This movie came out almost 30 years ago- in 1993- and garnered countless nominations and awards. It is one of those movies that showcase a year in the life of a person or a family with all their hardships but with no real purpose in the end. There is no payoff.  There is thankfully no agenda, but this maybe due to it having been made so long ago.  Depp and DiCaprio are at the beginning of their A-list acting careers,  but it is reminiscent in content (certainly not in quality) of the sitcom Roseanne. It is 2 hours of brutish people doing brutish things. Those sorts of films never, in the end, make me feel good. 
 
I guess I’d pay for it (I know even though I said what I said) but it was so critically acclaimed and the beginning of both their careers…. maybe just for that reason. I am glad I watched it, since it’s considered a movie classic to some extent.  

I was curious to see this only because it had won best picture at the Academy Awards last year and I have found that any best picture is usually voted ‘best’ for a reason.  It turns out it is an extremely well made movie. For almost the entire length of the film, (which by the way is subtitled), it is hard to tell what will happen next which is always a good sign in a script. The set up takes a large portion of the film, and as many movies do, near the end events start to get exaggerated. There is no agenda that I can remember and overall it has a good, original storyline. This is all topped off by the fact that  it is the very first best picture awarded to a foreign film.

 

This is one of those movies that portrays exaggerated character doing ridiculous things. If you can watch it with that in mind it can still be entertaining. (Personally I like a more realistic storyline.) Overall it was a fun movie to watch and has some really nice ideas when attempting to describe the back story of Santa. This reminded me of American Beauty in the sense that it is a bizarre and crazy story but in the end it succeeds in making a point.

And finally I would never notice let alone have a problem with any race or gender in a movie. The problem today is it is now an agenda hitting you over the head. So the fact that they made Mrs Claus black….well that to me is absurd and an agenda-based casting decision. Which makes me angry and disgusted. When in the real world it would not have even been a thought. Now it is all I see. Too bad huh?  An example of the carnage of the left.

Overall this is a fantastic movie. One reason is: it is complex. There are so many films made for the lowest common denominator audience member now that something that is difficult to follow is almost a treat. I don’t think even the film makers thought anyone could follow all of the plot points the first time through. The time element is probably the most difficult to follow because this is different than anything we have ever seen- this isn’t going forward and backward within our own timeline, it is watching time going in the other direction simultaneously with the people going in real time forward.  That is an affect that is very hard to keep up with!

Another element in the mix is the sound because it does make it difficult to understand what is being said at times- yet through all of this I would recommend this film. Just plan on seeing it a second time. At least.

This movie was very well done and thankfully stuck to the historical truth of what happened when two old Texas Rangers were called out of retirement to help capture Bonnie and Clyde.  Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson are cast as the lead characters whose increasing age cause them to question their ability to do what was needed to crack a case in the 1930’s- drive the ‘highways’ for months in search of clues, talking to folks and working out how to finally nab these outlaws.

In contrast to the 1969 Bonnie and Clyde with Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, this movie showed what their crime spree was actually like. They were treated like celebrities in the original 1969 movie  (which the populace believed them to be at the time) and their story was shown from their point of view. This new version is from the police and detectives perspective (ostensibly the truth of the case) which is 180 degrees from that public perception.

Overall it is well worth watching, Costner and Harrelson put on great performances and give the audience a feel for the country at that time. Most roads were dirt roads, most people lived in very small towns, most were simply eking out a living. No wonder two young lovers keeping out of the reach of law enforcement for over two years was an exciting story to be romanticized.  Possibly due to the simple fact that this was a story of what actually happened, it does not appear that Hollywood was able to slip in any of it’s agenda.

This may be the most difficult review I will ever do.  When this movie first came out there was an outcry- this was the most outrageous pile of garbage Hollywood has ever made. A story of a man seducing a young kid to have sex with him? ARE YOU KIDDING ME???  The right trashed it mercilessly, the left applauded it. Yet another chasm between the two sides of the political spectrum. How in the world could anyone applaud this movie??

Well, you can’t if you understand the surface storyline alone. (which, btw, I don’t know how this can happen if you actually do watch the movie) The profound nature of the film is on display immediately with the opening credits. The credits are paired with photos of iconic statues from the ancient world (which also happens to be part of a subplot in the movie- the boys’ father is working within academia to catalogue ancient artifacts which, in one scene, we see being dredged up out of a lake in northern Italy)  These images begin the story and are exactly what change the premise of the film – that this is not just more garbage from Hollywood – it is the deepest film I have ever seen.  

Now I would even go so far as to say that this is one of my favorite films because of what it portrays. It attempts to show us the meeting of two souls- a story that we mostly know from antiquity.  Alexander and Hephastion, Jonathan and David,  Apollo and Patroclus. This is the story of two souls who- no matter their sex or any other possible descriptor imagineable- find one another in a life changing summer in Italy. 

‘If I could have him like this in my dreams every night for the rest of my life I would stake MY LIFE on dreams. And be done with the rest of it.’  This lofty Shakesperean rhetoric is what makes this the deepest movie I have ever watched. If you can take out the details of who these people are, then you get it. And you will love it.

oh- the title of the movie. It says everything. Two people are so close they are each other.

This is a fun romantic comedy- especially for girls. It follows two girlfriends who get themselves deeper and deeper into trouble in the world of espionage which includes loads of criminals as well as handsome british spys . Kate McKinnon really shows her comedic talent in this and the relationship between the two makes for a very entertaining film.

One element that stood out though as I watched it were the violent scenes that were way over the top.
As an audience member you are watching a somewhat light hearted comedy and these scenes just didn’t work for this type of film. It was very strange and I don’t know if I’d ever seen anything like this before. Then the credits rolled and I found out the movie was written and direct by a woman, Susanna Fogel.

Later I ran across an interview with Fogel where she wondered if the criticism the film was getting over this point was due to the gender of the main characters. She wondered if the same criticism would be leveled if it were a male-driven storyline.

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/the-spy-who-dumped-me-interview-susanna-fogel-on-why-the-films-violence-shouldnt-be-so-a8507946.html

So the film itself was mostly free of liberal messaging but the one strange quality that I noticed was indeed debated in the whacky liberal bubble of Hollywood. The gender of the characters had absolutely nothing to do with whether the level of violence was out of place in this slaptick comedy!

This is a fanciful movie about how Charles Dickens may have been inspired to write his most famous work,  A Christmas Carol.  It reminded me of Shakespeare In Love a bit because it is a “what if” on how they came up with their greatest works.  Christopher Plummer plays the fictitious Scrooge and has the best scene when he and Dickens are arguing on how to go forward in the story. So it is a very creative way to relay what a character is thinking which is always a difficult concept to portray on film.

Although Hollywood can still get their agenda into period pieces this film did not attempt to end western civilization in anyway! (Luckily period pieces tend to deal with the politics of the time they are portraying and not present day concerns.)  So happily this was an agenda free hour and 44 minutes of cinema.

 

Note: I looked up whether the movie stayed historically correct and it turns out it did!

This was a pretty good movie by Kenneth Branagh with one glaring liberal Hollywood casting decision. They insert a black character where there was none in the original novel nor in any of  the film incarnations of this Agatha Christie novel. Unfortunately it seems that the “oscars-so-white”  movement controlled Branagh’s decisions in how he cast his movie.

Just as in the new Winston Churchill movie, Darkest Hour, they anachronistically either add a black character or make one of the original characters black- when they NEVER could have been there historically. This is in actuality an example of soft bigotry in my mind.  No, blacks weren’t riding trains in London in the 1930’s and no,
there probably weren’t any high class black doctors riding elegant trains from Istanbul to London around the same time period.

This isn’t a happy point I am making. It is simply the truth and to try to change history for the sake of political correctness is just sad.  And frustrating while one watches a movie.

 

This 1976 film is incoherent and choppily edited, full of 1970’s tripe. The scenes go on and on and then arenseemingly randomly spliced together. It is obsessed with naked bodies (especially Bowie’s) trying to shock the audience. It is pretentious- an artsy film where no one acts rationally. This throws you off and is why David Mamet said this about screenwriting : any good story should have a beginning a middle and an end. (this is why french movies are trash) Artsy movies like this Bowie -fest are purely ego driven- let me photograph a flower and I will force you to watch the image for way too long.