Author: jonsax201

Quick takes on 5 films

Vacation is a new take on the classic National Lampoon’s Vacation. Son Rusty from that film is all grown up, and decides to take his family to Wally World to relive his favorite family road trip as a child. Starring Ed Helms and Christina Applegate, with some cameos from the original film, this movie does have some laughs but overall it is a fairly weak remake. Some of the old jokes are even rehashed, and as good as Helms is, he doesn’t have the charm of Chevy Chase in his prime. Good for a few laughs, but that’s about it.
Mississippi Grind is a film that professionals reviewers would love, but the average film goer will probably think is just “ok.” That’s where I am. I think it is well acted and the 2 leading men (played by Ryan Reynolds and Ben Mendelsohn) are almost in a role reversal from typical stereotypes. Gerry is an aging gambler that is about at the end of his rope, owing money all over town in rural Iowa but unable to pull himself away from the tables. His luck seems to turn when Curtis rolls into town, and Gerry latches onto him to take him to a high stakes game in New Orleans. The two make their way down the Mississippi, gambling along the way, and we learn more about the two men and their sometimes surprising history. The viewer has to wonder if either will rise above their current plight before the end. A good movie, but not a great movie.
The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is based on an old 60’s spy show I think, though being well before my time, I had never heard of it before. In this movie, Henry Cavill and Armie Hammer play a couple of spies on opposite sides of the political spectrum in the early 60’s, with one from England and the other from the USSR. They are forced to team up though to stop a nuclear weapon from ending up in the wrong hands. The movie is funny in a quirky way, and feels like an old film in the way it plays out. I can appreciate the throwback, but some of it becomes tedious. One favorite ploy is to have a plot element happen, and then quickly going back to show the events that led up to that moment. This gets old by the end, but as a whole the film is still all right.
After the above so-so films, I finally hit a winner in The Walk. I greatly enjoyed this one, starring the underrated and always entertaining Joseph Gordon Levitt. He plays tightrope walker Philippe Petit, and the movie is the based-on-a-true story of his planning and eventual pulling off of the tightrope walk between the World Trade Center buildings in the mid-70’s. The film is told as a story, and Levitt’s Petit is an entertainer throughout, providing wit and charm in his tale. The movie does a fantastic job of getting you inside Petit’s mind, feeling his emotions as he gears up for the walk of his life. There are laughs, thrills, and even some emotion, you’ll run the gamut throughout the course of this one.

 

I’m not sure what to make out of Time Out of Mind. It tells the story of a homeless man, George, and his daily struggles on the streets. I think it is well directed, and definitely well acted by Richard Gere as George. Gere is known for his roles as a charmer and confident man, and this movie certainly takes him out of comfort zone. He is a defeated man, refusing to accept the turn his life has taken. At times he seems uncertain of what is going on around him, and we don’t know if he is just refusing to accept his circumstances or if he really is mentally ill. He struggles to find a shelter, and can’t even apply for aid because he can’t produce a birth certificate or any ID. It is pretty eye opening, the run-around a homeless person deals with just not to die in the cold. I think it is a good movie, but in the end perhaps a little too predictable.

A classic story gets a new twist in Wide Sargasso Sea

At first I didn’t know what to make of Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys. This story is a “prequel” to Bronte’s Jane Eyre, telling the backstory of Mr Rochester’s first wife, the insane woman in the attic in that famous novel. The book shows that all things are perhaps not what they seem, and every story has two sides.

Sea is separated into three parts, each told in the first person. The first section is the female protagonist’s, Antoinette’s, childhood. Her mother’s first husband has died, leaving them a lot of land in Jamaica but no money to back it up. The locals resent the family as former slave owners, but they are “rescued” by Mr Mason, who comes and marries the mother and restores their estate. However, one night the house is set afire by an angry mob. Antoinette’s brother dies, and her mother, already mentally unstable, goes insane.

The second part is told from the first person of a new gentleman. Though it never says his name, we learn later that it is Mr Rochester. He has come to marry Antoinette for money, and their marriage quickly falls apart. Antoinette slips quickly towards insanity, but we as readers find her to a be a sympathetic figure. Her husband sleeps with the help, she has no true friends, as most still carry animosity towards her family from years ago, and it seems there is no help or hope coming. Her husband has grown to despise her and has started inexplicably calling her Bertha, a name she hates. One night after a drunken arguement, the man announces he is leaving Jamaica and bringing his wife to England. Antoinette has always wanted to see England, but now just wants to stay at her home.

The third short section again switches to Antoinette’s view. She is totally insane now, and her narrative falls in and out of coherency. Her husband has locked her in an attic, and she refuses to believe this cell is the idyllic England she had envisioned. She doesn’t recognize Mr Mason or other visitors, and is convinced she has only been there for days, when in reality years have gone by. She escapes out of her room one day, and during a vision she sets fire to the building (obviously the same from Jane Eyre).

This book paints her as a tragic figure indeed. She obviously has mental disease in her family, but many factors outside of her control put her in that attic by Mr Rochester. The book is a little hard to get sometimes, much of it is told like a stereotypical creole story, with truth and present sometimes muddled with spirit and effervescence, to the point that you aren’t exactly sure what is actually happening. A good book though for sure, reminding you that the bad guy may not always be who you think.

Quick takes on 5 films

A disclaimer up front: I’m not a big Amy Schumer fan. Her jokes are meant to shock you because we aren’t used to female comedians talking like that, but if a male comedian were to make the same jokes, most people wouldn’t laugh. That being said, Trainwreck is a pretty funny movie, and towards the end, it has a lot of heart too. Amy plays the typical “guy” role, in that she sleeps around and is deathly afraid of commitment. When she meets Bill Hader’s character, her rules are tested, as she geniunely likes him. Hader is great and seriously underrated as as serious actor (go find last year’s The Skeleton Twins). I almost gave up on this film halfway through, but stuck it out and the second half is definitely worth it.
The newest Terminator movie, Genysis, kinda sucks. I wasn’t expecting much, so it’s not like it disappointed me or anything. It’s half sequel and half reboot, so I’m not sure what the next movie will do, if there is another one. It is pretty heavily a rehash of the previous films in the franchise and brings no new ideas to the table. Die hard fans alone should bother with this one.
The Gift is an interesting movie. Simon (played by Jason Bateman) accepts a new job and moves his wife Robyn into a nice new house. They run into one of Simon’s old school friends, Gordo. Gordo starts stalking the family though, creating tension between Simon and Robyn. Robyn however finds that perhaps Simon is at fault too. A pretty thrilling and quietly tense movie, with a couple plot twists that you do not see coming.
No Escape is another thriller, but there is nothing quiet about this one. Jack (Owen Wilson) moves his family to a tiny city somewhere in southeastern Asia, very remote and very much a “developing country.” He is there for his job as a contractor, but they are only there for a day before a city wide riot breakes out, with citizins angry at Americans for perceived wrongs. When a gang starts going hotel to hotel killing Americans, Jack must take his family and hide. The movie is full of eye-rolling coincedences, but not a horrible film, and definitely gripping to the end.

 

Infinitely Polar Bear got some pretty rave reviews, but honestly it is a better acted movie than a movie by itself. Mark Ruffalo plays a man diagnosed as bipolar (his young girls at the time pronounce it “polar bear”) in the late 1970’s. He refuses to take his medicine, leading to a rift with his family. His wife has to go back to school to hopefully one day earn enough money to support the family, leaving Mark’s character at home to raise the girls. The movie is a year in their life together. The acting is truly superb. Ruffalo is in my opinion one of the most underrated actors around, and he shines here again. Truly not a memorable or profound movie, but definitely worth seeing for Ruffalo’s skill alone.

The background of death surrounds in White Noise

White Noise by Don DeLillo is an interesting book. It is written in a playful, wry style. For instance, the main character Jack, is a Hitler studies expert and professor in a small, prestigious university (famous for Jack’s studies, since he was the first in the country to promote this course), yet he doesn’t speak German. The book follows Jack in his everyday life, and his dealings with quirky family members and work associates. As a modern family, the tv is always on in one room or another, so you think the title refers to the constant stream of commercials and background sound (the author does intersperse a line regularly into the novel from the tv), but really it is about the death all around us.  The backdrop of the novel is Jack’s obsessive fear of death. He thinks about it often, such as when he will die, how he will die, etc.

Jack’s fear grows exponentially when there is a waste spill just outside of town, and the residents must evacuate for a time for safety. Jack is exposed, and the response team (again humorously, a “fake” response team that is meant to practice for calamities is instead having to do the real thing first, and practice later in the novel) tells Jack that his life has almost definitely been shortened. When Jack finally tells his wife Babette about his real fear, she says she has the same fear, but while it is a nagging obsession with Jack, it is a paralyzing fear for Babette. She has gone so far as to find a black market pill that is supposed to subdue the fear of death, and she has been having an affair with the drug-maker to keep a steady supply coming. Jack takes this news in stride; with his own increasing dread he realizes he would do just about anything to rid himself of the fear as well.

In the end, something snaps in Jack, and he wants to get the medicine his wife has been taking, to see if it will help. He goes to the sleazy motel where she has been meeting the drug maker, and confronts him with the intent to rob and kill him. It goes astray though, and both end up at a local religious hospital, being cared for by nuns. Jack turns to a nun, looking for some faith to ease his troubled mind, and she admits she isn’t even religious and doesn’t believe in God or an after-life.

Funny little stories about death fill the book, such as Jack’s son’s friend who wants to sit in a pit with 70 deadly vipers to get in the Guinness book of records, or youngest son Wilder, who Babette is always checking on, but manages to find himself in the middle of a busy interstate at the end of the novel (he doesn’t get hurt). There are many more. Even the local grocery store where Jack and his friend Murray shop can be a metaphor for death. This book was much different than most of the other classics I’ve been reading lately, and a good, if somewhat unsettling, change of pace.

Farm and family struggles in O Pioneers!

O Pioneers! is the second novel of Willa Cather’s I’ve read in this list of 100. Written many years before Death Comes for the Archbishop, it is a softer story but is still very moving. It tells the story of Alexandra Bergson, an independent strong-willed woman struggling to build a farm in rural Nebraska in the early part of the 20th century.

It starts when Alexandra is a young adult. Her father brought their family to the USA from Sweden to start a new life, and after struggling for years to get something to grow in the strange Nebraskan soil, he is dying. Alexandra is the eldest child and must now look after the farm and her three younger brothers. Brothers Lou and Oscar are similar in that they lack the foresight for grander schemes, and want to sell the land and settle on a smaller farm by the river where farming may be easier. Alexandra wants to further her father’s goal of the kids having a better life, so resists their efforts, while grooming youngest brother Emil to go to university one day and move on to bigger and better things. She puts her personal life on hold, keeping her only male friend Carl at a distance.

From these beginnings, the novel shoots forward from chapter to chapter. Sometimes a week or month will go by, sometimes years. Over time, Alexandra is able to turn her small farm into a sprawling plantation. Lou and Oscar still pine away for an easier life, Emil has gone to school and come back for a short time, deciding what to do next, and Carl is having is own adventures around the country, but always returning from time to time hoping Alexandra is ready to settle down with him. Emil ends up falling in love with Marie, a neighbor who is all ready married to a burly farmer named Frank. Emil struggles with his feelings, finally deciding to leave before anything comes of it, but when he goes to say good-bye, the two give in to their feelings. Frank finds them and shoots them both in a crime of passion. Alexandra’s hopes of Emil being the one sibling to go off to a new life are shattered, and she realizes that has been the big goal of her life, more than the farm or prosperity she has brought to the area. Now in her 40’s, she finally allows herself some personal comfort and agrees to marry Carl. She knows that no matter how hard she tries to hold on to something, whether it is Emil or the land, all things fade and time keeps moving on.

This is a quiet, unassuming, “little house on the prairie” kind of book, but a good one. In fact one of the more moving books I’ve read in a little while. Much of the book is told in dialogue, and the descriptive background writing is sometimes sparse, leaving much to the imagination. Cather does a fantastic job of writing just enough to give you a sense of the open land they live on and the life it holds there, and lets your mind fill in the rest. Alexandra is a different kind of feminist. She doesn’t stand on a soapbox shouting for equality, but she does her work quietly, as well as any man could, and doesn’t even listen when her brothers try to move her to do something she doesn’t think is right. An enjoyable, quick read.

Tropic of Cancer ground-breaking in its day, has not held up

I sincerely hope Tropic of Canceris on the list of 100 greatest 20thcentury novels based on its history and not for Henry Miller’s actual writing. The novel was banned in the USA for nearly 30 years, for being obscene and vulgar. When it came out in 1934, I’m sure the language in it was eye-popping, but in today’s generation it doesn’t stand out from the latest stand-up comics. I have to think all of the critics, who raved over this novel, loved it for breaking down barriers and bringing an underground culture to the mainstream, but on its own, again, I don’t think it is much of a novel.
In it, the main character “Henry” is living a wasteful life in Paris, France. He is about the worst human being I can imagine. He is intelligent and introspective, is well versed in all the great authors and painters and artists, but doesn’t use his knowledge for anything that can further the human being. He sets himself up above other authors, deriding their work as irrelevant, but never writes anything of his own. He feels entitled and wishes to live a life of luxury and opulence, but refuses to get a regular job. He mooches off his other bohemian-living friends where he can, spends his nights floating from one prostitute to another, and wastes any money he does happen to come across. For awhile he manages to scrape by off the money his wife in America sends him, but when she stops, he basically becomes homeless. By the end of the novel, he has even started stealing from his friends, the only way he can survive at that point.
If that were all there was to it, it would just be a dirty novel, but Miller spends whole sections of the novel rambling on about ideas and philosphy, or nothing at all. For instance, “I look again at the sign but it is removed; in its place there is a pane of colored glass. I take out my artifical eye, spit on it and polish it with my handkerchief. A woman is sitting on a dais above an immense carven desk; she has a snake around her neck. The entire room is lined with books and strange fish swimming in colored globes; there are maps and charts on the wall, maps of Paris before the plague, maps of the antique world, of Knossos and Carthage, of Carthage before and after the salting. In the corner of the room I see an iron bedstand and on it a corpse is lying; the woman gets up wearily, removes the corpse from the bed and absent-mindedly throws it out the window. She returns to a huge carven desk, takes a goldfish from the bowl and swallows it. Slowly the room begins to revolve and one by the one the continents slide into the sea; only the woman is left, but her body is a mass of geography…”

What is that even supposed to mean? It sounds like the ravings of a madman, and all I did was flip to a random page. There are huge portions of the book that are worse than that. If that is brilliant writing, maybe I’m not as much of an intellectual as I thought I was. Again, props to Miller for breaking down walls. I’m all for free speech and no censors in literature or art, but I didn’t get this book at all.

The force is alive in the new Star Wars

Yes, I saw the new Star Wars on opening night. I’m that big of a nerd. The Star Wars films were integral to my childhood, being born in 1980, I really grew up on them. I’m not going to write anything here that you won’t read anywhere else, so in the interest of not leaving any spoilers, all I will say is I loved it. Even my wife, who generally hates sci-fi movies, really liked it (enough to go back and re-watch, or in some cases watch for the first time, the first 6 movies). It fires on all the right cylinders. I’m sure Disney is counting on this film to reboot the franchise, and with all of the new Star Wars films coming over the years, they have at least started on the right course.

Early science fiction in War of the Worlds

Lets get something straight. War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells isn’t a great book by my definition. It is definitely ground breaking for its day, but I can’t call it profound literature. Everyone knows the story: Martians come to Earth to enslave, they cause a ton of destruction in a small amount of time with no resistance to their technology, but quickly die off, in deus ex machina fashion, when their bodies can’t fight the bacteria present everywhere on our planet. It is an interesting read from the point of view of seeing how much our perspective and knowledge has changed in the 115ish years since it was published, as Wells writes about big societies on the rich, vibrant Martian planet. Despite being a science fiction novel, Wells glosses over the science parts of the book, focusing more on the narrator’s (the book is told in the first person, and we never get his name) interactions with others around him. Probably known best as the radio drama (that historically is probably a bit overblown), or for young-ins, for the movie adaptation, the novel itself is a quick, short read.

Quick takes on 5 films

I’m not sure what all the fuss about Dope is. I saw one early review call it “the Clueless of a new generation.” It is a cute little movie, but not very well acted and not even really all that memorable. It is about a good high school kid who goes to school in a rough inner city school. He has aspirations for Harvard, but even the teachers don’t give him much of a chance with his background. All of his future plans get in jeopardy when he ends up with a backpack full of drugs, which he needs to sell to pay to the dealers, or they will hurt him and his friends. It is a mad dash to the end of the movie, and finale is well done, but the rest of the movie can be kind of a mess at times.
Just Before I Go is better than you might think, with the goofball lead actor of Sean William Scott in a more serious role, but the film is hampered by shtick comedy that hurts an otherwise good story. Scott plays an adult whose life has not turned out the way he had hoped, so he decides to end it. Before he does though, he returns to the small town he grew up in, which he had left right after graduation, to settle some scores and say his good byes. Things don’t go the way he had planned, since the high school bully has turned out to be a good person, “the one that got away” is now married with a house full of kids, and the teacher that bullied him doesn’t even remember him. Not a terrible movie despite the bad reviews online, but ultimately a good script doesn’t reach its potential.
I have little to say about Jimmy’s Hall. It is about an Irishman who returns home after years in exile in America, and tries to teach the new ideas of jazz, free thinking, and modern dancing to the locals, to the chagrine of the church and other conservatives. Based on a true story, there really isn’t much to remember about this one, and it gets dull by the end. You never feel attached enough to the main characters to really care all that much.
Paper Towns was written by the same guy that did Fault in Our Stars, but Towns isn’t nearly as good as Stars. Quentin is a bit of an outcast at school, keeping to himself and his small group of friends. He has a crush on his neighbor Margo, who is the popular girl in school. The new spin on this old tale is Margo doesn’t really care for the attention, and instead runs away. Quentin spends the rest of the film tracking her down. The film is teen drama at its best (worst?) and any viewer over the age of 17 or 18 can’t help but ask a “Really?” by the end.

 

Self/Less holds an interesting concept, but in the end is really just a decent action film. A group has learned how to move conscienceness from body to body, so old, dying rich people can move to a new younger body and all is well. However, when one man does it and fails to take the drugs perscribed, he sees visions and realizes the body he is now in has a past. The rest of the film is just fist fights, gun fights, car chases, and all that goes with it. Not bad action scenes, but ultimately you wish for more exploration than action.

Quick takes on 5 films

Dwayne Johnson seems to be the king of mindless action films. San Andreas is another in the long line. You won’t want to see this film for the “story,” but you will want to for the amazing computer-enhanced graphics. Not a deep film, it is about a major earthquake in California, the largest ever on record, tearing the various cities apart. Johnson’s character is a rescue helicopter pilot who is trying to locate his family and get them to safety. The movie is chuck full of buildings collapsing and mass chaos, beautifully done, so it is a great movie to watch if you just feel like kicking back and not thinking.
Southpaw could have been great, and while Jake Gyllenhaal is terrific as boxer Billie “the Great,” the film gets bogged down in overdone cliches and an almost paint-by-numbers kind of feel. Billie is an undeafted boxer when his wife is killed and he falls into depression and alcoholism, having his daughter taken away in the process. He ends up as a janitor in Tick’s gym (played by Forest Whitaker), where he starts the long road to recovery and redemption. Gyllenhaal took the role very seriously, putting a lot of muscle on his normally wirey frame, and his acting is fantastic too, its too bad the movie’s plot and direction don’t follow suite.
If you do want to think a little bit, Mr Holmes is a solid choice. Ian McKellen plays the great Sherlock Holmes, who while still attentive to detail, has started to lose his memory and has thus retired to a quiet countryside to live out his days. The movie is told in 3 parts, the present day where he lives with his live-in housekeeper and her son, the somewhat recent past where he traveled to Japan to try to find an herb to help his failing memory, and his last big case from a few years previously, which he is trying to remember correctly to prove to himself that his mind is still sharp. The ending if clever and sentimenal at the same time, and it is a moving film.
Spy on the other hand, is just for pure laughs. Melissa McCarthy’s most recent escapade, she plays a “desk” spy that helps those in the field, until she is thrust into the field herself. Also staring Jude Law, Rose Byrne, and Jason Stathum, who is hilarious as a bumbling but energetic spy, the film follows McCarthy and she hunts a nuclear device out in the world, before it can get sold to terrorists. It was written and directed by the guy that did McCarthy’s The Heat last year, so more of the same kind of laughs, and very well done. Starts a little slow, but really hits its stride in the second half, and stays funny to the end, not always easily done in the today’s comic fare.

 

I saved the best of the batch for last. End of the Tour is one of my favorite movies in recent memory. Semi-biographical, it tells the story of a weekend long interview of author David Foster Wallace (played by Jason Segel) by Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg). In the mid-1990’s, Wallace has just written a break-through novel that has propelled him to the limelight, and Lipsky is out to see what he is all about and question him about rumors that have circulated about him and his book. Segel is absolutely brilliant as the private-life loving Wallace, in a serious role in which he shines. Wallace, as any creative mind would, loves the recognition his novel is receiving, but at the same time is not so caring for the new attention being shown him, and is deathly scared that none of it is real, that people will somehow realize his book isn’t as good as they’ve said it is and he is just a fraud. Lipsky on the other hand, himself an author who seems to only be working at the magazine because his novel career hasn’t gone anywhere, wants to find the hole in the wall Wallace has surrounded himself with, and refuses to believe Wallace doesn’t like the accolades. The film is an endearing look at the human mind, what makes us tick, and how success can mean very different things to different people. I can’t recommend this one more, every film lover needs to see it.