Reviews

***SPOILERS***

For me, the show is a moderately entertaining drama.

My big question is whether the callings that visit the 828ers are rooted in sci-fi or in spirituality.

Of greatest interest to me is the character of detective Jared Vasquez. He's part of a triangle that includes Zeke Landon, the para-normalized guy from the cave and Michaela Stone, the female detective caught between the two men.

I think it's a shame Michaela loves Zeke rather than Jared because, of the two, I FEEL that Jared's love for Michaela is 10x greater than Zeke's love for her. When Zeke was being stand-offish to Michaela, I felt that disconnect, whereas, now, in his supposed loving phase with Michaela, I don't feel anything close to romantic love on his part. I guess it's a case of me not buying actor Matt Long's romantic chemistry with actress Alissa Roxburgh. I do believe Roxburgh's love chemistry with Matt.

I think the best writing goes to the Vasquez character. He character is, emotionally speaking, the richest & most complex. I guess this is fitting since J.R. Ramirez is the best actor in the cast. In general, the cast are good, but Ramirez is head-and-shoulders above the others.

I do hope the writers move Vasquez back towards villainy (although not all of the way) because, with the revelation of the fakeout re: his participation in a plot to kill the 828ers, his character was cleaned up too much, thus stripping him of the shade that makes his morally ambiguous character dramatically compelling.

Mad Men is The Great Gatsby Part 2 04-15-17 Most of us have heard the maxim, "nothing new under the sun." Perhaps more germane to my topic, "there are only thirty-nine story plots that get recycled endlessly." Mad Men, Matt Weiner's brilliant TV drama, (set in 1960s New York, on Madison Ave., global advertising's headquarters at the time), echoes Scott Fitzgerald's great American novel, The Great Gatsby.

I think I want to say, as a characterization of Mr. Weiner's astounding achievement in dramatic entertainment, that Mad Men is The Great Gatsby Part 2.

Here's the gist of my argument: Comparison of the Characters Don Draper, a masquerading James Bond of Madison Ave., follows in a direct line of descent from Jay Gatsby, a masquerading Ernest Hemingway of West Egg.

Pete Campbell, a patrician brat-boy of New York, follows in a direct line of descent from Tom Buchanan, a patrician wastrel of East Egg.

Roger Sterling, an insider frat-boy of Madison Ave., follows in a direct line of descent from Nick Carraway, an insider trader of West Egg.

Betty Hofstadt (Draper), a cover-girl blonde of the social-climbing middle-class, follows in a direct line of descent from Daisy Buchanan, a cover-girl blonde of the social-climbing mid-west.

Comparison of Situations Jay Gatsby, a penniless man without a family, gloms onto an upscale mentor who examples for him the good life of the ideal man.

Dick Whitman, a penniless man without a family, steals the identity of Don Draper, whom he fashions into the dashing image of the ideal man.

Comparison of the Writers Fitzgerald/Weiner Objective - Examination of the American Dream Fitzgerald/Weiner Conclusion - The American Dream is a sparkling bauble, just out of reach Comparison of Relationships Nick Carraway, an upscale insider who is an underachiever, has Gatsby's back on matters of culture & decorum. Caraway, a conventional stuffed shirt, marvels at Gatsby's reckless romanticism.

Roger Sterling, an upscale insider who is a man child, has Draper's back on matters of culture & decorum. Sterling, a conventional stuffed shirt, marvels at Draper's reckless adventurism.

Comparison of Time Periods The American 1920s & the American 1960s mirror each other. During both decades, American pop culture slipped out from under the watchful eye of Puritan morality. Each time, legions of young adults turned on to intoxications while embracing free love.

Jay Gatsby & Don Draper are the two monumental frauds who embodied, with sparkling gusto, the fleeting ecstasy of temporary good times.

This is a great picture based upon a great book.

The title of both gets immediately to the heart of things.

The book establishes the probability that after Sam the lion & Lois Farrow, Sonny Crawford, of the following generation, is the most intelligent person in Anarene, the fictional Texas small town.

For me, the premise of author Larry McMurtry's novel is the source of the greatness of this coming-of-age story. As everyone knows, the title refers to the closing of The Royal, the movie house in downtown Anarene. The location is becoming a ghost town as Mrs. Mosey, the theater's operator, reveals to best buddies Sonny & Duane her intention to shutter the place after one last unspooling of "Red River." It's the night before Duane goes off to fight in Korea.

The deeper, subtler meaning of the title refers to the process of growing up mentally, which means seeing beyond Hollywood-fueled fantasies about what life is supposed to be in favor of clear-eyed visions of what is your own real life in actuality.

At the center of the story is the trio of Sonny, Duane & Jacy, the girl. There's a late-blooming triangle of competition between the two boys seeking the love of Jacy, their (and everyone else's) dream girl in the flesh. Duane gives everything he's got to the winning of Jacy, whereas Sonny, who never expected to get his chance with her, finally does, but only after falling in love with Ruth Popper, the forty-year-old abandoned wife of the macho but gay high school physical education teacher.

Jacy is the villain of the story because she's a very smart schemer who tries, almost diabolically, to realize in the flesh the dreamy scenarios that fill her head in the wake of countless trips to the matinée. Her real life is her enemy because it keeps refusing to conform itself to her Hollywood-laced mental picture of how things are supposed to be. She's the most beautiful girl in town and she's a seductress and yet, actually, she doesn't even like sex, that is, not real sex as sharply distinguished from what she's seen in the movies.

Duane, a mostly good-natured guy with strength & athletic prowess, in accordance with the standard movie scenario, figures to be the best match for Jacy. Throughout most of the story, he's got a white-knuckle grip on this dream & his insane jealousy where Jacy's concerned turns him into a violent loose cannon who almost wrecks his bff connection to Sonny.

Sonny cherishes the same sort of dreams that animate Jacy & Duane, except that his sharp mind makes him too observant of what's in front of him to be as completely enchanted (and distracted) as the other two. This openness to immediate reality over celluloid dreams delivers him into a real life love relationship with Ruth Popper, a good & vital woman who outperforms Jacy in every important category of womanhood.

Picture Jacy & Duane facing the prospect of an unfashionable lover more than twenty years their senior. Neither would consider saying yes because the reality is too far removed from what they've seen on screen. Sonny almost makes the same mistake with Jacy until he sees that her marriage proposal was just a temporary movie scenario playing in her head. Awakened from the picture show in his head, Sonny returns to his lover in real life, Ruth Popper.

"Steve Jobs," is one of the important films of the 2015-2016 season.

The Aaron Sorkin script has (2) premises to go along with the (2) story lines: The A-story, or intellectual story, covers the public life of Steve Jobs as the visionary marketing genius who runs Apple Corp., thereby changing the world. The B-story, or emotional story, covers the private life of Steve Jobs as the prodigiously gifted, deeply flawed man who walks the boundary line between shadow & light.

The premise of the A-story boils down to Jobs' answer to Apple Corp. co-founder Woz's pivotal question: "What do you do?" Answer: "I play the orchestra." The Apple Corp. staff are great instrumentalists, and Jobs plays them to the futuristic tune of a new millennium.

The premise of the B-story boils down to Woz's answer to Jobs as he walks out of Jobs' life: "It's not binary. You can have talent and also be decent." The nugget of Jobs' vision is his understanding that the new millennium of technology consists of machines that don't look like or feel like machines, but rather like extensions of the human identity, which is mostly cerebral.

In the heart of the world's staunchest bastion of anti-intellectualism, the United States, Jobs made cerebration fun.

In "Horatio's Drive," documentarian Ken Burns tells the fascinating story of how the auto was sold to the public via the first cross-country auto race that saw the drivers met by cheering crowds in small towns across the continent in 1903. Before the big race, whether or not the auto would replace horses was an unsettled question. Some little time later, Henry Ford started mass producing Fords.

In a parallel, before Steve Jobs, whether or not the computer would replace pen and paper was an unsettled question. Jobs was, foremost, a salesman. He was the Henry Ford of computing.

I don't think there's any spoilers, but I don't wanna be kicked off IMDb, so I'm saying there's spoilers just in case.

First of all, my hat's off to jadepietro's excellent review here at IMDb, which clued me in to a bunch of stuff I was too dense to get.

My gut feeling is that this is a movie with distant rumblings of greatness. The loud & thunderous bass tones of incipient genius are far off, but just present enough to be disturbing.

There's an uneasy relationship of comedy & drama here, and I don't know if it's due to the failings of the writer who, like Chicago Tribune critic Michael Phillips suggested, needed to run the story through another draft or two, or if it's in the nature of this particular narrative beast to be structurally awkward and off-putting.

Screenwriter Diablo Cody presents Mavis Gary, her YA novel-writing main character, as a big fish from the small pond of Mercury, Minnesota. Following her notorious high school career as a demon diva, she learns to swim well enough in the ocean of Minneapolis but, wouldn't you know it, hick town Mercury owns a piece of her soul, so she's got to go back, and thus begins the drama.

One of the main sources of my muddled response to the movie is the complicated focus of Act 2 (which is buried somewhere within the first sixty minutes), which seems as much an indictment of a city and its culture as it is an examination of the bloated ego of a spoiled princess and would-be home wrecker. Mediocrity is on trial here.

As I scratch my head, I keep thinking I'm catching a chill from the ghosts of Kaufman & Hart and that Mavis Gary is really "The (Wo)man Who Came To Dinner." The difference is that the depression-era play has a conventional moral center that never challenges the viewers' conscience. Not so here. Cody & Reitman don't give us the familiar moral scaffolding that leads us to the comforting conclusion that, after all, Mavis is really a warm soul with a dark cover. Uh uh. Mavis is so thoroughly black until she invokes the dreaded N-word with respect to her Nordic disdain (her's and Cody's I might add).

That's right. I can't separate Mavis' disdain from Cody's. I think they both hate Mercury while being owned by it. And, I suspect, they're both owned by Buddy Slade. The trick of the superior egomaniac, you see, is that she's got to have some sort of love object. Of course it's really her own mind and its wonderful imagination, but she needs to feel connected to something beyond herself, and thus the hard appeal of dim-bulb Buddy Slade, a blank canvas who gives her much room to write her own stories upon. By setting this story within a backwater, midwestern city, Cody enters the turf of Alexander Payne and the Coen brothers. These guys always have middle-American mediocrity in the crosshairs of their satiric wit.

I think Cody's drama sits uneasy with her comedy because she hates and wants to kill. There's no moralizing correction in the comedy that universalizes human foibles. Although everybody's messed up, some are more so than others. Cody can't help herself: she'll let goody-goody Beth Slade go down in flames in order to save the distinguished albeit corroded beauty of Mavis Gary.

Is this a noir comedy?

01-08-10 "Up in the Air" is a thoughtful and satisfying entertainment. I'm a big fan of the team of creative artists who made it happen. It's an amazing work of art from auteur, Jason Reitman. All the more impressive is the fact that he's only thirty-two. All of these kudos notwithstanding, I want to briefly address the character of Alex because therein lies a serious flaw. I'm not confirmed in my opinion, however, so I want to put it out here for possible contradiction.

Early in the second act, Alex (Vera Farmiga) starts showing palpable signs of falling in love with Ryan (George Clooney): her eyes, facial expressions and energy feel to me like a woman not only falling in love, but also a woman actively (although not verbally) seeking a deeper emotional bond and commitment. This culminates in the conversation with Natalie (Anna Kendrick), when Alex talks about the importance of marriage, children and home.

After Ryan and Alex attend his sister Julie's (Melanie Lynskey) wedding, Ryan is seeing clearly the emptiness of his jet-setting life and then, suddenly, he stops mid-sentence during one of his lectures and rushes to Chicago to see Alex; I think there's a marriage proposal balancing on the tip of his tongue.

Was Ryan primed for this change of attitude by recent events? Yes. Were the looks, expressions, energies and statements of Alex an important part of this priming? Yes.

When the big reveal happens, and Alex is uncovered as a committed wife and mother who only wants side-action with Ryan, I thought to myself, as the writer and director, Jason Reitman has exaggerated and simplified the transparency of Alex's feelings for Ryan in order to insure that the big reveal plays as a reversal that packs a wallop. This wallop, I think, comes at the expense of the psychological realism and moral validity of Alex.

Please consider an alternate second act in which the character of Alex is a bit more complicated: If Alex is morally and emotionally sound, and I think the movie wants us to feel that, for the most part, she is, then I don't think she would actively solicit a deepening emotional commitment with Alex without informing him that she's unavailable for marriage. A failure to do so is the self-centered, unscrupulous behavior of a rat. Likewise, denying this moral responsibility with a reference to Ryan's commitment to bachelorhood is a flimsy rationalization. It's entirely possible that Alex finds the force of her emotions such that she cannot help moving towards a deepening of emotional feeling for Ryan. However, as a decent person, I think she would have a deep internal conflict with this emotional trend. Of course this internal conflict and holding back by Alex would be detected by Ryan. Quite possibly, Alex would reach the apex of her internal conflict during the wedding, when she sees Ryan turning away from his confirmed bachelorhood towards a union with her. In turn, Ryan might interpret this behavior as a conflict about Alex's desire to maintain her single lifestyle. From here, the movie might show how Ryan, after the influence of his sister's wedding, flip-flops and becomes the person pursuing marriage while the woman resists. The through-line of cavalier good will and humor would be easily maintained by Ryan because he thinks he knows why Alex is resisting and then - Blam! - Ryan goes to Chicago on impulse and discovers the truth.

With this version, the reveal still packs a wallop, Alex remains a somewhat decent person, the psychology of her behavior remains valid and there's no telltale intrusion by the writer-director.

Willy Wonka, a disturbed, man-child genius, creates magic with (chocolate) candy. At the story's beginning, sublime sweets are his compensation for a sad childhood that was ruined by a scientific father who puts ideas over and above affection (see "Peeping Tom" for a parallel).

At the start of the famous tour of Wonka's human-devoid factory, which introduces five "lucky" children to the surpassing creativity of imagination-in-isolation, we meet a disturbingly strange individual. Willy doesn't know how to be with people because, strictly speaking, he is not himself a human -- at least not in the social sense. Such has been the extremity of his isolation that his links to other persons are strictly biological.

Without knowing it, the Burton-Depp Willy throws open the doors to the factory in order for Willy to start becoming human. His public desire to find an heir is just a cover for his deeper desire to enter the fellowship of social humanity before it's too late.

The cautionary tale dimensions of the story, wherein the movie fails most blatantly, depend upon the garish, one-dimensional vices of four of the children tourists and their culpable parents. Both Willy and the movie fail to identify the cold perfectionism of Willy's upbringing as the source of the heartless critique of gluttony, arrogance, egotism and aggression that send the four to their comeuppance. Since Willy is nearly a monster himself -- albeit a subtle, clever one -- it's only fitting that his tour group be peopled by monsters. Therefore, the humanity of the film and Willy's humanization, until the very end, lack the warmth of understanding and tolerance for human frailty that would put charm and goodness into creative counterbalance with the cautionary elements.

Charlie Bucket, a Dickensian good fellow and the fifth tourist, who is free of any discernible flaws, via staunch family values, delivers Willy's comeuppance, which disgraces his exquisite narcissism while humbling him into a reconciliation with father and, beyond that, introduces him into human fellowship.

This fairy tale, by merely upbraiding bratty children while sanctifying the everyman golden boy, plays out as a cold, intellectual exercise. What's needed is dramatic examination of fallible flesh and blood handled with knowing affection (see "Shrek").

Clint Eastwood, Morgan Freeman and Hilary Swank are three of our national treasures who happen to be actors. With a cast of this caliber, movie fans are compelled by logic to pay serious attention. As many of us already know, these three leads and the entire cast of "Million Dollar Baby" do NOT disappoint. This story of a not-quite-young woman's journey to the top of the boxing sport delivers a wallop from the opening bell to the closing credits.

Through the first two acts I was convinced I was seeing the American version of storytelling greatness unfolding upon the screen. Through a combination of deep athletic talent, deeper courage and, beyond even that, something intangible and, perhaps, spiritual, boxer Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank) (known to fans in the story by a Gaelic name I can neither spell nor pronounce) earns her shot at a major title fight. The protracted action of the title fight (as do all of the fight scenes) delivers the kind excitement that had me concluding this is the best boxing movie since "Raging Bull." When the fight is over, Maggie's upward momentum is tragically broken.

And then comes the start of the third act. If there's a problem with the third act, which many will dispute, it's that the movie's dramatic momentum collapses in perfect parallel with the collapse of Maggie's career momentum. This, I believe, happens because the third act makes a sharp turn away from being a hard-boiled action-drama focused upon desire to being a four-hanky tearjerker about euthanasia. For an uncomfortably long interval of the third act, we're allowed to ponder the significance of the dirty fight business, to simmer with hatred for Maggie's one-dimensionally evil family and to psychologize about fight manager/trainer Frankie Dunne's (Clint Eastwood) tragic character flaw. Individually, all of these story elements are good; in combination, the story starts feeling over-the-top in the waterworks department. I was seriously fearful about boxing gym manager Scrap Dupris (Morgan Freeman) not appearing again; but then he does reappear and, thankfully, his conflict with Frankie resumes. The resumption (and resolution) of this conflict partially redeems the heretofore tearjerker third act by turning back the story to the hard-boiled account of epic desire made good by a champion.

Euthanasia, although understandable as the preferred choice of a fallen warrior, as a story element still carries too much of a charge to share center stage with another major story element, and thus much of the third act meshes poorly with the first two acts from the standpoint of momentum. For the most part, the third act on its own is good, but it awkwardly meshes with the first two acts. The problem may stem from the fact that the movie is cobbled together from the short stories of boxing manager F.X. Toole, as opposed to being an adaptation of a feature-length story. This may very well mean that the full arc of Maggie's story is a creation of the screenwriter not intended by the original author.

For the first two acts this movie waltzes across the floorboards, held gloriously within the close embrace of greatness. It sputters and stumbles into the third act, and then it recovers its balance before the final curtain.

*** Some General Spoilers painted in broadstrokes ***

If Capt. Algren had been serious about making amends for his crimes against humanity, he would have returned to the scene of his crimes and there submitted himself to the judgment of a tribunal administered by the people(s) whose members were his victims. In so doing, his longing for death would have been fulfilled straightaway.

In place of this, we see Capt. Algren undergo a healing of mind and body within the confines of a paradisiacal mountain village. Considering the unblemished beauty and noble character of the villagers, only a heart of stone or a corpse could have failed to experience emotional bonding. When trouble invades the rustic quiet, the born-again soldier rises to defend the martial pedigree of his adopted culture. Determined to get it right this time, he hurls himself into the teeth of the dehumanizing, modern machines of war.

In the same breath the film encourages disapproval of the Euro-American, imperial juggernaut and exalts its fugitives from justice. Instead of facing execution or prison in his homeland, Capt. Algren, summarily washed clean by good intentions, finds peace in the arms of the beautiful wife and brilliant son of a slain native.

For the most part, this is feel good, Hollywood malarkey.