Category: Drama

SCENT OF A WOMAN

By Marc S. Sanders

When it comes to Thanksgiving films, majority turn to that John Hughes road picture.  However, there’s another film that is just as meaningful to the spirit of the holiday and that is Martin Brest’s Scent Of A Woman which features Al Pacino’s Oscar winning Best Actor performance; at last!!!!

Before Chris O’Donnell became Robin in some tired Batman movies or a tough guy on NCIS, he was the staple prep school achiever (see also School Ties).  Here he plays Charlie, a student attending a prestigious boarding school in New Hampshire.  He does not have the wealthy background of his classmates and without the funds to go home for Thanksgiving, he opts to accept a weekend job tending to retired Lt. Col. Frank Slade, U.S. Army (Pacino).  Frank is a frightening lost soul with Pacino’s signature outbursts.  What’s even more challenging is that Frank has been plagued with blindness following a reckless accident with a hand grenade.  Unbeknownst to Charlie, Frank assumes control once his niece’s family leaves town for the weekend and sends himself with Charlie in tow to New York City.  Frank plans to enjoy a pleasant stay at the famed Waldorf Astoria, have a nice meal, crash his older brother’s holiday dinner, get a new tailored suit, bed a beautiful girl and drive a Ferrari.  Afterwards, he’s going to blow his brains out in full dress uniform.

This is not a problem Charlie needs to be dealing with right now.  The pressure is on the young man to identify the students of a prank that occurred just before the holiday break.  The Dean of Students (James Rebhorn) has given Charlie and another student, the privileged George Jr. (Phillip Seymour Hoffman, in a very early role) the weekend to ponder how they should respond.  Charlie, however, seems to face expulsion and likely an opportunity to miss out on admittance to Harvard.  George Sr., a former student and benefactor, will likely save his son.  Frank has predicted this outcome, and Charlie can’t deny that it is likely the truth.  Charlie’s dilemma is in his own morals as a man.  He’s not a snitch who will sell out his future to satisfy the esteemed integrity of the prep school and the ego of the Dean.

I miss the director, Martin Brest.  He has some magnificent films on his resume (Beverly Hills Cop, Midnight Run & Scent Of A Woman).  His other two popular films are broader in action comedy.  Here he is much more sensitive, and he uses the legacy of Pacino’s craft to the highest level.  He allows Al Pacino the freedom to be intimidating and frightening and intrusive.  A most uncomfortable Thanksgiving dinner at Frank’s brother’s house begins with awkwardness and ends in terrifying fear for Frank and all at the dinner table. 

Brest also lives up to the title of the picture.  There’s really not a main female character in the picture.  However, the camera captures a woman entering the frame at random times for Frank’s heightened senses to kick in.  If Frank is going to end his life soon, then he will at least absorb the finest things the world has to offer and that is a beautiful woman.  Charlie doesn’t realize this yet, having spent most of his days at an all-boys private school.  Martin Brest does such good work.  He’ll position his close up on Pacino doing his work and then a brown-haired young lady will enter from behind.  The scene will shift gears from morose to eye opening. Simple, yet great technique at play here.

Pacino may have won the Oscar, where some debate this was not his finest material and that it was a more likely a long-time coming career award at this point.  The portrayal has also become spoofed so many times over since the release of the film (Seinfeld) and “Hoo Ahh!”.  Still, look at the individual scenes on display here.  There are so many different angles to this guy.  Frank Slade is a lonely man who doesn’t directly identify his sorrow, but rather masks it with drill sergeant persona.  Yet, Frank is also a charming man who graciously does a sensual tango in the middle of a dining room with a beautiful young girl (Gabrielle Anwar).  Reader, if you are a regular subscriber to my write ups, then you know I adore a dance scene that occurs within a non-musical.  Scent Of A Woman may feature the number one ranked scene in that category.  Try not to grin or smile during this marvelous centerpiece.  How fortunate for Anwar – the one woman who got to do a tango on film with the great Al Pacino.  I’m thankful it is cemented in my consciousness for eternity.  It’s an amazing scene; one that can be taken out of context from the film and adored on You Tube, many times over.

Pacino and O’Donnell have brilliant chemistry together and it makes sense that the story takes place during the Thanksgiving weekend.  These are two men from very different backgrounds and neither realizes how much they need to be rescued by one another.  Charlie will have to literally save Frank’s life, no matter how intimidating he appears.  Frank will have to save Charlie’s future against an established school that’s offered up some of the country’s most brilliant minds.  Poor Charlie from Oregon, without the coat tails of a legacy to ride upon doesn’t fit the mold for the next President or championship football coach.  Both issues have insurmountable odds of being overcome, and yet these two are the only ones who plow through the challenges.

Scent Of A Woman has delightful moments to simply watch, such as a blind Frank driving a Ferrari through So Ho district and of course that tango scene, but this is an actor’s piece for sure.  The climax confirms that distinction.  The holiday weekend has come to an end and Charlie must face his peers and the Dean and confirm what he will do, but Frank will make sure to attend this makeshift trial. Then the opportunity is given for an outstanding monologue performance that only confirms one simple notion.  Al Pacino is one of the greatest film actors in history. I imagine the dialogue for this wrap up scene is quite something to read on a page.  However, to watch Pacino bring it to life is something else entirely. 

Therefore, on this Thanksgiving, I’m thankful for Al Pacino and Chris O’Donnell and Martin Brest, along with the tango, and I’m especially thankful for Scent Of A Woman.

THERE WILL BE BLOOD (2007)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis, Paul Dano, Ciarán Hinds
My Rating: 10/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 91% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A story of family, religion, hatred, oil, and madness, focusing on a turn-of-the-century prospector in the early days of the business.


My first draft of this review got up to nearly 1300 words before I realized I was just spinning my wheels.  This is quite simply one of the most original, most daring, most engrossing films of the new millennium that I have ever seen.  And after a while, my first draft became just a list, ticking off and describing scenes that I feel make it great, rather than a precise review.

So instead of giving a full film summary, which you can find elsewhere online, I’m going to try and instead give an actual review.  I’m going to gush a little bit (no pun intended), because it’s a masterpiece, but I’m just going to have to live with that, I guess.

When I first saw this movie (with my good friend Marc Sanders, as it happens, at a free preview), I remember leaving the theater feeling inspired.  Daniel Day-Lewis’s Oscar-winning performance in There Will Be Blood has, to this day, been in the back of my mind every time I’m on stage, whether it’s a drama, comedy, or whatever.  It genuinely makes me want to be a better actor.  Oh, I’ve seen great performances before from the likes of Nicholson, Hoffman, O’Toole, and the rest, but there’s something about the laser-like intensity of Day-Lewis’s performance as Daniel Plainview that had me gawping at the screen in awe as the film played out.  I can’t fully explain it.  It was, and remains, a religious experience to behold.

(For those of you unfamiliar with the story, Daniel Plainview is a turn-of-the-century prospector who thrives in the early days of the oil boom in America, but when his ambition crosses paths with a fire-and-brimstone preacher named Eli Sunday, things get a little testy.)

So, there you go, the acting is not just top-notch, it’s revelatory.

But then there’s the movie itself, exhibiting a level of craftsmanship I haven’t seen since the heyday of Stanley Kubrick.  The plot itself reads like one of those summaries of films that great directors dreamed of making, but were unable to for various reasons, like Kubrick’s unrealized biography of Napoleon.  I mean, who wants to see a 160-minute movie about oil drilling?  Why would anyone care?  Why should anyone care?

Director Paul Thomas Anderson’s ingenuity relies heavily on the acting and casting choices, and of course the ingenious screenplay, but any discussion of the film also has to mention the score.  As much as any other element, the film’s musical score creates and sustains a mood of dread and suspense over such banal scenes as pipeline being laid, oil derricks being built, men surveying land, etcetera.  The atonal and urgent score suggests that what we’re seeing is the prelude to some sort of apocalyptic event or incipient bloodshed.  It keeps you on the edge of your seat, as if around the corner an earthquake or mass murder is waiting.

(Sometimes the ABSENCE of the score is just as disturbing, as in the scene in a church when Daniel Plainview is reluctantly baptized, or most of the scenes in the finale, taking place in 1927.)

But ticking off these technical details still feels lacking.  This is the second draft of this review, and I still feel as if I’m not getting across how much this movie works on the viewer.  Or, at least, how it worked on ME.  This was only the third time I’ve watched the movie since first seeing it in 2007, and I was hooked all over again, right from the opening shot, with those dissonant strings playing over a panorama of sunbaked hills and scrub brush.

The movie just FEELS perfect.  It’s anchored by Daniel Day-Lewis, who is in literally every scene except two that I can recall.  But the artistry of everything else at play is just…I am at a loss for words.  It is, as another review puts it, “wholly original.”  There is just nothing else like it.  Sure, it’s definitely inspired by Kubrick, but it takes things to another level.

It’s one of the best films I’ve ever seen.

ONCE UPON A TIME…IN HOLLYWOOD (2019)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Quentin Tarantino
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Timothy Olyphant, Dakota Fanning, Bruce Dern, Luke Perry, Al Pacino, Kurt Russell
My Rating: 10/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 84% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A fading television actor and his stunt double strive to achieve fame and success in the film industry during the final years of Hollywood’s first Golden Age in 1969 Los Angeles.


Quentin Tarantino’s ninth film is a little bit like Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.  It’s big, bombastic, and goes the long way around the barn to get to the finale, but in the end it all makes sense and is a transcendent experience.

Let’s see, where do I start?

First of all, the film’s evocation of 1969 Los Angeles is like Mary Poppins: practically perfect in every way.  I’m no fashion scholar or visual historian, but every exterior shot of the city was pretty convincing to my layman’s eyes.  The movie theatres, the movie posters, the restaurants (anyone else remember “Der Weinerschnitzel”?), the cars, those HUGE sedans sharing the road with VW Bugs and M/G’s…it’s clear they did their homework.

There’s the performances by the two leads.  Tarantino once said he considered himself the luckiest director in modern history because he was able to get DiCaprio and Pitt to work on the same film.  Can’t argue with him on that score.  They carry the film in a way that few other tandems could have.  (Newman and Redford come to mind.) Mind you, DiCaprio and Putt don’t look much like each other, considering one has to be the other’s stuntman, but you get the idea.

Above all, there’s the story.  DiCaprio plays Rick Dalton, a former leading man from ‘50s TV westerns who is now playing colorful bad guys in ‘60s TV westerns.  Brad Pitt plays Cliff Booth, the stuntman who’s been taking the dangerous falls for Dalton for years.  Dalton happens to live next door to Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate on Cielo Drive in the Hollywood Hills.

All the trailers, and all the industry buzz, reveal that the Manson family and Sharon Tate play a part in the film.  That’s no spoiler.  Given what we know about those events, the movie plays like Gimme Shelter, the landmark documentary about the ill-fated concert at Altamont that was actually due to take place a few months after the events of this film.  It’s all very suspenseful, in the sense that we know what’s coming, but we’re just not sure how the movie is going to approach it.  So every scene with poor Sharon Tate in it is overshadowed by the fact that we know her ultimate fate in history.

It’s like the famous Hitchcock analogy of suspense.  Two people are eating at a restaurant when a bomb suddenly goes off under their table…that’s surprise.  Put those same two people at the restaurant, where the audience knows there’s a bomb under the table, but it doesn’t go off right away as the two people eat and converse and have dessert, and we’re wondering will they leave BEFORE the bomb goes off or not…?  That’s suspense.

And that’s the genius of this movie, with Tarantino’s sprawling, winding screenplay.  We get to know Rick Dalton and Cliff Booth intimately, we get the rhythms of their relationship, of Dalton’s mood on set, of Booth’s quiet acceptance of his role as Dalton’s sole support system.  We are treated to lengthy scenes showing Dalton at work on the set of a TV western, so we can appreciate the vast differences between an actor and their characters.  There’s a brilliant backstage scene between Dalton and a child actor who is impossibly, hilariously advanced for her age, and who winds up giving Dalton some goodhearted advice.

And interspersed through it all is Sharon Tate.  Sharon Tate bopping to music at home.  Sharon Tate picking up a female hitchhiker on her way into town.  Sharon Tate almost passing, then backing up to admire with youthful excitement, her name on the marquee of a movie theatre, right next to (gasp) Dean Martin’s name!  Sharon Tate dancing, walking, smiling, drinking…living.  She’s the diner at the restaurant, and the Manson family is the bomb we know will eventually go off.  It casts a pall over the proceedings, but not in a bad way.  It’s an interesting way to bring the reality of the situation into focus from time to time.

And now I have to end this review before I inadvertently give away certain, ah, plot elements that elevate Tarantino’s film from a mere character study or period piece into the heady heights of cinematic transcendence.  I have not myself read any reviews of the film, so I can only guess that whatever negative reviews are out there probably center on the film’s finale, or perhaps on its meandering script.  All I can say, or will say, is that I am firmly on Tarantino’s side on this one.  The way the conclusion was written and filmed is the kind of thing that people will still be talking about years from now.

So just take it from me.  If you’re a movie fan, and ESPECIALLY if you’re a Tarantino fan, this is right up your alley.  It’s easily his most slowly paced movie since Jackie Brown, but that just gives you time to e-e-e-ease into the characters, like putting on a tailored suit piece by piece.  This film, like Beethoven’s Ninth, is a masterpiece.

UNITED 93 (2006)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Paul Greengrass
Cast: Ben Sliney, Khalid Abdalla, Corey Johnson
My Rating: 10/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 90% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A real-time account of the events on United Flight 93, one of the planes hijacked on September 11th, 2001, and of the chaos on the ground as the FAA and the military grasped what was happening.


There are a handful of movies that can still make me cry when watching them, even on repeat viewings, and even then it doesn’t always happen.  Fearless, directed by Peter Weir, is one of them.  The finale of Edward Scissorhands still has the power to choke me up.  The transition from black-and-white to color at the end of Schindler’s List can still bring a lump to my throat given the right circumstances.

But only one movie has made me shed real tears every single time I watch it, and I’ve seen it now at least four times.  I used to watch it every time September 11th came around, as a sort of (morbid?) remembrance of that terrible day.  I haven’t done so the last couple of years simply because the emotional reaction I have to the movie and the events it depicts is just too much to deal with.

Paul Greengrass’ United 93 is unlike any other film about 9/11 that I’ve ever seen.  Many people praised Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center when it came out, but I found that movie too pumped up with melodrama and forced situations.  United 93, on the other hand, takes a documentary approach and simply follows the passengers and crew boarding their flight, like any other, on their way to a date with destiny that nobody saw coming.

Intercut with the flight itself are scenes on the ground, in various air traffic control centers, and the FAA itself.  One of the masterstrokes of the film was to cast Ben Sliney as himself.  Ben Sliney, for those who don’t remember, was the FAA Operations Manager on 9/11.  In fact, it was his first day on the job in that new position that very morning.  It was his decision, after seeing the carnage in NYC and the Pentagon, to take the unprecedented step of grounding ALL air traffic over the United States.

The movie’s effectiveness comes partly from the re-enactments of the ground controllers, trying to make sense of garbled messages coming from first one, then two, then three flights, something about people taking control – and then seeing those flights disappear from radar coverage.  And then someone in the tower sees smoke coming from downtown New York…  Those scenes, more than any documentary I’ve seen, really bring back the memories of that morning for me, the disbelief and utter shock of seeing that building burning and smoking.  And then the second plane hits…

But the movie’s real power is with the flight that ultimately didn’t hit a significant target, crashing instead in a field in Pennsylvania.  (There has been some speculation about its intended target, but the truth is we’ll never know.)  The scenes aboard United 93 have been pieced together using recorded phone conversations from passengers, flight deck recordings, and data on the plane’s flight path.  There’s no way to know how accurate some of these events are, but the point of the movie is that it feels 100% real.  The fear on the face of the hijackers, the fear of the passengers, the slow realization that this flight is headed to another target, and their gradual determination to do something about it.

Watching those scenes, with the knowledge that this flight will eventually crash with total loss of life, is an unbearably sad experience.  The final few minutes of the film, as the passengers rush their attackers and frantically try to break down the cockpit door, fills me with dread.  I find myself thinking, unreasonably, “Maybe this time they’ll get to the cockpit in time…maybe THIS time they’ll get the one pilot among the passengers behind the wheel this time…”  But no.

So WHY, oh, WHY do I give this movie a “10” when it’s such an immensely tragic experience?

Because this movie does not feel like a cheap attempt to cash in on a national tragedy.  Instead, it feels more like a memorial to those brave souls who did everything they could to keep themselves alive, to keep their attackers from fulfilling their evil deeds.  As much as any soldiers who gave their lives attacking a beach head, these everyday civilians deserve our gratitude, and they should be acknowledged as genuine heroes.  I believe United 93 treats them as such.

ROCKETMAN (2019)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Dexter Fletcher
Cast: Taron Egerton, Jamie Bell, Richard Madden, Bryce Dallas Howard
My Rating: 8/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 86% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A musical fantasy about Elton John’s (Egerton) breakthrough years in the 1970s.


Much more so than Bohemian Rhapsody, Rocketman feels like a genuine musical.  On top of that, it also provides much more insight into the lead character than Rhapsody did.  I did feel that it was stretching a bit, trying a bit too hard to pluck the old heartstrings towards the end of the film.  But the fact remains that I was more invested in the Elton John character than Freddie Mercury.

I think a big part of that improvement is due to the way Rocketman is structured.  The entire film is played out in a series of flashbacks, ostensibly during a group therapy session at a rehab clinic.  I say “ostensibly” because, in the opening moments of the film, he apparently walks into the session moments after abandoning his Madison Square Garden concert.  He is in full Elton John regalia: a flaming orange and red outfit complete with spreading wings on his back and devil horns on his head.  Through most of the film (after his meteoric rise to fame), he will do his best to live up to the devilish nature of this costume.

(This structure is not new…see, for example, De-Lovely, in which Cole Porter defends his life to a mysterious figure at the moment of his death.)

I have said over and over again, on Facebook and to my fellow cinephiles, how I cannot handle movies or TV shows with loathsome characters as the leads.  I can never and will never watch the TV show Mad Men.  No power on earth will ever compel me to sit through another screening of What About Bob? If someone had shot Jennifer Lawrence’s character in American Hustle with a shotgun, I would have cheered.

And yet here is Rocketman, featuring a lead character who, in the course of the movie…let me see…gets himself addicted to drugs and alcohol, succeeds in alienating anyone and everyone close to him, attempts suicide, gets the venue city name wrong during a massive concert (that’s a BIG no-no), ditches the people who made him famous in the first place out of misplaced affection for his smarmy manager/lover, and marries a woman (out of nowhere) knowing full well he is gay.

He does all of these things, and yet I was still on his side.  Weird, right?  The last time I felt that kind of empathy for a troubled lead character was in Ray.  (I’m not equating the two films, just remarking on their similarity.)  If I had to draw a line connecting those two films, and why I was able to handle their anti-social tendencies, the first things that come to mind are their music and their backstories.  The music produced by Ray Charles and Elton John (and Elton’s inseparable collaborator, Bernie Taupin) is on such a level that it was intriguing to me to watch their characters evolve, to see where such music comes from, and how much suffering is sometimes (always?) necessary for greatness to be achieved.

Another aspect of Rocketman’s success is the way unique visual tricks were used to convey the extreme emotional impact of certain events in Elton John’s life.  I’m thinking especially of his first concert at the famed Troubador nightclub in Los Angeles.  After a few agonizing seconds of nervous silence, Elton and his band break into “Crocodile Rock”, and when the bouncy chorus begins with its high, ‘50s-esque falsettos, there is a glorious moment when Elton, the band, and the crowd slowly levitate in the air, transported by the music.  I can imagine the real Elton John describing that moment in that specific way.  Or any number of performers describing their one supremely perfect moment in the spotlight, that one fleeting moment in time when it felt like the world revolved around them and their music, or their monologue, or their pas-de-deux.  It’s a magical sequence.

I cannot call Rocketman a perfect biopic.  As I mentioned before, it tries a little too hard at the end.  There is a bit of speechifying that is intended to get a gut-wrenching emotional reaction, but which I felt was a little too much of a muchness.  But it is an improvement on Bohemian Rhapsody.  I got a much fuller picture of Elton John’s life before he became THE Elton John, and as such, I was much more invested in how things turned out.

BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN (2005)

By Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Ang Lee
Cast: Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Randy Quaid, Michelle Williams, Anne Hathaway
My Rating: 10/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 87% Certified Fresh

PLOT: The story of a taboo romantic relationship between two cowboys, and their lives over the years.


Brokeback Mountain is the kind of movie that makes me wish I was a better communicator, like Lost in Translation.  I know I love these movies, I know WHY I love these movies, but it’s difficult for me to put into words.

Brokeback is, of course, the movie that will forever be known among the snark peddlers as “that gay cowboy movie,” which is insultingly reductive.  That’s like referring to Star Wars as “that space movie.”  To reduce the movie to those terms is to totally ignore the boundless riches to be had by watching it, I mean really watching it.

For one thing, damn, just LOOK at it.  Look at the way the skies fill the frame, with clouds hanging heavily over the mountains and the dusty streets and the trailer parks.  Director Ang Lee makes the sky into a tangible character all its own, much like Kubrick did with the Overlook Hotel.  It infuses every outdoor scene with a sense of the largeness of the world around us.  It’s a fitting backdrop for the intimate story presented to us.  In fact, those huge scenic backdrops are kind of a throwback to the ‘70s, to the films of Cimino and Arthur Penn and Bertolucci, when painting a picture with the camera was two-thirds of the story.  Virtually every outdoor scene in Brokeback Mountain is worthy of framing in an art gallery.  Stupendous.

The movie turns on the story of two men who unexpectedly and passionately fall in love in 1963, a time when gay love was still taboo, at least in polite society, and especially in any given cowboy community.  But as the story winds its way through almost twenty years in the lives of these men, it becomes less about the FACT of their affair, and more about the enormous sense of yearning and loss that comes from desperately wanting something that you can’t have.  Who among us has never felt that kind of insane desire?  Not necessarily for a person, even, but for anything at all?  A crippled man who longs to walk, or a blind man who yearns to see.  A dream job.  A dream vacation.  That’s what this movie is about.

Heath Ledger delivers the performance that really put him on the map.  His portrayal of Ennis Del Mar is incredibly subtle, although his Western accent flirts with impenetrability at times.  I love the way he shambles and mumbles through his role, virtually the entire movie, which pays off in that fantastic scene by the lake (“I wish I knew how to quit you!”) when this hulk of a man is torn down by his own unspoken passion.

Again…I’m not a poet, so this really doesn’t quite get at the mood generated by the movie.  It’s no feel-good film, that’s for sure, but it’s worth seeing by anyone who loves world-class storytelling.  Don’t let anyone, or your own preset notions, steer you different.

ROMA (2018)

By Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Alfonso Cuarón
Cast: Yalitizia Aparicio, Marina de Tavira, Diego Cortina Autrey
My Rating: 10/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 96% Certified Fresh

PLOT: A year in the life of a middle-class family and their maid in Mexico City in the early 1970s.


The closing credits of Alfonso Cuarón’s intensely personal, emotionally powerful Roma state unequivocally (in Spanish) that the entire movie was shot on 65mm film.  This is an important choice with a movie that communicates its emotional beats with strong, crisp visuals that don’t feel like a traditional movie.  To me, Roma feels like looking through an old, well-preserved photo album of a family I don’t know.  But the closer I look at the pictures, the more I can intuit how their lives are no less important or vital than my own.

More than most films, Roma exemplifies one of Roger Ebert’s core beliefs about film.  He said that movies “are like a machine that generates empathy. It lets you understand a little bit more about different hopes, aspirations, dreams and fears. It helps us to identify with the people who are sharing this journey with us.”

That’s how I felt watching Roma.  I never really felt like I was watching a film.  Director Cuarón (who served as his own cinematographer) uses his camera and shrewd editing to create the idea that I was looking at a fondly remembered memory instead of a traditional, plot-furthering movie sequence.  I didn’t grow up in Mexico or have a maid, but within just a few seconds of the opening scene – hell, during the opening CREDITS – I was sucked into the world of the film.

Another important element of this movie’s success is the exquisite sound design.  Over the opening credits, we see nothing except a close-up of some sort of tiled surface.  Soapy water spills over it a couple of times. We hear a mixture of street sounds, but not a busy street.  At one point a jet airliner flies far overhead, visible in the sky as reflected in a puddle of water. We can hear birds, and people talking and shouting in the distance, and a street vendor, and the occasional dog barking, and…it succeeds in placing you firmly in the world of the movie. It all feels completely organic, not engineered.

I’ve just realized I haven’t said a word about the plot.  The story, in itself, is nothing extraordinary.  We follow several months in the lives of a middle-class family in Mexico from 1970 to 1971.  They have a maid, Cleo, who discharges her duties with efficiency, who is beloved by the family children, who has a life of her own outside of her employer’s household.  Through various personal upheavals, both in her own life and the life of the family she works for, they all grow incredibly close.  …and I can almost hear your eyes glazing over as you read those words.

But, as is the case with every other film, what’s important is not WHAT this movie’s about, it’s about HOW it tells the story.  And Roma, if nothing else, solidifies Alfonso Cuarón’s standing as one of the great modern masters of cinematic storytelling.  In his hands, this humdrum story of middle-class life becomes a hymn to nostalgia. There’s a brief scene of everyone gathered around a television set, watching a variety show.  The sight of their smiling faces, illuminated by the screen, triggered a memory of my own family sitting around the TV back in ancient history, before VCRs and even cellphones(!), and watching the ABC Movie of the Week, like The Towering Inferno or Grey Lady Down.  It’s rare for a film to affect me like that.

I have to tread carefully here, because I want to mention a key event that occurs in the latter half of the film.  It’s immensely harrowing, all shot in one take (indeed, IMDb tells me it was shot only ONCE and not repeated).  In any other movie, I would say that it’s the kind of thing a screenwriter would throw in as a shamelessly manipulative plot twist, designed solely to elicit unearned emotions from the audience.  In Roma, however, the movie has so thoroughly worked its magic that the event, when it happens, is not shameless, but shocking and heartbreaking.  I was not watching an actor or actress.  I reacted as if I was watching a home movie of a real person going through a traumatic event, and it was devastating.  THAT’S the kind of rare cinematic event that I live for.

Roma is a black-and-white film shot in Spanish, with English subtitles, and which leans heavily on visual storytelling.  This may not be your cup of tea.  But if you like film at all, if you like the kind of movie where you can drink in the visuals like you were at a museum where the pictures breathed and lived and loved, then you owe it to yourself to see Roma as soon as possible.

MATCH POINT (2005)

By Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Woody Allen
Cast: Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Scarlett Johansson, Emily Mortimer, Brian Cox
My Rating: 10/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 76% Certified Fresh

PLOT: At a turning point in his life, a struggling, engaged tennis instructor (Rhys Meyers) falls for an aspiring actress (Johansson), who also happens to be engaged…to his soon-to-be brother-in-law.


Watching Match Point is as exhilarating as any moviegoing experience I’ve ever had.  It’s pure soap, much like its uncredited (but obvious) inspiration, 1951’s A Place in the Sun with Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift.  But a crucial decision is made by the main character in Allen’s film that shifts everything into darker territory more comparable to Hitchcock than George Stevens.

One of the best things about the film is the editing.  It’s not a short film, clocking in at just over two hours, but everything feels pared down to the bare essentials.  The passage of time is indicated in efficient pans or quick cuts.  Unnecessary conversations are cut short.  Winter changes to spring in a single fade.  Allen wastes no time in getting to the meat of the story, and it makes for a film that hurtles along breathlessly.

The performance by the lead, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, is also a key factor.  Watching it again for the first time in quite a while, I was struck by how measured his deliveries are.  There’s nothing wrong with it on a technical level, but it always feels like he’s acting or performing.  Even when his character, Chris, interacts with his girlfriend who eventually becomes his fiancé, nothing he does feels real.  It’s almost distracting, how theatrical his performance is compared to everyone else’s.  I was thinking, “Well, I guess Rhys Meyers is the best they could get to stay under budget.”

EXCEPT…when he meets Scarlett Johnasson’s character, Nola.  Only then do his eyes and face reflect the lust in his words.  They flirt fiercely for about a minute before they’re interrupted, but the damage is done.  He’s hooked.  And it’s at THAT point I realized the “staginess” of his acting in previous scenes was intentional, because his character WAS acting.  Chris is ALWAYS putting on a performance for everyone around him, except Nola.  With Nola, we see the real Chris, the focused, hungry Chris who will stop at nothing to get what he wants.

It’s a brilliant layer to a brilliant film.  Woody Allen has created a movie that starts out exactly like so many of his previous character-driven art-house films, so much so that we never suspect the surprises in store.  For the score, he chose stock opera recordings, really OLD opera recordings that sound so scratchy I wonder if any of them were actually being played on the old Edison cylinder players.  It’s the PERFECT topping.  It creates a uniquely Allen-esque atmosphere that lulls us into the feeling that, well, I know where THIS is going.

But I assure you, you don’t.

Pay particularly close attention to the various discussions of luck peppered throughout the film.  At multiple milestones in the film, luck plays a HUGE part, not always for the good.  Are these plot conveniences?  Well, how much of our own lives are governed by luck, good or bad?  An acquaintance of mine was killed in a wreck where a truck toppled onto him from a highway overpass.  Another was killed because someone was driving at night with no headlights.  Another friend contracted breast cancer, but is now in remission.  I have two uncles who last cancer battles.  Yet another acquaintance, the daughter of a friend, beat childhood leukemia.

Luck is inextricably linked with our existence, to the degree that it’s a little frightening.  We can bitch and moan about plot contrivances in movies and convenient phone calls and the rest, but if you step back, everything in existence is a contrivance: random meetings and phone calls and stoplights that keep us from hitting that pedestrian, and missed flights on airplanes that end up crashing, etcetera.

That’s REALLY what Match Point is drilling down to.  We live our lives, we play our roles, we follow the scripts WE choose…or are they chosen for us? Even without the backdrop of luck as a metaphysical discussion, the movie is an absolute top-notch thriller, one of the best of 2005, or any year, for that matter.  But it’s that next level hanging in the background that makes it my favorite Woody Allen film.

QUICK TAKE: Munich (2005)

By Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Steven Spielberg
Cast: Eric Bana, Daniel Craig, Ciarán Hinds
My Rating: 9/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 77% Certified Fresh

PLOT: After the terrorist group Black September kills Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games, Israel responds by sending covert hit squads after the men responsible.


Munich is an engrossing film that doesn’t pretend to have easy answers.  Anyone who comes out of the movie thinking that Spielberg has either denounced or commended Israel’s actions in the aftermath of the 1972 attack wasn’t paying attention.  The film simply portrays the aftermath in an extremely even-handed manner, presenting both sides of the argument without making a judgement call itself.  If there’s a judgement call to be made, that’s on you.

To make a movie that hinges on an attack by Arab terrorists just four years after 9/11 was a risky move.  Four years sounds like a long time, but I can assure you, it was still fresh in everyone’s minds at the time.  The film closes on an image of the New York skyline as it appeared in the ‘70s, complete with the digitally restored Twin Towers.  Aside from being an extremely effective visual statement tying the events in the film to today’s world, it was a little eerie.

Eric Bana is a mass of contradictions, a committed Israeli soldier who leads a squad of assassins, but who starts to have misgivings after a couple of close calls.  Their targets are essentially assigned via a safety deposit box.  No questions, no discussion: kill these men. But he starts asking the very questions that can’t be answered.  He wants proof that these assassinations are making a difference.  All he sees are newly vacant spots in the organization being filled by terrorists even MORE extreme than the one before.  So what’s the point?

Suffice to say, it’s one of Spielberg’s finer efforts, and it will challenge you to think critically about your deeply held views, whatever they may be.  And isn’t that a workable definition of “art?”

QUICK TAKE: Mary Queen of Scots (2018)

By Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Josie Rourke
Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Margot Robbie, Guy Pearce
My Rating: 6/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 60%

PLOT: Mary Stuart attempts to unite England and Scotland, but her cousin, Elizabeth I, refuses to acknowledge her sovereignty, resulting in years of treachery and political maneuvering.


I came into Mary Queen of Scots with only movie knowledge to guide me, mostly from Elizabeth, the 1998 film starring Cate Blanchett.  After watching this movie, I can honestly say that, in terms of knowledge, not much has changed.  All I learned was that Mary Stuart would stop at nothing to keep the throne, which she believed was her birthright, and her cousin, Elizabeth I, refused to acknowledge that birthright because of her religion.  I think.  And much heartbreak and backstabbing ensued, resulting in Mary Stuart’s beheading.  (That’s not a spoiler, we see it happening at the very beginning.)

This isn’t so much a BAD movie, as it is a DENSE movie.  It assumes the audience knows much more about Elizabethan intrigues than I obviously do.  It becomes clearer as the movie progresses, but for the first 20 or 30 minutes, I was a little lost.  There is some excitement during a military attack, not to mention the unexpected exhibition of cunning linguistics, but for the most part the movie is content to sit back and simply regard the drama without getting invested in the story.  It was rather bland.  Not boring, just lacking in flavor.

The biggest draws here are the performances from the two female leads.  Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie are riveting, Robbie in particular as Elizabeth I.  She disappears into the role, without any trace of her previous screen personas.  Ronan’s Scottish brogue is on point, and she brings Mary Stuart to fiery, red-headed life.  But the surrounding story density never seems to let the actors swing for the fences.  It was a muted experience.

Fans of this historical period will likely enjoy Mary Queen of Scots more than I, much as Queen fans adored Bohemian Rhapsody more than non-fans.  I wouldn’t necessarily run to theaters, though.  Maybe wait for cable or Netflix.  Yeah.