Old Man @ The Movies

After deciding that I would not see Summer Camp, Babes and I Saw the TV Glow simply because I'm trying to amend my viewing habits and the subject matter turned me off, my son and I went to see EZRA, and we both enjoyed it.  It is a heart warming, poignant and sometimes funny story about family and relationships.  Max, played exceptionally well by Bobby Cannavale, has become a dark stand-up comedian, living with his father (Robert De Niro) during s separation from his wife (Rose Byrne), and father of an autistic young son.  When the couple's arguments about what to do with their son reach an unsolvable point, Max takes son Ezra and embarks on a get-away-from-it-all trip to friends in Michigan and onward west. It serves no purpose to explain more about the trip because there are too many events to recount, but Max ends up as a fugitive of justice for kidnapping.  There are other elements to be examined such as Max's troubled relationship with his father, who went from being a

I made a decision after going to see FURIOSA and leaving the theater before the film ended.  I'm just too old and disinterested to waste time seeing these action-filled Marvel comic superheroes and their ludicrous exploits that I honestly don't understand.  Furiosa, I suspect, was intended to capitalize on the successful franchise introduced in 1979 and starred Mel Gibson.  I also suspect that no one in the audiences today were even born when the original was in theaters.  This one, like the others, looks like it takes place in Australia and is sometime well in the future and depicts a dystopian world (I had to look up the definition of dystopian to be sure it meant what I wanted it to).  And I can't tell you much more than that.  It is a world filled with awful biker people, led by a man with the inappropriate name of Dementus.  A young girl, Furiosa, leaves her peaceful home and is abducted by the big D.  This is a movie filled with very loud noises and growling motorcycl

This past weekend I has the pleasure of seeing a very good movie with my daughters.  They invariably pick the best movies for us to see together.  This one was another based on a true story, and for a change, in the epilogue to the film, the real life main character of the film actually vouched for its authenticity.  The is the inspiring and often painfully tragic story of a brilliant young Chinese boy, Ming Wang, caught in the horrors of the Chinese cultural revolution, who against all odds travels to America and receives degrees from Harvard and MIT and becomes a renown eye surgeon and who, with his American colleague, creates a procedure which restores sight to s blind person.  This amazing story is very well presented and skillfully acted, with the only recognizable actor, Greg Kinnear, who portrays Dr. Wang's colleague.  It depicts China in a very poor light because of the harshness of the revolutionary movement and the hardships inflicted on the population.  A nun brings a yo

I like and admire John Krasinski as a comedian (The Office), an actor and more recently as a writer/director of The Quiet Place. He appears to be a nice and talented man.  But I'm not quite sure what he was trying to do with the film I saw yesterday—IF.  Did he make this part live actors, part animated creature movie for children or for adults or did he hope to appeal to both?  Based on my experience in the theater yesterday, he missed the boat.  The only other people in the theater with me were a father and his young son, and they talked continually and loudly throughout the movie which suggests that neither was interested in what was going on on the screen.  I would describe If as a fantasy, a light-hearted, colorful film inhabited by a star-studded cast of actors (Krasinski, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Sam Rockwell, and Maya Rudolph, among others) and some very cute computer-generated lovable beings who were the real stars of the movie.  I think most of the actors did voice-overs o