Old Man @ The Movies

I don't understand it.  What compels reasonably attractive and talented actresses to debase women in general and themselves specifically on screen.  Although Poor Things and Emma Stone was the rock bottom in my opinion,  Nicole Kidman and BABYGIRL comes in as a close second lowest!  Perhaps they should have called it Poor Things Revisited. In this one, Kidman is a brilliant (Yale summa cum laude) robotics and technical expert in a large firm. She appears to be happily married with two children and on her way to bigger and better things until she is introduced to the new group of interns, one of whom is a good-looking young man. Somehow, he insinuates himself on her, and they embark upon a sleazy sensual and sensuous affair with no holds barred and absolutely no inhibitions. But the worse thing that happens is that he gains complete control over her and is able to make her do anything he commands. It's basically a dirty porn movie in which, cinematically, Kidman is un...

A couple of days before Christmas, I saw a film that held me captive for an hour and 47 minutes, and I liked just about all of it.  LAKE GEORGE is what I might be inclined to call a sleeper. Unheralded and with no familiar names (to me), it was interesting, sometimes funny, off beat and violent.  The principal, Don, is just out of prison after ten years there, and he's looking for work.  Reluctantly, he ends up asking for help from a heavy duty criminal for whom he did a job which put him in prison. The crime boss agrees to pay him what he's owed if he, Don, kills the criminal's girlfriend. He is given literally no choice and reluctantly trails her and then abducts her and takes her to the desert to perform the execution. He's basically a nice guy and cannot do it, and the nice-so-honorable girlfriend proposes a pact to rob the criminal of all his ill-gained funds. They are successful and unexpected events occur again and again. It is extremely well acted and set up and...

On a frigid Saturday before Christmas, I went to a crowded multiplex theater and was one of 4 people watching HOMESTEAD. The rest of the hoards were in theaters showing the two other new releases— the Disney production of Mufasa: The Lion King and the animated Sonic 6 (or whatever number this one is).  My film was a deep drama depicting the virtual destruction of America by a nuclear weapon or weapons and a group of people who join others in an isolated fortress in the Rockies.  It was designed to be a self-sufficient enclave determined to limit the number of people there by being protected by armed security people. A racially mixed family is there because the husband has been hired to head the security effort.  It is an interesting film with no recognizable actors and has a great deal of suspense and anxiety and pathos, particularly the plight of the people outside the gates in dire circumstances who are refused admittance.  I was constantly thinking throughout the ...

I think I must be seeing too many movies because I actually liked, but not too much, the movie I saw Monday, despite the fact that it was a Marvel comic film and I had previously decided not to see any of them some time back.  This one was different because I understood everything that was happening.  This is the story of how Kraven, obviously a popular villain who has appeared in previous renditions, got to be what he became.  Maybe they should have entitled it Birth of Kraven instead of KRAVEN THE HUNTER. He is one of two vastly different but devoted to one another brothers, Sergei and Dmitri, whose father is a Russian gangster and drug dealer living the high life in the U.S.  Dad is well played by basso profundo-voiced Russell Crowe.  Kraven, a name Sergei adopted, leaves home after violent confrontations with his father and in a remote part of the world is transformed into a superman of sorts (but doesn't fly) and he travels the world supposedly hunting...

The second film I watched on this chilly weekend was THE MAN IN THE WHITE VAN, and I was alone in the theater as I watched it at the 1:15 showing.  The other patrons of the multiplex proved they were wiser than I by seeing other movies. It's not that it was bad; it was just pointless, rambled all over the place and ended by being unresolved in any way.  I didn't realize it was based on a true story until I started to write this review.  It is the story of what I considered a dysfunctional family, the young daughter of which is frantic because she feels and reports that she is being stalked and no one believes her.  The stalker should come as no surprise to you because he is a man in a white van.  He finally finds an opportunity to abduct her but she manages to escape. The film spends an inordinate amount of time on the girl riding her horse, Rebel, which had nothing to do with the story line, and I thought her parents were stiff and disinterested.  I d...

Prospects looked dim when I viewed the new films released locally and read the brief descriptions.  So I flipped a coin and ended up seeing Y2K, which, to put it mildly, was abysmal. I won't waste your and my time in describing too much of the plot. This is a poorly made film, likely written, produced and acted in by teenagers who are anxiously awaiting the arrival of the millennium, headed by two social outcasts who are hoping the millennium will grant them kisses from girls and possibly sexual favors.  Instead, they experience all of the awful things that were anticipated by the experts but which did not materialize in real life.  They do in this film, which features dialogue more foul than most of the movies recently, much of which was spoken by the girls.  Need I say more?  45% of critics reported they liked it but audiences neglected or refused to rate it.  Smart audiences.       

I don't understand my actions sometimes. I knew from reading the brief description of the movie I was going to see today on the theater's website that I wasn't going to like it. And rational beings knowing this would not go to the movie. Guess I'm just irrational and obsessed with movie going. It was as bad as I expected, and perhaps it was worse. This is the story of a family, obsessed by the "f" word, who go on a vacation to a seemingly serene island in Sweden and find themselves in the midst of some bizarre ritual involving the island residents. I won't prolong this by telling more of the plot other than to say there's a whole lot of killing going on, mostly with knives and very bloody.  Unless this is your cup of tea, avoid this one. None of the cast was recognizable and shouldn't be. And, in the continuing mystery to me, 75% of critics gave this a thumbs up. They could not get any audiences to rate it.  

The film we saw the day after Thanksgiving was my choice because I had seen all the other movies available. And I apologized to my daughters for the choice but was glad they saw it with me so I could ask them what happened in the movie afterward. Don't misunderstand. I thought it was an excellent movie, beautifully acted snd filmed, but it was an Irish movie and Irish dramas tend to be dark and depressing and SMALL THINGS LIKE THESE was no exception. An Irish cast, headed by the brilliant acting of Cillian Murphy, who you may recall played the title role in Oppenheimer, did a first rate job in a film that ended up being a condemnation of nuns who ran a facility for young girls and was found to have abused them over the years. Not the most cheerful subject I can think of. Murphy works for or owns a company that supplies bags of coal for stoves and furnaces, who, when making a delivery, discovers a young abused girl in an unheated storage facility belonging to a home for homeless gir...

I had the pleasure of being with my daughters for Thanksgiving and because they are moviegoers like me, we went to the movies—twice.  Our first choice was what I thought of as the most hyped, most promoted, most everything movie I ever remember being released, and it should not come as a surprise to any of you that I was totally unaware that this two hour and 40 minute film was only Part 1 of this Broadway adapted hit. WICKED was a grand spectacle and it was spectacular. Starring who I knew to be a pop singer, Ariana Grande, and a star from Broadway, the show is about things that happened before The Wizard of Oz fantasy movie of 1939. Beautifully filmed, it featured great voices singing, marvelous choreography and a story that moved right along as it should. This was one of the few Broadway shows I didn't see when we were living just outside the city, but my daughters, both of whom saw the show on Broadway more than once, said it was true to its antecedent, which is not always true...

Faced with a choice of movies I didn't want to see, such as Moana 2 and Venom: The Last Dance, I selected Red One, a Christmas story which I thought was an animated one.  Thankfully it was not animated and surprisingly, it wasn't as bad as I expected. RED ONE turned out to be an amalgam of many Christmas movies—a little bit of Dickens, a smidgen of How The Grinch Stole Christmas, and even had a vague resemblance to classics like Miracle on 34th Street and It's a Wonderful Life. In this modern day tale, Santa, known as Nick by his staff and associates and played by the wonderful but unrecognizable J.K. Simmons, is abducted just before Christmas, and it's up to his chief of security, Dwayne Johnson, to join forces with a non-believer to rescue him in time to deliver toys around the world. Santa's sleigh is super modern and sleek and the reindeer are huge and super powerful. Sure, it's silly and contrived but it held my attention for its just over 2 hour length. It...