Reviews

Few movies can introduce you to God, but Cameron's The Abyss may just do this. There are resurrections, splitting of seas, and old fashioned miracles. Characters who hate one another learn to forgive, as new air is breathed on them. If one ever wants to visit the depths of the ocean, The Abyss will take you there, there to a real abyss. The special effects will have one fully immersed with the director's reality. There are stories of the risks the actors endured, but they survived. At the time, they must have hated Cameron for some of these life-threatening scenes. The movie, though, is the reward for a lifetime they can enjoy having participated in this epic.

If you want to take your emotions to extremes, if you want to experience real fear, choose "Inheritance." This film is no " Sound of Music" happy film. Rather, there are extreme plot twists that spin your emotions into a tangle, then twists them together tighter and tighter. From a death comes chaos, and far more than an ordinary one. The politics of the family, the D. A. daughter, pushed to extremes by the secret wishes of a will read in front of the group sets a foul mood for the characters. Money has real advantages but can cause us challenges. Love, though, can expand its web to extremes that one can never understand . . . Until the end.

Hell or High Water deserves acclaim as one of the best modern western movies. The Texas plains provide the stage while men do bad things that make western movies good. Like robbing banks. But not where they go to empty the whole vault of millions of dollars (like the modern HEAT), rather they take loose bills in the teller's money tray. They wear masks, of course, and yell at customers, but then get out of Dodge in their hotrod switching the ride along the way. Cowboys also had horses so they could swap out when on the way.

But what makes this a very, very good Western is Jeff Bridges. His isn't a high profile sheriff who paces in every scene. Instead, he moves with the age of his character, old enough to have retired long before. But he thinks, thinks like the bandits and uses that to try to trap them.

This is not The Wild Bunch, but has some interesting commonality with that movie's finale.

Although receiving a Best Supporting Actor nomination, in itself an honor, he should have been awarded in the Best Actor category. He made the sheriff matter, regardless of what Hell or High Water got in the rhetorical way.

By UltraSuperior Media.

You won't forget. You will feel the fear and horror of very bright people. Never have you gone down this trail. Neither had they. Forget about breathing. Lock the doors. You will live in this space for many turns of the earth. And you may be surprised who spins with you.

From a scientific lab, only one returns from chasing the island's Shimmer, its mysterious lights dancing in the sky. Plants grow in unique shapes taking one along the way of their mysterious form and function. The big question occurs when missing your lover. Is that lover kissing you or have they adapted to a new way or been changed to something else. Will this be it, the end or the beginning? You must decide.

The terrain resembles the opening of.2001 Space Odyssey, which contains little other than rock and mountains . . . And a kind of piglets like those battling to find food in Kubrick's movie. On The Settlers, they had a compound of a man, woman, and the child. Hal was real people here who try to take over the compound through a gun battle, not unlike Mad Max. Not for petro, though. One gets the idea that in this far away place, some want to build populations when others don't care to be the mothers and their husbands don't either. The suspense builds and becomes a boiling point when, in this movie, the HAL takes one for the remaining team and can't be repaired. How it ends will trouble you . . . And maybe that's what makes the movie special.

I'm lucky, but not in the way The Best of It defines luck. My luck came by running into a person with whom I can swap movie ideas. Somewhere in the conversation he asked, "Ever seen the movie "The Best of It?" He described it as an insight to pro gamblers especially sports based. The film sends one along their profiles with history and conviction all included. What a trip! Not long into the story I recognized there is a whole vocabulary outside normal language to describe what they do. I have some schooling to do to learn their language. One begins to get a feel of their stress level, but that, too, has limits just as the size and number of bets. The fun continues when trying to read their lists of games to cone and how they stand on them (betting wise) now. They don't care who wins but rather, who beats the spread. The movie satisfies on a number of levels: winning, being wrong, staying out of the doghouse, how to live that life, and an opportunity to judge it for yourself. Could you stand up to this heat?

UltraSuperior Media, Phillip Gary Smith, writer.

Going against convention can upset some, but for others it creates lots of opportunities for humor. This movie is like "The Big Chill" filled with immature adults vs snob sophisticates. It's fun, full of laughs and a great way to relax.

In this expertly written episode by Christopher Knopf, Ryan plays Captain William Kraig, a tough military guy caught with a wimpy Harry Townes bringing to life Corporal Henry Durbin. The battle of wits with the Mexican Colonel del Armija, whose forces captured these two, centers around making either or both prisoners talk.

Armija, performed as Alexander Scourby's Shakespearean-influenced version, figures the 4000 troops behind these two, who carried heavy explosives, are going to either of two targets. The story revolves around trickery and a drink or two in the Mexican's well-appointed tent to discover which one, or with the two prisoners in their small prison cell, until Ryan suddenly stumbles upon an important insight. His realization boosts this episode toward the top of the Zane Grey Theater list of best shows, a tough list to break into anyway.

One can see in Ryan the makings of his signature role, that of Deke Thornton in Samuel Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch" filmed eight years after this performance. His acting alone earns one's respect and gratitude for this master of the acting craft.

Only rare documentaries researching multiple views on a unique subject include only the most researched theories or sound ideas. Such is the case for Room 237. Entertainment often shows, and no doubt needs, the comic, wacky concepts along with the foundation-based thoughts of researchers like the renown Kubrick investigator, Dr. Geoffrey Cocks, Ph.D., History Professor at Albion College, Michigan. Cocks published the amazing "The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History, and the Holocaust" in 2004 detailing Kubrick's "Jewish past, early years spent under the shadows of fascism and war, and his 1957 marriage into a German family of artists and filmmakers," all provoking a deep drive into the history of Nazism and the Holocaust. Cocks convincingly details how Kubrick continued to foist those themes in his movies. To discard Cocks' views when placed along with others, whose theories may well be outlandish, fails a reviewer. A privilege I enjoyed was submitting a few of my ideas to him regarding "The Shining," written from my perspective and 100's of hours viewing the movie, but within the boundaries of his research. In doing so I discovered his unprecedented access at times of the Kubrick-family archives. Dr. Cocks is the real deal with multiple books on the subject of Third Reich psychotherapy, Nazi Germany health and illness along with "Treating Mind and Body: Essays in the History of Science, Professions, and Society Under Extreme Conditions." Room 237 is far from a perfect movie, but like a diamond in a bucket of costume jewelry, Dr. Cock's research shines brightly.