Reviews

I have no doubts about the veracity of these ten men sharing what they experienced with actor Kevin Spacey in terms of sexual harassment and/or misconduct. My disappointment comes from the craftsmanship of this "series." It's two episodes, about 50 minutes each. The first touches a little on Spacey's childhood - which is critical - and the second deals with his later work at London's "The Old Vic." The first group of accusers are American men, the latter are British. The second episode repeats some of the same moments from the first. A reporter by the window checking his phone, another reporter pacing in a conference room... Some of the lines from Spacey's accusers are repeated, too.

Perhaps most bewildering is the huge bombshell dropped by his brother in the middle of the second episode, there one minute and gone the next, never to be revisited.

This could have been an excellent feature documentary, with more insight into Spacey's childhood trauma. It could have avoided the repetition that cheapened the stories shared by his accusers. And it just sort of ends, having really arrived nowhere, revealing nothing more than these ten sad stories of sexual impropriety.

6/10.

You don't make a movie called "Civil War" that ostensibly envisions what an American civil war in modern times would look like, then switch to a film about the challenges of combat photojournalism. Or simply a film about how such a civil war would be violent and terrible. We know.

What are the particulars of such a war? How and when did it kick off? How long has it been going on? What are the sides exactly hoping to get out of it? Writer-director Garland doesn't answer these questions. Or, if he does, it's so offhanded and quick you might miss it. More so, it's purposefully obfuscated. Texas and California are the "secessionists"? The two US states with the least in common? Why are the "western forces" western? Who's calling the shots?

Nick Offerman's president is confusing, too. This is no parody of Donald Trump, yet it's casually referenced at one point he's in his third term. But doesn't he control the US military? And aren't they the western forces? If so, then the ending makes little sense.

Regardless, the film just feels like a bait and switch. Jesse Plemons is billed in the trailer and has five minutes of screen time. Characters are introduced so they can be killed in the very next scene. No one's motivations are very clear, even the journalists, who are just "doing their job," and want to interview the president before the war is over, they say. None of it makes for very compelling viewing.

I wanted to like this more; I wanted to be an important film from a talented writer-director, but he punted.

6/10.

Good movies make you want to live in them. It's sad when they end. The characters feel like close friends. And nowhere is this truer than "Running on Empty," a tightly-woven drama directed by veteran director Sidney Lumet from a heart-wrenching script by Naomi Foner.

Sure, the "Manfield" family (an alias; their real surname is Pope) are on the run all the time, living out of suitcases, can't even remember their latest assumed name. Seventeen year-old Danny / Michael has attended more schools than he can count. They're constantly leaving behind friends, community, a life. Who would want that?

But their warmth and their conviction, their care for each other makes them likable. You want to be there with them, singing along in their kitchen to James Taylor's "Fire and Rain." You share in Danny's joys and feel his pain as he begins to break away from the family.

The story by Naomi Foner does what all good dramas do -- at its heart is a turning point, a moment a character makes a choice that changes everything. Danny decides to tell his girlfriend (a somehow feisty-yet-insouciant Martha Plimpton) what he's never told anyone -- that his family are fugitives on the run.

The story really is Danny's, but it's Annie's too, played by a perfectly cast Christine Lahti, who gets top billing. Lahti's combination of sweetness and toughness, her smarts and her good looks, imbue Annie Pope with all the right characteristics she'd need to handle this life. She loves her family and she loves her son, a talented piano player coming of age.

We realize the extent to which this is Annie's story during a scene towards the end when she meets with her father for the first time in 14 years, asking him to take care of Danny. It's an absolutely heart-rending scene, written and acted to perfection.

Running on Empty is a gem. Everything about it works. The love story between the teenaged Danny and Lorna (Plimpton) is convincing and touching. Danny's piano playing, his talent, is perhaps augmented by the tragedy of real-life Phoenix being such an immensely gifted performer himself, taken too soon.

Phoenix's tragedy makes the ending, too, perhaps even more lovely and poignant than it already is. "You're on your own kid," says his father, Artie. And everyone, tears in their eyes, says goodbye as the James Taylor song comes fading back in. Phoenix's Danny smiles -- his life can begin now. His own story. And he knows he will see his loved ones again.

That final shot though, seems almost clairvoyant in its rendition. There's the expected mixture of relief, sadness, and exhilaration, but something darker, too. A fear, perhaps, of the wider world and what's to come.

Or maybe that's just hindsight talking.

9.5/10.

This show has received so much backlash for being "fake," that the producers decided to make an episode (S1E5) addressing the accusations.

The thing is, most viewers have no idea what goes into making a television show. You can't just follow people around with cameras. You need permits in many cases and appearance release forms from anyone you film. You might miss a critical moment - like two brothers shooting a caribou at dusk - so you reenact it, cut a scene together with what footage you have, etc. It happened, it just didn't unfold directly in front of the cameras in real time.

If the family goes into a bar to attempt to barter with the owner, you think the cameras were already in there all set up? Or if they go into a store and flirt (poorly) with the female cashier? Of course not. Those people are asked in advance, sign waivers, and maybe are even coached a little how to behave. It's been done this way since 1992's The Real World.

Where Alaskan Bush People succeeds is in its characters. I find these people fascinating. And whether or not there are sides to them we don't see (of course there are), what we do see is endearing.

The problem is all the repetition. At least for the first two seasons, the writers have introduced us to the family about a dozen times. "Bear runs through the woods, Matt is the oldest," etc. I realize the show aired on Discovery before I got to it here on HBO Max, and it's cut for commercials, but my God, how many times are we going to get the recap of their first cabin, then being run off their land, then their boat sinking, etc. The Christmas in the Bush episode (S2E1) was particularly excruciating and I fast forwarded through most of it. An hour of them cutting a tree down and decorating.

But it goes on for 12 more seasons! I'll skim along and find out what happens to this interesting family.

UPDATE: Having watched (or skimmed, really, due to the insane amounts of repetition) to halfway through season 8, my tune has changed a bit. The show *is* fake. But, a few caveats: Of course I don't think the family are actors (I even follow some on instagram). And I believe the basic story of a family of libertarian parents and their seven kids who, for a time, truly did seem to live off grid. Once the show started, though, their lives understandably changed. "Browntown" wasn't as remote as it was depicted on the island of Chichagof, and there's no way they're feeding those strapping kids with a couple of deer and that tiny, sad garden. Or even the chickens they had one year, or the cow. No, the show never comes right out and directly claims they are 100% self-sufficient, but its implied. And it's just not true.

When the family must move to California for Ami's treatments, okay -- no problem. It's a "reality" show, after all. And in real life, stuff happens. But after a season (7) almost entirely of repetition and flashbacks, the family then ostensibly heads to Colorado. Only, at the start of season, they're not in Colorado, but Washington State. Wait--what?? Unless I missed something, this was NEVER EVEN MENTIONED. Season 7 just ends with them in Colorado to start a new life, and somewhere into season 8, Bill Brown says "Washington," and then Birdie says "Washington." I looked it up. They're in Washington.

But -- and here's the more important thing -- they're not really living atop a mountain in Washington. They're not living in those four teepees, or even the mobile home. No way. They're in city clothes, well-fed, sitting around a fire while the cameras roll. A crew goes off with Matt and he makes some fireside coffee, or purifies water, and the producers spread this across a couple of episodes. That way it looks like daily life for the Browns. It's not. They arrive for a time, get wired up with the microphones, and the cameras roll while they cut down a couple of trees or build a small deck off the RV. Bam is dating a producer. Bear wears Michael Jackson leather jackets and pants. Rain is a California kid if I ever saw one.

But hey, I like them. I think they are genuinely good people. I think this show happened to them, and it's obviously changed their lives irrevocably. But they're no more "Alaskan Bush People" than I am. They're a reality TV family, a sort of anti-Kardashian family the cameras follow through changes and misadventures. Try as the producers might to bend the show towards some kind of survivalist family story, toward bushcraft or outdoorsmanship, it's really not. But that's okay.

Over 30 years ago, Ron Howard and Brian Grazer made "Backdraft," a serial killer story wrapped in an estranged brothers tale wrapped in a paean to Chicago firefighting. And it's a beautiful thing.

While only 1991, Backdraft is quintessential 90s. Sweeping shots of Chicago, Bruce Hornsby music blaring over masculine montages, shotgun-blast punch sounds, even a couple of brief -and meaningful - love scenes.

Even with what's now obvious 90s over-the-top schmaltz, Backdraft is a solid film, handily directed, well-acted, with a story that never slows or lags, but let's you in, makes you want to be there for every moment. When the big set pieces come with all the dazzling pyrotechnics, they're more a bonus than something you've just been waiting for, because you're invested in the characters and the story.

All the characters are three dimensional, even the minor ones. And while the plot mechanics are largely procedural - it's an investigation at the heart of this story, after all - the pieces come together in an almost Shakespearean way. Stephen (Kurt Russell) and Brian (William Baldwin) are brothers who lost their firefighting father at a young age. (They must've lost their mother, too, because Stephen ends up raising Brian.) It's twenty years later and the man their father saved before dying is (spoiler alert) serial killing men connected to a money-making scheme that was killing firemen. As the Lieutenant, Stephen has to deal with what Axe (Scott Glenn) has done -so in a perverse way, the sins of the father are visited upon the sons.

Sure, the arson investigator (Robert De Niro) is involved with the case way past his purview, and without a doubt Stephen's brazen choices in a fire would be condemned by any real fire safety expert, but it's a drama. A solid 90s flick from an original screenplay by Gregory Widen and directed by one of our most reliable, Ron Howard.

They don't make 'em like this anymore.

I watched this when it came out and remember liking it, particularly Frank Darabont's crisp dialog. On a second viewing, 13 years later, woah. There are some problems.

So, Rick Grimes gets shot in the side. It's bad, but not crazy bad. He's in the hospital and he passes out, apparently, because when he wakes up the world has been entirely transformed. And not just in the span of a few hours. The changes had to take days, maybe weeks.

At least a week.

The world is wrecked. Rick slept through tanks and helicopters and absolute mayhem. The slaughter of hundreds of zombies. Bedlam in the hospital. Rick was unconscious so long that people gave names to the zombies - "walkers" - and know how they operate, how to deal with them.

A week. Easily. Yet all that time in a hospital bed and Rick didn't poop himself or pee himself or wake up FOR ANYTHING. He's got a full beard though.

While Rick slept, a man and his son lost the wife / mother. She turned to a zombie while they were in someone else's house squatting. They had left their home, gone to another home, the wife died, turned into a zombie and they turned her loose outside. While Rick was cutting Zs in the hospital.

Rick was out of it for so long, apparently, his wife assumed he was dead and slept with another guy. Hooked to an IV, just snoring away while the military bombed buildings and people screamed and zombies died en masse, Ricks wife was like okay, it's time to move on, how about I let Ricks best friend have a poke.

Other than that, well, it wasn't so bad, just not as exciting I'd remembered. I've seen the opening of The Last of Us now, so I'm spoiled.

This episode honestly felt slow, with Rick making some really dumb moves, like turning his back on a car full of murderous criminals, or shooting a guy in the head in close quarters, blowing his ear drum. Certain scenes were even laugh out loud funny - Rick running around in his hospital gown with that fake beard on, trying to react appropriately to hell on earth.

Granted, it all must've worked on me the first time, because I watched for several seasons.

I won't be doing that again.

Benicio Del Toro co-writes this gritty, granular police procedural about a murdered real estate agent. Who killed her? Her fiancé, Justin Timberlake, her soon-to-be ex-husband, or a sketchy weirdo played convincingly by Michael Pitt?

But then, heavy spoiler alert, the final act: when Del Toro comes home one night from the job, he finds signs of a break in. The pool is leaking. You think, Oh no, the killer got to his wife!

But she's not dead - she's shot at Pitt and put a hole in the pool. Pitt is there, it turns out, to give Del Toro a clue. One of those handy thumb drives with all sorts of damning digital evidence.

The real estate thing involves the cops, and drugs, and something about money laundering. Del Toro confronts the cops, at one of their homes, at nine in the morning, and a shootout ensues. End of story.

He doesn't even go after Timberlake, who instead we see golfing in a penultimate scene, then the FBI ride up in a golf cart and nab him.

Roll credits.

I mean, Jesus.

What started out as a creepy, interesting story with lots of tension devolved into a by-the-numbers "corrupt cops" trope. Granted, a lot of this was done well. The pacing feels brisk, the editing crisp. Del Toro is great, his wife played by Alicia Silverstone is great, and it was refreshing to have their marriage be healthy and functional.

The music is on point, too. The direction and camera work consists of the usual intensive continuity with way too many close ups, but that's nearly every film today.

Se7en this is not. This is Netflix doing a pretty good job of creating a serviceable cop drama with some flashes of originality that ultimately isn't brave or bold enough to not fall victim to the most pat formula resolution.

I mean, who or what was "reptile" anyway? Who even actually killed the woman at the beginning? What was the significance of her wounds - being stabbed so hard the knife penetrated bone?? What were the potential bite marks on her hand all about?? It's like the writers thought to present a great mystery but only figured out how to solve some of it.

Close, Del Toro, but no cigar.

Okay, Nolan fans, get your fingers poised to downvote what I'm about to say. That's the only way I can understand the high rating for this film - thousands of devoted Nolan fans inflating the score. Because if you're honest, there's no way this mottled mess of a movie is an 8.9. Not in any sane universe.

I've seen all of Nolan's films. Memento was a brilliant calling card for a young director and The Dark Knight elevated superhero movies to something amazing, gritty and crackling with verisimilitude. But Inception was a long slog of exposition, and Interstellar, while offering some good moments, also imploded under the weight of the writer-director's ego.

Nolan likes to tackle big ideas. Dreams and outer space. Here, he delves into quantum physics, but it's relegated to a line, really, that Oppenheimer offers Kitty before marrying her. He explains quantum physics as mostly space in which particles have an "attraction" to one another... and then they hold hands.

For the first two hours of Oppenheimer, I was lost in a blizzard of short, disparate scenes, constant musical score, actors chewing through endless dialog. You are never allowed to rest, never really sure where or when you are. Nolan offers only two cryptic title cards at the very beginning: 1. Fission and 2. Fusion. (Or maybe it was the other way around.) He separates the time period of public hearing, with Robert Downey Jr. As the main character, by desaturating to black and white. But other than the make-up used to age or de-age Cillian Murphy's Oppenheimer, you never really know quite where you are, or where it fits in sequentially or contextually into the story.

There is the public hearing, and there is a closed hearing with a wolf pack of hungry prosecutors, and then there is some semblance of Oppenheimer's backstory - his love life, his gradual involvement in government, leading to a general (Matt Damon) for some reason hiring him to be the head of Los Alamos. All of this is mashed together, scenes never really more than a few seconds long before cutting to somewhere else, something else, often interpolated with macro shots of things fizzing and roiling and exploding. I assume that's supposed to be some sort of visual metaphor for the work Oppenheimer is doing, his theorizing and contemplating, but that's it, for any demonstration of the actually "work" Oppenheimer does, save one scene near the beginning where he inadvertently shatters a beaker in class and we hear he's terrible in a lab.

Yet, without exaggeration, by an hour into the movie, we've been told at least ten times that Oppenheimer is brilliant, or a "genius." We're just never shown why. And this is Nolan's chief sin - he is a teller, not a shower. A writer, not really a director.

Take "A Beautiful Mind" for comparison. In that movie, director Ron Howard regularly visualizes the work of John Nash. He shows him, for instance, watching pigeons gather crumbs, and in his mind's eye he maps their pattern. Or on a window overlaying the view outside of some young men playing sports, he uses a piece of white pastel to draw a diagram of them. Film is a visual medium.

Consider "Schindler's List" (or any Spielberg movie, really), and observe the blocking of the actors, the placement of the camera, all in service of telling the story visually. An actor may dominate the frame, or maybe have his back turned. Characters may move and create an entirely new frame (blocking). Their relationship to each other and to the camera help tell the story.

In Nolan's filmmaking, where the camera goes is really arbitrary. And where he cuts the shot has to do with his writing, not the actors reaction or the blocking of the scene, so that the editing feels off, clunky, the shot moving off of an actor at the start of a reaction, or coming back with an actor already in motion. This is because Nolan is cutting for the script, relying on dialog to tell the entire story. Even plays have blocking.

True, he decides to tell the story of the "Father of the A-Bomb" chiefly through these two hearings, the public one and the closed one, so there's going to be lots of talking. But then he doubles down on the talking - on the telling - even further. In one scene, Casey Affleck sits beside Oppenheimer in some room somewhere (I don't even know who Affleck was playing, really, it was very short) and while he's talking to Oppenheimer, Nolan cuts back and forth to another scene with Matt Damon on a train with Oppenheimer, and Damon is telling us about Affleck and who he is and what he wants.

Character should be revealed through action. Not some other character explaining everything off to the side.

There are a great many cameos in Nolan's film - it is "star studded." But rather than the appearance of a name actor helping to clarify the character portrayed, they distract. At one point, a woman near me in the theater said "Oh, look who that is," when Remi Malek appeared. We're focused on the actor and their previous roles, not the character.

Everything in this movie, especially the first ninety minutes, bounced me off, like a stone skipping over water. The scenes are too short, the music never stops, there are too many characters, we're always changing time and place, I'm not really sure what's happening, famous faces keep popping up. And I don't understand why everything is so frantic.

Once we get to about the halfway mark, and the Trinity project gets that infamous test, the movie sinks in a little. That's because Nolan finally slows things down, lets us exist somewhere in the film for a moment, lets us be immersed.

After that, for the most part, he's back a it, whisking us from one quick scene to the next at a pace that tries so hard to be breathless and exciting and just ends up distracting and frustrating. Still, I felt more in tune for the second half of the film, because I could now sense the dilemma, the emotional conflict in Oppenheimer after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In one of the best scenes in the film, Oppenheimer is giving a speech to toast the success of the American empire, but the room turns white, and rumbles, and woman's skin flays.

And finally, another scene with Emily Blunt, as Kitty Oppenheimer, giving one of those wolf pack prosecutors a piece of her mind in the closed hearing, really steals the show. Blunt was truly an enjoyable part of this movie, though she had little screen time.

There's not much else to say. I feel like I just listened to some hyperactive child try to tell me a story that I thought I already knew, but became unnecessarily convoluted in the telling. I didn't really learn anything new, not about the physics of the A-Bomb, nor did I really get a sense of the McCarthyism of the era; they were just after Oppenheimer for no real reason I could grasp, until very close to the end, apparently it was all because he had some reservations about using the H-Bomb.

Nolan tries a twist, too, holding back on a brief conversation between Oppenheimer and Einstein by a pond. Because several of Nolan's films have had a big twist, this one felt kind of paltry as twists go, but drove home the underlying grief and sadness of the whole A-Bomb project, and what it meant for the world.

6.5/10.

If you've seen the preview for The Covenant, you already know everything that's going to happen.

Even if you *didn't* see the preview, you could predict the path of this story without much brain power; that's because writer-director Guy Ritchie never gives you much to think about. He tells you what's about to happen, and then -- it happens. This technique is crystallized in the moment John Kinley's wife (Emily Beecham) says, effectively: "You're going to go back there and save Ahmed and bring him to the United States."

And that's exactly what happens.

Most of the film feels more like a preview itself than an actual movie. A simulation of what a movie *would* be like. But it never really lets you in.

Actor Dar Salim is terrific as Ahmed, the Interpreter, though he's not given much to work with. We're told he doesn't play well with others, but that never really bears out, or seems relevant. We're told the Taliban killed his son, and so he's against them, but so is everybody else.

He "knows things" (in fact he's pretty much always making John Kinley look foolish in the first half of the film), and we later learn he used to work in the drug trade. That would be more interesting if his knowledge was ever crucial, or a source of conflict or tension. Instead, he just makes Kinley look kind of dumb because he doesn't trust someone Kinley does, or he knows opium smokers won't have weapons.

And Kinley...dear God. I don't know if Jake Gyllenhaal has turned in one of his flattest performances to date, or a real life Kinley is really this two-dimensional. When he's not killing people like an absolute machine, or being dragged through Afghani mountain country while he lolls helplessly, he's staring blankly or screaming about being put on hold. There's really only one moment he has to show some humanity, and it's an exposition dump to his wife in the middle of night where he spells out for the audience why he has to go back for Ahmed.

At one point, he's feeling pretty useless at his job and his wife tells him to just sit there and look good. Later, Ahmed's brother (I think) is telling him about his beautiful blue eyes. I laughed out loud at that one.

Is the otherwise lackluster performance Gyllenhaal's fault? Maybe to an extent. But I think Ritchie, who brought us the over the top indie Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels is just too in love with himself as a director to tell a truly compelling story. First, he puts his name in front of the title. Then he telegraphs what he's going to show you. And then he shows you.

6/10.

Leaving Las Vegas is bleak, yet it nevertheless paints a far rosier picture than the reality. A suicidal alcoholic and an abused prostitute; only Hollywood could turn this into something escapist for a mass audience. The real thing, of course, would truly turn your stomach.

That's not just my opinion, that's according to the sister of John O'Brien, the real life Ben Sanderson (Cage) and author of the book on which the movie is based. O'Brien famously died by suicide just as the movie was being made (some accounts say he'd just found out it was going to be made, others that it was two weeks into production). He was a terrible alcoholic, but his death was not from drinking -- he ended his life with a gunshot.

To truly drink yourself to death would not take a neat four weeks, with a little coughing and shaking a the end, a wholesome loving prostitute on top of you. No, for as "gritty" and bleak and sorrowful as this film is, Leaving Las Vegas is still a Disneyland theme park ride compared to the real thing.