Old Man @ The Movies

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 no...

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...

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...

I should be more observant.  I did recognize from the previews that I was in the theater that seems to be reserved for horror films.  And I didn't really notice that the title of the movie was a little unusual, i.e., THE STRANGERS; CHAPTER 1, because I didn't really believe that the filmmakers would blatantly announce there would be more chapters.  But they did because at the end of the film, the words "to be continued" rolled across the screen.  How dare they?!! This is the story of a nice young couple making an extended road trip, and they stop in a tiny offbeat village to eat.  There's a strange group in the restaurant and when our couple leaves, they find their car won't start. Conveniently, one of the others in the restaurant owns a car repair shop, examines things and tells them he needs to order a part from another town which he can't do until the morning.  There's no hotel in town but a waitress offers to drive them to a cottage available for t...

Too often Hollywood believes in the statement, more is better, and what resultsis more horror films, more sequels. more franchises, more super heroes and King Kongs and Godzillas, etc., etc.  I happen to be a simian lover, starting way back to Tarzan movies and Cheetah, his pet chimpanzee, which is why I went to see KINGDOM OF THE PLANET OF THE APES.  Believe it or not, I actually persuaded my bride (we were on our honeymoon in Spain thanks to her job as a flight attendant with Pan American) to visit the Barcelona zoo where we viewed the world's only albino gorilla in captivity.  He was just an infant then.  I subsequently revisited the gorilla some 50 years later while on a business trip.  He was huge, still white, in his own building.  I hasten to add, he did not remember me. Back to the movie.  I enjoyed the original Planet films, including the ones where apes were trying to take over the world.  They were civilized, spoke and rode horseback....