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abeal49
Reviews
The Laundromat (2019)
Not as good as The Big Short
This is kind of a mess, but interesting. The ending is downright asinine. Meryl Streep seems unaware that it was this kind of thing that got Trump elected. Back in 2016 he was campaigning on the grounds that he was self-funded and not beholden to anybody. Said he was going to clean up the swamp. Streep poses like the Statue of Liberty and says we need campaign finance law reform, but I would bet money she and everybody in this movie voted for Clinton. SMH
Frozen (2013)
Sense & Sensibility
Nothing really new to see here: if you don't recognize Eleanor and Marianne Dashwood in this you don't know Jane Austen. Elsa, like Eleanor, is cool and reserved. Anna, like Marianne, is emotional and dramatic. Both Marianne and Anna fall madly in love with a gorgeous jerk on a horse. Both finally realize the better man was on the sidelines all along, but it takes a near death experience to figure it out.
I love the music and animation but as for the plot, if you want a film with good characters and acting, watch how Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet did it. Few people watch Disney films for plot and dialogue anyway, so if this film disappoints you, perhaps you have outgrown the genre.
Manhattan (2014)
Oppenheimer is a Stoner
The only non-fictional character in this is Oppenheimer, who has been smoking way too much marijuana. He gazes aimlessly off into space, speaks slowly, and opines that it doesn't matter if the bomb works or not as long as the Army thinks it does, and it doesn't matter anyway because the caldera they're working in will erupt again in a few million years and reduce everything to ash anyway.
Everybody else is engaged in a horrible soap opera of sex, nudity, marital strife, alcoholism, head lice, purple chrysanthemums and a botanist who uses the word "ecosystem" (not coined until 1935 and not widely in use until the late 60s)to describe symbiosis.
It's awful.
Snow Dogs (2002)
no naked people, no dead dogs
This movie is most appreciated by certain groups of people. The first group is made up of the occupants of multiple big dog households. You will recognize your own behavior along with your dogs. The second group is made up of adoptive families. It's a wonderful movie to take an adopted child to. Cuba Gooding Jr. finds out he was adopted, and in the process, finds out how much his adoptive mother loves him, and learns that his biological parents loved him and each other and although they couldn't keep him, wanted more than anything to bring him into this world.
This movie is also appreciated by people who are sick of naked people and dead dogs. Nobody gets naked, and none of the dogs die.
Kingdom of Heaven (2005)
somebody has a political agenda
Curious film; everybody in it actually existed, except Godfrey of Ibelin (but maybe he was supposed to be Godfrey of Bouillon, who was a real person). Historically, Balian "the Younger" of Ibelin married Maria, widow of Almaric I, this would make him stepfather to Baldwin IV The Leper and Sybilla of Jerusalem. History says Sybilla, wife of Guy of Lusignan, died during the siege of Acre in 1190, but the movie says she rode off into the sunset with Balian (In the movie, he's her lover, not her stepfather, remember? Not that those two relationships are mutually exclusive, Woody Allen did it) after he tells Richard I of England, whose character is a composite of Tony Blair and George Bush, that no thanks, he's not going on another Crusade, he's going to live as a hippie in France. Historically, he escaped to Tripoli with his family after Hattin, and in 1192 helped negotiate the peace treaty between Richard I and Saladin.
What I don't understand is, if the historically accurate version of the story was that interesting, why did the writers mess it up? They thought they couldn't sell a story with a hero who negotiates peace treaties between Christians and Muslims?
a post script: I read the comment from Dick Steele, about the audience laughing when Richard I shows up. I laughed, as did everyone else who knows what happened to him. It's the comic relief at the end of the movie, the funniest scene in the film.
Searching for Debra Winger (2002)
Pitiful!
The film opens with Arquette telling the audience that the first movie she ever saw was The Red Shoes, a movie about a neurotic ballet dancer so torn between her career and family that she throws herself in front of a train. Later in the film we learn that it was her own mother who took her to see this movie (no Disney for that family, it seems) when she was only four years old. Her mother died at 57 of cancer, but it is Arquette's opinion that what really killed her was the inability to express her art. It is unkind, but irresistible, to note that Arquette's mother's tombstone bears a Star of David, which explains why the entire documentary is one incredible guilt trip, that contrary to Arquette's belief that her mother never expressed her art, she in fact mastered the art of Jewish Motherhood. (Did she ghost write the book by Dan Greenberg, I wonder?) Giving credit where it is due, she did her job well; it seems they are all over-achievers.
Anyway, Arquette decides to probe the depths of this guilt over how she and her siblings' demands led to their mother's untimely demise, by interviewing every actress willing to talk to her. What is notable about this is finding out that if you take the scripts away from actresses they turn into inarticulate potty-mouths. What is even more surprising is seeing them having lunch in a fancy restaurant, screaming the f-word back and forth at each other, and the management never asks them to leave. Memo to all: don't go to lunch there, the patrons will make you vomit.