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Lee (#603)

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The movie I went to see today wasn't worth driving in the rain to see but I sincerely hope it was better than another choice, entitled My Old Ass.  Regarding this movie based on a true story, I admit to never having heard of the central character nor did I recall seeing the famous photograph of her bathing in Adolph Hitler's bathtub.  The title character of the movie LEE is Lee Miller, a onetime model turned into a fashion photographer.  Played slovenly by Kate Winslet, she is depicted as a chain smoking. heavy drinking, morose, promiscuous woman living first in Paris, then in London where she is employed as a photographer for Vogue.  She eventually is able to work her way into photographing WWII on the front lines snd eventually ending up viewing the horror in the concentration camps.  We learn all this through flashbacks as she is being interviewed by a younger man.  I found the movie incredibly talky but with characters really saying nothing important or noteworthy. Frankly,
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A Mistake (#602)

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I saw a powerful, moralistic medical drama that was dark, deep, and predominantly tragic. Made in New Zealand with the sometimes difficult accents of the actors, it was excellently acted and filmed, including some very graphic operations and technical medical language. In A MISTAKE, Elizabeth is obviously a very gifted surgical consultant, overseeing a student in difficult surgery on a young woman, who subsequently dies.  The patient's parents are distraught, unsatisfied with the explanation of their daughter's death and eventually there is a newspaper article which accuses Elizabeth of mishandling the surgery.  This all comes at a time when the hospital administrators are introducing a new set of dats that reveals numerically individual doctors and their success and failure rates.  Elizabeth objects and she is suspended and soon after her surgical student, wracked with guilt over the patient's death, commits suicide.  The film is direct and points fingers and plods at time
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The Substance (#601)

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I don't know how or why you can destroy a film that had a unique premise, reasonable acting, great cinematography and special effects and other good things to make it unusual and watchable in the last twenty minutes, but it was achieved in THE SUBSTANCE by its French writer/director.  Critics raved, calling it a marvelous Hollywood satire.  The last twenty minutes made it gross, grotesque, violent, bloody and absurd.  Demi Moore, whom I don't recall seeing in ages, did a good job as a highly successful and beautiful model and movie celebrity, with a star on the Hollywood walk of fame, who is fired from her network fitness show because she's too old (a la Jane Fonda?).  The man who fires her and demands a younger, prettier version to succeed her is a manic and funny Dennis Quaid named Harvey (a caricature of Harvey Weinstein?).   A mysterious and anonymous voice advises Demi that she is able to create a replacement for herself with one injection. Said injection will allow he
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Speak No Evil (#600)

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I am sorry to report that my 600th review was a genuine stinker, at least in my opinion and despite what critics and audiences believe.  It claims as its genre "suspense," but I would classify it as psychotic and silly.  I should have recognized this from the previews I had been watching for what seemed like six months.  In SPEAK NO EVIL, a naive American couple who live in London and are having rough times meet an arrogant "doctor" and his wife on vacation in Italy and accept an invitation to visit these relative strangers at their home in the West County of England. They take their young daughter.  Dr. Arrogant begins to exhibit some aberrant behavior and you want to scream at the naives to go home.  They don't and things only get worse.  I guess James McAvoy does a credible job as the nutty doctor, but the other actors seem to be playing their parts as if they were in another movie, or at least another place. You will also learn why the movie was titled as it
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The Killer's Game (#599)

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Described as an action-comedy, THE KILLER'S GAME hits the target of both descriptions. It has an incredible amount of ultra-violent action, and it is funny and farcical.  It stars Dave Bautista, whom I guess I had seen before (after reading his biography), but who I did not recognize.  He's a heavily tattooed likable bruiser (he had been a world-champion wrestler earlier in his career), and I thought he did a terrific job as Joe Flood, a successful assassin, who meets and rescues the love of his life in a dance theater after he kills half a dozen people.  His handler or agent, the one who gives him all his assignments, is played beautifully by Ben Kingsley, and despite the seeming sordidness of their jobs, they come across as decent and genuine friends.  We learn later that although assassination is their business, they only are involved with killing criminals, and Joe does a lot of that.  Joe wants to quit because he is having severe headaches and other debilitating symptoms,
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