Quick takes on 5 films

Everest tells the story of the 1996 Mt Everest disaster. Starring Josh Brolin, Jake Gyllenhaal, Jason Clarke and others, it shows several several teams try to make the trek up Everest at the same time. With “tourism” hiking, the teams are large and face bottlenecks along the way, meaning they are late in getting to the summit. When they finall turn back, a storm sweeps in forcing some to hunker down and spend the night exposed outside. Pretty straight forward story but still gripping, and you definitely feel the plight of the climbers.

Miss You All Ready is just ok. Two long-time best friends (played by Toni Collette and Drew Barrymore) are facing hard times. Milly (Collette) is diagnosed with cancer, and as she fights for her life, Jess (Barrymore), finally gets pregnant after years of trying with her husband. Milly has always been the center of attention so Jess doesn’t share her news until it boils up later in the film. Good acting, but a fairly forgetful film when its over.

Black Mass on the other hand is a good one. The story of Whitey Bulger’s rise with the Winter Hill Gang and later fall and the FBI’s corruption in regards to him makes for a fascinating film. Johnny Depp as Bulger is incredible, walking the fine line of calculated boss and total psychopath. In the beginning, you just never know what he is going to do, and once you realize how crazy he is, you come to expect him to take the most violent course available. By the end you are rooting for him to be taken down.

It seems every couple years we hear of another person that was kidnapped and held captive for a long time, and Room shows how this tragedy may play out. Joy (Brie Larson) was kidnapped 7 years ago and is now 23 or 24 years old. She has been held all this time in a shed by her captor. She lives there with her son Jack, 5 years old, who knows nothing outside of “Room.” To help her son cope with their existence, she has taught him that the whole world is Room, and there is nothing outside of Room. Finally though, she latches on to a plan to escape, and must convince Jack that there is an outside. When we hear of these events in the news, the story ends with the escape, but this film shows that life doesn’t go back to normal just because they make it out. A brilliantly acted film, and tense in the beginning and heartbreaking in the end.

Suffragette is good for history lovers, with good acting covering a somewhat thin plot. Telling a fictional story about real-life events when women in the UK bonded together for equal rights to men, it stars Carey Mulligan as the central figure. She is a working class woman who sort of falls into the pro-suffragette movement, almost accidentally, but picks it up as she goes. Her husband is teased by his friends, so he ends up leaving her. More than just voting rights, the movie shows how few rights women had at the time, since Mulligan cannot see her son, and has no say when her husband decides to give the child up for adoption later. Obviously the women gain rights by the end, but the film does a good job of showing what they were up against the whole through.