Movie Review: Run All Night

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: An excellent first hour setup followed by a sub-par, formulaic run-fight-escape chase movie.

I really need to stop being a sucker for Liam Neeson beat-em-up films.  He’s running under 50% success rating with these vehicles.  That said, the beginning of “Run All Night” was a pretty good movie and almost makes it worth the time investment to watch it.  Yeah, we’ve seen many gangster underworld movies where the hot-headed son of a powerful mob boss screws things up and his attempts to fix his screw up only makes things worse.  This one starts in that vein, but it does a really good job of fleshing out all of the main characters so you have some level of sympathy for them even though there’s really only one main good guy.  There is a realness to all the characters that is often difficult to capture.  It’s about as engrossing as is possible for the type of movie that this is.

The movie moves along really nicely until Common enters the picture.  Common plays Andrew Price, another hit man who is hired to take out Jimmy Conlon (Neeson) and his son Mike (Joel Kinnaman).  Before this point, we had a gripping, somewhat reality based chase/revenge movie going, but Common’s introduction throws the movie off the rails.  It isn’t that Common does a bad job because he’s suitably bad-ass.  It’s just that his character is completely outside the realm that all of the other characters inhabit.  While all the characters are somewhat grounded in reality, his is super-human.  He goes on this insane killing spree just trying to get to the Conlons.  It doesn’t fit the pattern of the movie at all.  It might have been made acceptable if they at least gave Common’s character some background, but he’s just suddenly there with a “Oh, I’ll kill him for free” attitude.  There’s a story there, tell it instead of showing the rampage.

What we have here are two movies that don’t belong together.  On balance, I think it’s worth the time because the first half is pretty engrossing.  Really, if you watch it from the comfort of your own home, just fast-forward through the Common portions and it’d be quite enjoyable.  Or maybe just suspend reality for the Common portions of the film.

Movie Review: Amour Fou

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 2/5 stars

Bottom Line: A colorful and bleak look at life in an 1810 Berlin home. Wow, life in 1810 Berlin was boring as hell.  At times interesting, at times overwrought.

“Amour Fou” means “insane love”.  The movie is appropriately titled.  Set mostly in the upper-class household of Fredrich and Henriette Vogel, it explores the lack of intimacy and awkward relations between what I am assuming is everyone in 1810 Berlin.  This lack of intimacy leads to many strange (and yes, insane) views on love.  One such view is held by the poet (of course, it’s a poet) Heinrich.  Heinrich believes that the truest expression of love is to find a woman who will commit suicide with you.  He sets his sights on Henriette when his advances are spurned by a woman who I believe was his cousin.

Either 1810 Berlin was hopelessly bleak and lifeless and loveless or everyone in the film was just a horrible actor.  I’m not sure which.  I’m going with the former interpretation because it does fit with the overall themes of the movie.  What is funny is that the backgrounds are always so colorful.  Almost distractingly so.  It contrasts so much with the wooden and lifeless people going about their daily lives.  This was most noticeable in the Vogel family’s serving woman.  She was a tall, gangly, somewhat homely young woman dressed in this red and black outfit that reminded me of Olive Oyl from Popeye.  Every scene she is in, despite being mostly mute throughout, she steals because she is the most colorful and towers over the others.

Oh, and let me tell you about the singing.  It exists in the movie.  A lot.  The same song.  Over and over again.  Live.  With piano accompaniment.  By people with only moderate talent.  In the movie’s defense, it is a thematic song, but I wanted to shoot myself half way through the second rendering and there were more to come.

Yeah, so art films, whatcha gonna do?  There is stuff here that’s interesting, but it’s really hard to get past how unemotional everyone is.  I mean, if you’re getting distracted by the tall, homely servant, there’s something wrong, right?  Ok, so not a good start to the European Union Film Festival.  There are five more films to go, though, so there’s lots of time to make up for the first dud.

2015 European Union Film Festival

It’s EU Film Festival time at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago and I’ll be seeing six of their many offerings this year.  The Gene Siskel Film Center is a wonderful place to watch a film.  The theaters are intimate and comfortable and they are always showing films you can’t see in wide release.  It is a hidden gem of Chicago and I don’t use it nearly as much as I should.

I have a general idea of which films I will be seeing, but that’s likely subject to change as life gets in the way so I will refrain from saying up front which are on the agenda.  As per usual with movies I see in the theater, I will be doing reviews for them all.  The first one is “Amour Fou”.  I can say that because I watched it yesterday.  It is a little insane.  Which is appropriate because it means “Insane Love”.  The review will likely be up tomorrow as I’m still processing it.

How To Describe Gender

For someone who doesn’t have the vocabulary or knowledge to talk about gender clearly, this cool infographic is a great starting place.  I’m sure it’s not all-inclusive, but it’s certainly better and simpler than anything I’ve ever come across.  It does get across the point well that gender is far from a binary position.

Genderbread-Person-3.3.0

 

Movie Review: Still Alice

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 4/5 stars

Bottom Line: An emotional and devastating look at living with Early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease.  Well acted and well paced.  Sometimes a little over the top with the emotional manipulation.

I can think of nothing more terrifying than slowly disappearing into your own mind; finding moments of clarity becoming fewer and fewer; knowing in those moments of clarity that you are just becoming more and more of a burden on those that love you; not remembering from one moment of clarity to the next that you’ve come to the same conclusion many times already.  Such is how I imagine living with Alzheimer’s Disease would be.  Such is the story of “Still Alice”.

Julianne Moore turns in a devastatingly good performance as the eponymous Alice who is an accomplished linguistics professor who learns she has Early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease and, along with her family, does what she can to live with it.  There are many real and heart-rending scenes portraying the difficulty of doing so.  Moore is backed up in her effort by a top-notch cast portraying her family, including Alec Baldwin as her husband, John, and Kristen Stewart as her youngest daughter, Lydia.  Say what you want about Kristen Stewart and her wooden acting in the “Twilight” series; I think it was more the material than her abilities because she does a fine job in this movie.

All movies manipulate your emotions on some level or another and “Still Alice” does a fairly good job of organically making you feel for each of the main characters as individuals.  There are times, though, where it goes a little overboard.  Those times are when they show home movies of Alice’s youth.  Maybe it’s trying to portray the internal thought process of an individual with Alzheimer’s or something similar, but it just seems out of place with the rest of the movie and I’m surprised they weren’t able to find a more effective way to do it considering how effective the rest of the movie is.  It is really the only fault in the movie.

Minor quibbles about failed emotional manipulation aside, “Still Alice” is well worth your time.  You get great acting and an honest representation of both what it’s like to have Alzheimer’s and what it’s like to live with someone who has the disease.  There are a few highly impactful scenes that will stick with you for a long time.  Julianne Moore deserves every award she won for her role.

End Time Zones Now!

This one minute video sums up my feelings on the use of time zones very nicely.  They may have made sense at one point, but they make sense no longer.  They just add to global confusion.  Stand up against the time zone patriarchy!

The Right-Wing Schrödinger’s Cat

Benjamin Netanyahu gave his controversial speech to Congress today and it was as banal as expected.  Iran is evil, Iran must not get nuclear weapons, Iran plans on destroying Israel, Iran supports terrorism, Iran plans on taking over the Middle East.  He presented nothing that hasn’t been heard by every single Congresscritter and every single individual on earth that pays attention to events in Israel haven’t heard a million times.  In other words, the speech was useless propaganda with Congress playing patsy to a foreign leader.

What gets me is how much of what Netanyahu says seems to contradict each other.  Take for instance the contradicting beliefs that Iran both plans on being a major power in the Middle East and that it is a suicidal power that only wants a nuclear weapon to use it against Israel.  The former is almost certainly true.  Iran uses proxies in many of the Middle Eastern countries to exert some sort of control over those countries in the underwear gnomes hope that they will somehow profit.  The latter is absolutely ridiculous.  Any use of a nuclear weapon by Iran or by a proxy of Iran will immediately result in Iran becoming a desert of glass.  Iran knows this.  Israel knows this.  The U.S. knows this.  End of story.

So Iran is both suicidally against the existence of Israel and wants to project soft power all across the Middle East.  Netanyahu needs Iran to be this geopolitical equivalent to Schrödinger’s cat in order to play to his base who would re-elect him at home and to play to his base who will lend him political cover here in the U.S.  And our right-wingers are more than eager to lap up this drivel like it was the richest of cream.

I don’t know enough about the U.S. negotiations with Iran to say whether the deal is good or not, but all the arguments I hear against it are disingenuous at best and flat-out lies at worst.  At it’s heart, once again, is that Obama hates America and is a secret Muslim.  And the Otherness campaign against Obama runs apace.

Movie Review: Focus

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: A slow-paced caper thriller that keeps you guessing.  It is light, enjoyable, and smart.

What just happened?  You may find yourself asking yourself that question at the end of “Focus”.  It can take a while for your brain to wrap around all the lies and misdirections that the movie throws at you near the end.  That the movie succeeds in walking that fine line of believability while doing so is much to its credit.  The movie is put together like a jigsaw puzzle and throws pieces at you that you’re not even entirely sure are part of the same puzzle that you’re trying to put together.

The biggest problem with “Focus” is that it is mostly setup.  We spend over half the movie just introducing the characters and getting to know the business when it suddenly switches gears and throws the characters around only to incongruously throw them back together three years later.  What saves the movie is that the setup is fun.  There is one scene early in the film when Nicky (Will Smith) is teaching his protegé Jess (Magot Robbie) the art of misdirection by stealthily sliding items off her person.  It’s straight out of a sleight-of-hand magician’s playbook and fun to watch even if it was most likely just play acting instead of the real thing.  The entire setup is like that; showing the various tricks of the trade of the con man.

When the main con does start, it feels kind of empty.  That isn’t to say that it’s not fun, it’s just that the movie spent all this time introducing you to this cast of characters and then it whittles it down to just the two main ones and a bit-player.  The movie slows here some as Nicky and Jess work through their attraction to each other and their trust issues.  The con is interesting if unlikely and fairly straight forward but just when you think Nicky is going to get away with it all, it throws a right hook at you and you’re left wondering where everyone’s allegiance lies.

The light fun makes this movie worth watching and the reveal may blow your mind a little, but there’s not really much there there.  So what we have in “Focus” is a good distraction.  Just be sure to check you still have all of your belongings afterwards.

P.S.  I am mildly amused that Will Smith plays the role of a con man given his penchant for a certain cultish religion that shall remain nameless but nevertheless quite resembles one of the largest cons since Bernie Madoff.

I Want To Start My Own Professional Basketball League

This idea has been rolling around in my mind for a while now and I figured I better write it down before it disappears into the chasms of my mind.  The American mind spends an inordinate amount of time thinking about sports much to the detriment of much more important topics that are far more pertinent to our lives.  That said, professional sports have also been a positive impetus for social change.  Jackie Robinson is a great example of this.  Michael Sam, though he’s not on an NFL team yet, has also brought the echoes of change that will likely lead to the avalanche of openly gay men playing professional football.

I have many issues with professional sports, but the one that has always made no sense to me was that they were divided by gender.  I have no issues with the fact that there is a men’s league and a women’s league, but I do have issue with the fact that that is all we have.  The States are abound with coed recreational leagues so why not professional?  But to me, that doesn’t go far enough because it perpetuates the belief that gender is binary.  What I would like to see is the GNBA: the Gender Neutral Basketball Association.

The rules of the GNBA will follow most of the rules of any professional basketball association with one main difference: everybody is eligible.  Of course, that’s not enough as it would likely just turn into another men’s league so there will be two other rules.  First, the team that is on the court has to be gender neutral + 1.  Second, no individual player can be responsible for over 25% of the scored points.

Gender neutral + 1 probably needs a bit of an explanation.  There are five people on the basketball court at any given time.  Having one self-identifying male and one self-identifying female on the court makes the team gender neutral.  The +1 gives some wiggle room since it is a five person team.  So you can have 3 women and 2 men on the court or 2 trans women and 3 trans men or 1 man and 1 woman and 1 trans man and 1 trans woman and 1 bigender individual, etc.  Importantly, each individual would be self-identifying with no questions asked.  Also, this is not meant to be an exhaustive list of identities or combinations.  Gender identity is vast and complicated and I only have an 8th grade education in it.

No individual player being responsible for more than 25% of the points is an effort to curb the superstar effect that basketball seems to have.  It is there to emphasize team play over individual ego.  If an individual has over 25% of the points at the end of the game, points will be deducted from that individual’s total until they have 25% or fewer points.  This is a rule that I wish the NBA currently had.

Why did I choose basketball?  Practicality, mostly.  Both soccer and baseball would be well suited to a league of this nature too and I like both sports better, but they both require much larger spaces and more players.  Basketball courts are ubiquitous, scale well to attendance levels, and require less person-power.

The biggest obstacle to gender awareness right now is visibility.  We are brought up with a binary view of gender since birth.  This can cause huge emotional damage in those who do not fit that socially enforced binary.  Creating an all-inclusive basketball league will certainly not solve all our gender problems, but it’s a way to bring positive visibility to a portion of the population that remains too invisible to society.