Tag: review

Movie review: Creed

I had not seen Michael B. Jordan in the well-regarded Fruitvale Station, or the Fantastic Four flick.

Creed_Movie_PosterI had been initially disinclined to see the movie Creed. I’d seen the first four Rocky movies, and while the earlier ones were good, the fourth one I thought was awful. Never bothered with the apparently terrible fifth, or Rocky Balboa, the 2006 film I missed, despite a respectable critical response, because we had a two-year-old.

Now, I should emphasize how much I especially like the original 1975 movie. In part, it was because I saw it with my mother, just the two of us, which we did periodically when I visited Charlotte, NC, where my parents moved in 1974.

But Creed was playing at the nearby Madison Theater. PLUS Sylvester Stallone won a Golden Globe AND was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, for playing Rocky.

Maybe it was low expectations, despite quite decent reviews, but I really liked this film. One could appreciate the storyline, even if you had never seen a single reel featuring the Italian Stallion, as Balboa had been dubbed. But it surely enhanced my enjoyment, the dialogue that evoked the late boxer Apollo Creed.

The plot is that a young boxer is driven to follow in his late father’s footsteps, without using the champion’s name; beyond that, see it for yourself. The film is directed by Ryan Coogler, based on a screenplay by Coogler and Aaron Covington.

I enjoyed Phylicia Rashad as the mother figure, especially in the pivotal scene near the end, which is, in the context, LOL funny. Also good is Tessa Thompson as Bianca, the irritating neighbor/singer. And, yes, Stallone is worthy of the awards buzz.

It is Michael B. Jordan as Adonis Johnson who is the real revelation. I had not seen him in the well-regarded Fruitvale Station, or the Fantastic Four flick. But I did see him on the TV show Parenthood a few seasons ago as the boyfriend of one of the Braverman girls, and he was quite fine then. This performance by Jordan is Oscar-worthy.

Despite the boxing violence that was more graphic than it was 40 years ago, I left the cinema feeling exhilarated by a feel-good movie. It ended with a variation on a familiar Rocky trope, which The Wife particularly loved.

Movie review: Spotlight

Where the Post had Ben Bradlee, the Globe had Ben Bradlee, Jr.

spotlightIt appears that every movie I’ve seen lately, most recently Spotlight, is designed to tick me off. The subject of my ire this time is the Roman Catholic church that allowed its priests to prey upon its young, vulnerable members. Not only did they do nothing about it, but the system also allowed priests to get transferred to other parishes to continue their misdeeds.

All this I knew coming in. What was interesting in the telling was this: once upon a time, great metropolitan newspapers actually took on the system, even when that system is the mighty RC church in Boston. One truly chilling moment in the movie was one priest’s rationalization of why his actions weren’t so bad. Beyond the pain I felt from the physical and emotional abuse of the victims was the loss of faith and trust the now-adult victims experienced.

Some have compared Spotlight with All the President’s Men, and I think it would be fairly apt. Instead of two disparate reporters from the Washington Post trying to make sense of Watergate, there’s the special unit of the Boston Globe (Rachel McAdams, Brian d’Arcy James, and the headstrong character played by Mark Ruffalo). The group is headed by Walter ‘Robby’ Robinson (Michael Keaton), attempting to ascertain the scope of the church scandal.

Where the Post had Ben Bradlee, the Globe had Ben Bradlee, Jr. (John Slattery), plus a cerebral new boss (Liev Schreiber). The closest thing to Deep Throat is an infuriating, possibly crackpot lawyer (Stanley Tucci) who was representing some of the victims.

At one point, the team asks someone who had studied the phenomenon whether it could be as many as 13 priests in their area. Of course, there were far more, and not limited to the Boston diocese. In fact, the end of the movie lists all the areas in the country, then the rest of the world, where pedophile priests were rooted out. This included Albany, NY, first on the alphabetical list, as the nearly sold-out crowd at the Spectrum Theatre in the city noted.

The other great sadness of this story is that the events happened early in this century, yet the level of investigative reporting has all but disappeared, due to budget cutting. This is not a flashy movie but is a solidly made, occasionally tension-inducing narrative, despite the fact that we largely know the outcome.

Movie review: Concussion

Director/co-writer Peter Landesman was trying to explain WHY and HOW Dr. Omalu went on this crusade.

Concussion-Movie-PosterThe Daughter, an avid news watcher she is, thinks it’s weird that I was watching football on Week 17 of the National Football League. She thinks it’s a stupid sport, where the chances of getting a concussion, or worse, is quite great.

She’s not entirely wrong. The Wife and I returned to Oneonta on New Year’s Day and got to see the movie Concussion the following day at their mall. It’s about pathologist Dr. Bennet Omalu (Will Smith, looking just slightly not like himself) discovering the linkage between brain damage in football players who suffer repeated concussions in the course of normal play.

It’s a steady, unglamorous process, as science is wont to be. The cast is solid: Albert Brooks and Paul Reiser, almost unrecognizable as other doctors, and David Morse as Pittsburgh Steelers retired center Mike Webster, who is the initial driving force of the film. Alec Baldwin, as retired Steelers team doc Julian Bailes, ALMOST ceases to be Alec Baldwin.

The reviews are lukewarm in that the critics thought, perhaps correctly, that the story should have been more about the exploration, and perhaps less about his budding relationship with a woman from church (Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Prema Mutiso), but I think director/co-writer Peter Landesman was trying to explain WHY and HOW Dr. Omalu went on this crusade when he didn’t even know about American football.

I think it’s a good, solid film, 3 stars out of 4. Will Smith deserves his Golden Globe nomination. Yes, the film could have been more dramatic. Still, the National Football League comes off as obstructionists, not looking out for the safety of its current and former players. And it does address the fact that I was watching the NFL that weekend, not because of the mindless violence of the sport, but because of the poetry in motion.

Movie review: The Big Short

The Big Short is based on a Michael Lewis book that he was frankly surprised that was optioned to be a movie.

big-shortI walked into work at the same time as a colleague and told him I had seen The Big Short the night before. As it turned out, so had he, at a different cinema. I asked him what he thought of it. He said, “It pissed me off.”

I could quit there, I suppose, but need to mention that the movie is about that very real credit and housing bubble that collapsed the economy, and not just in the United States, in 2008. The big banks were greedy and lacked foresight. The government failed to do oversight. The characters here not only predicted it, but they also profited off of it.

The Big Short managed to take an amazingly dense, inherently boring topic and make some detailed sense of it, in part by using folks such as chef Anthony Bourdain, singer Selena Gomez, and Australian actress Margot Robbie (in a bubble bath) to explain some basic concepts. And, in spite of being often infuriating, the film was also rather funny.

This is an imperfect analogy, but it’s like how John Oliver will take a topic such as net neutrality (SNORE) and make you entertained enough to actually care.

There is great acting by Christian Bale, Steve Carrell, Ryan Gosling, and Brad Pitt, among others. There are odd little vignettes of Pharrell videos and “real life”, there, I think, as a palate cleanser between big concepts, and to show how the world was going on as usual while the system was undermining people’s lives.

The Big Short is based on a Michael Lewis book that he was frankly surprised that was optioned by Brad Pitt and others to be a movie. I’m told Lewis does a great job at making a dense subject understandable and human, though a very different animal. Adam McKay, the writer/director of Will Ferrell movies such as Anchorman and Talladega Nights directed this film and co-wrote the screenplay with Charles Randolph.

The tags near the end suggest that we may not be safe from this disaster happening again. In fact, Michael Burry, Real-Life Market Genius From The Big Short, Thinks Another Financial Crisis Is Looming.

And now for some venting

On December 30, I went to my favorite venue, the Spectrum Theatre in Albany, specifically to see SPOTLIGHT for the 6:15 pm showing, meeting my wife right after work. But, for some reason, it was preempted by another showing of the new STAR WARS, a movie already showing there. Some group had apparently rented out a theater.

Don’t know where this fact was noted, but I felt blindsided, as did others. The ticket seller did not even know until he was told by another unhappy patron. I know this situation wouldn’t have happened under the previous ownership, who would have noted it on their weekly broadsheets well in advance.

And preempting for STAR WARS? I could almost see some special local film. But a film that has grossed domestically, as of that date, $629,034,583, and over a billion worldwide?

Landmark Theatres, you have really ticked me off. The fact that I found a decent film to see in lieu of SPOTLIGHT does not mitigate the dreadful customer service in this situation.

Movie Review: Joy

I was curious whether David O. Russell could pull off a third film with Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper (and technically, Robert DeNiro).

jennifer-lawrence-as-joyThis is how I ended up seeing the movie Joy. The choices at the Spectrum in Albany, my favorite movie venue, were showing Joy, The Big Short, The Danish Girl, Spotlight, Carol, Brooklyn, and Youth.

Oh, yeah, and some space opera thing that seems to be somewhat popular. I would have seen any of them, though especially Spotlight and The Big Short.

But we weren’t IN Albany, we were in Oneonta, about 75 miles away, on Christmas weekend. The only crossover between the mall theater in Oneonta and the Spectrum was Joy.

I was interested in seeing this movie in part because it was based on the real story of entrepreneur Joy Mangano, who invented a better floor mop. How can that be a compelling story?

Also, I was curious whether David O. Russell could pull off a third film with Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper (and technically, Robert DeNiro) after they had appeared in Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle. I’m thinking that it feels somewhat rather like the troop of actors who used to show up in Woody Allen films.

This is a pretty solid 100 minute-film. Unfortunately, it ran 124. There’s a lot of nice bits: real soap opera actresses (Susan Lucci. Donna Mills) as the soap opera that Joy’s mom, Terry (Virginia Madsen), though the joke went on too long. As a business librarian, I found the parts with QVC rather interesting; Melissa Rivers played her mother Joan.

I appreciated the actors, including Édgar Ramírez as Joy’s ex-husband/still friend Tony; Diane Ladd as grandma Mimi, the narrator who seemed to disappear for large portions of the film; and Isabella Rossellini, as Trudy, Joy’s financier and the girlfriend of Rudy (DeNiro). But the character of Joy’s half-sister Peggy (Elisabeth Röhm of Law & Order) is a movie contrivance, unrelentingly negative.

There IS a good film there, I’m convinced, and Jennifer Lawrence carries much of it. But it’s muddled, and the transitions from scene to scene often didn’t work. I’m not quite sure I “believed” the ending. All of that said, I did enjoy it at the moment, though – and this is always a bad sign – I checked my watch 2/3s of the way through.

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