyed the visuals and physical acting of this Macbeth, I really did miss about half of the dialog due to the lack of clarity in the actor's speech.

My most recent favorite adaptation was Joss Whedon's version of As You Like It. It's a fun piece of Shakespeare Lite, done in a shortened contemporary version, filmed inside his own house, but with The Bard's language.