Old Man @ The Movies

Yes, I make mistakes.  Many of you know that I am no a big fan of animated films and rarely, if ever, see and review them.  But when I saw that a film was showing which sounded interesting and educational, if animated, I decided to take a chance.  I was alone in the theater for a 3:10 p.m. showing of THE INVENTOR and found the opening and credits well done and imaginative.  But the rest was disappointing at best.  This movie, depicting the life of Leonardo DaVinci, one of the world’s most recognized geniuses — a painter, scientist and thinker — was just plain disappointing.  With the opportunity to expose him and his achievements to a massive audience, the producers missed the boat.  It became a typical animated film, silly at times, with inappropriate singing and dancing.  And I won’t say any more than that.  As to be expected, critics gave it  a 76% thumbs up, while audiences were more critical with only 44% approval. 

I have been a fan of Hercule Poirot for a very long time and because of that, probably saw most of the movies and TV shows with him as the central character.  Bottom-line is, I preferred reading the books and short stories to seeing him on the big screen or tv.  Kenneth Branagh is a talented actor and director, but he ain’t no Poirot.  His latest effort, A HAUNTING IN VENICE, is dark but entertaining and not all that scary.  In this one, Poirot is happily retired in Venice but tracked down by an acquaintance, a very successful British crime story novelist, Ariadne Oliver, who has appeared in several of Christie’s works.  She implores him and he reluctantly agrees to attend a seance in a very dark, falling apart palazzo, and one of the guests is murdered.  As in most Poirot adventures, virtually everyone is a suspect, snd Poirot takes us to a solution in his lengthy meticulous way.  When we are out of doors, the scenes of beautiful Venice made me long to return there.  Two things bother

Years ago in my checkered career, my little one-man public relations agency in NYC was hired by the Cayman Islands to help them increase their tourism.  At the time, they were attracting minimal numbers, primarily scuba divers.  The airport terminal was a former hanger with a couple of desks inside for customs and immigration, and there were a grand total of three seedy motels on Seven Mile Beach, and another one elsewhere on the island.  I was successful in making it a very desirable destination.  Which is a long way to explain why I went to see THE RETIREMENT PLAN when I read that it took place in part on the Cayman Islands. Nostalgia, but in all honesty, it has changed so radically since my involvement that I barely recognized anything.  It is a violent, action-packed thriller starring, of all people, Nicholas Cage.  The gist of the story is a family involved with a very bad group of characters, headed by Donny, who only speak in four letter words.  The husband, who is an innocent d

I have no credible excuse for giving Liam Neeson another chance.  Probably because I fdlt like going to a movie and it was a choice between him and Jawan, an Indian film I could have watched in Hindi or Telugu.  I should have opted for Jawan.  RETRIBUTION was a dismal excuse for a thriller — car chase, et al.  Once again Liam is involved with saving family members.  He is depicted as head of a dysfunctional family whose neglect has his wife on the verge of divorce and his son and daughter disliking him.  Reluctantly driving them to school in Berlin where this all takes place, he gets a call from a computer distorted man who advises that, unless he follows instructions, the bomb located under the driver’s seat will be detonated.  And if they try to get out of the car, it will explode.  Following instructions, he encounters along the way two cars that are bombed — one occupied by an employee of his investment firm and his girl friend, the otherby his best friend and longtime partner.  Th

Please don’t ask me to describe THE NUN II, which I saw today.  First off, it is another film photographed in available light in venues that have no light, and my old eyes are just unable to make a lot of things out.  Secondly, it is a sequel and I am not exactly sure of what is happening.  I am surmising that a number of priests, bishops and nuns throughout Europe are dying in many ways, like murder and suicide.  A senior in the church orders a nun, Sister Irene, to investigate and stop this killing because she was able to do this previously (in the original The Nun perhaps?)  She initially refuses and then reluctantly accepts the assignment.  From then on, I was literally and figuratively in the dark.  She ends up at a convent school somewhere in France where the main characters are a young student named Sophie, the kindly school maintenance man Frenchie and another nun who turns out to be the Demon Nun whom Irene encountered in her previous assignment.  In prolonged action mostly in

If you’re expecting  to see reviews of the following films:  Strays, Aristotle & Dante, etc.,  My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Blue Beetle, look elsewhere.  Despite at least one very high critical and audience rating, they are no-sees for me for a variety of reasons.  I did see THE EQUALIZER 3, and it was okay, formulaic as it was.  Denzel Washington, as one iteration of a retired secret government agent named Robert McCall who goes around sticking his nose into other people’s business with violence and righteousness, is in Sicily and gets himself beaten up.  I don’t know why he’s in Sicily or why he gets beaten up, but he ends up being cared for by a doctor in a tiny town there.  He learns that the Camorra, a longtime mafia-like criminal organization, is doing bad things in the town and has the residents terrified.  He warns the CIA and then proceeds to do what equalizers do best — beat the heck out of the Camorra, and the CIA cleans up afterwards with an agent to whom he told the st

I reached the bottom of the barrel when I went to see my fourth movie in about a week.  I had read a précis on what it was about and wasn’t really sure I wanted to see it.  I can describe BOTTOMS in a couple of words:  disgusting, obscene. gross and just plain awful.  If it was supposed to be a satire or a farce or a comedy, it completely missed the boat.  Briefly, two gay high school students, using language that would embarrass a sailor, start a fight club to attract cheerleaders for the purpose of losing their virginity.  I am now convinced that women can write, produce and direct filthier movies than men. This is proof.  And to prove how wrong I am with my negative review, you need only to know that critics (95%) and audiences (92%) loved it.  A critic at the lofty New York Times, Elisabeth Vincentelli, went so far as to write, “For most of its tight fisted running time, Bottoms hovers on the cusp of greatness.”  No one in their right mind would call me a prude, but this one grosse

This must be my week for sports movies and based-on-a-true-story movies.  After tennis and auto racing, I saw a film about baseball, which was also faith based, and unexpectedly very religious.  THE HILL is the supposedly true story of a young boy who wears unwieldy braces on both legs  but who can his a baseball farther than anyone else and who lives with his family in a small rural snd poor town where his father is a by-the-book minister (played well by an almost unrecognizable Dennis Quaid probably because he never smiled) and his mother and two siblings.  Quaid is fired because he asked two parishioners to stop smoking and spitting in church and ends up in an even more poor and remote church.  Through a series of improbable events, the boy, named Rickey Hill and well played  by Colin Ford, eventually gets a tryout and wins major league contract after a hard-to-believe performance in front of all the major league scouts, hitting 11 for 11 as a designated hitter for both teams.  Ther

At two different times in my checkered career, I have been heavily involved with car racing. The first time was when I handled the Bahama account for a major public relations firm.  I inherited two weeks of sports car racing there, which featured legendary names like Sterling Moss, Phil Hill, Caroll Shelby and A.J. Foyt.  The second time was when I was vice president of corporate communications for STP and one of my responsibilities was their racing program.  They were sponsors of the leading driver on the NASCAR circuit, “King” Richard Petty, and on the Indy Car circuit, with driver Mario Andretti.  I was not and am not fond of car racing, but my experiences probably led me to see GRAN TURISMO.  It is the unlikely but purportedly true story of a young man in Wales who, despite his parents’ feelings spent his entire leisure time “playing” s video game simulating high speed auto racing.  An entrepreneur talks Toyota into sponsoring a worldwide contest involving the video game in which t

I love tennis.  I played tennis and pickle ball until I was almost 90, and I had a subscription to all the matches at the US Open for many years until I gave it to one of my daughters.  And I still watch it avidly on television. including yesterday when I decided to watch my new favorite player, Carlos Alcaraz, play instead of going to a movie.  I also believed theaters would be jammed on a Labor Day weekend and before school started here. I went today, and found the theaters empty, to see the rare tennis movie NEVER GIVE UP.  It intrigued me because it was allegedly a true story about a deaf tennis player , a sport I was totally ignorant of.  It was obviously intended as a feel good movie; it was also a faith-based one, but unfortunately, it appeared as though it was written, produced and directed and acted by amateurs.  The dialogue was stilted; some actors sounded as though they were reading ineptly from a  teleprompter.  And there were endless scenes of men hitting a tennis ball ai