Category: Drama

CLOUD ATLAS (2012)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Directors: Lana Wachowski, Lilly Wachowski, Tom Tykwer
Cast: Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving, Jim Sturgess, Doona Bae, Ben Whishaw, Keith David, Susan Sarandon, Hugh Grant
My Rating: 10/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 66%

PLOT: An exploration of how individual lives impact one another in the past, present, and future, as one soul is shaped from a killer into a hero, and an act of kindness ripples across centuries to inspire a revolution.


Okay, faithful readers, I hope you’re comfortable.

Cloud Atlas is one of those movies like Baraka that leaves me with the urgent need to tell people how amazing it is.  It’s visually spectacular, thought-provoking, and hopelessly optimistic about love and the good side of human nature, even in the face of the worst humanity has to offer.

Based on a critically acclaimed novel by David Mitchell, the movie tells six separate stories, linked by the fact that a core group of actors plays all the principal roles in each story, and by the fact that at least one actor in each story carries a curious birthmark shaped a bit like a comet or a shooting star.  Each story is separated from the others by decades or centuries, taking place in the years 1849, 1936, 1973, 2012, 2144, and an apparently post-apocalyptic 2321.

I cannot imagine the lengths to which the filmmakers, and the film editor in particular, went to make this movie work.  The film jumps freely from one story to another, forward, back, forward, and back again, somehow maintaining a clean flow and keeping each storyline absolutely clear.  Although the stories are unique, the editing keeps the idea of connection alive for nearly three hours.  Just based on the editing alone, that makes Cloud Atlas kind of exhilarating to watch, especially when things heat up in the 2144 segment.

Let me see if I can quickly summarize each story, without giving too much away:

  • 1849 – An American lawyer visits property holdings overseas and witnesses the brutal whipping of a slave, who stows away on the lawyer’s ship returning to San Francisco; meanwhile, an unscrupulous doctor has plans to steal the lawyer’s gold en route.
  • 1936 – A struggling composer, Robert Frobisher, is hired as an amanuensis (a fancy word for a music stenographer) to another aging composer, which allows Frobisher to compose his own masterpiece, The Cloud Atlas Sextet. The aging composer demands credit for the piece and threatens to expose Frobisher’s bisexuality, including his deep, unconditional love for a gentleman named Rufus Sixsmith.
  • 1973 – An investigative reporter stumbles onto a conspiracy at a nuclear power plant, thanks to a whistle-blowing report written by none other than Rufus Sixsmith, now in his sixties.
  • 2012 – An author on the run from hooligan creditors takes refuge in what he thinks is a hotel, but is in fact a nursing home, to which he has inadvertently committed himself.  He and three other residents plan a daring jailbreak.
  • 2144 – Set in a vastly futuristic New Seoul, a renegade “fabricant” is brought in for questioning by the ruling government known as Unanimity.  The fabricant, known only as Sonmi-451, spins a tale of oppression, liberation, and horrific realization as she becomes the voice of a revolution that will ripple across centuries.
  • 2321 – In a post-apocalyptic Hawaii, peaceful Valleysmen live in constant fear of attacks from vicious cannibals, the Kona tribe.  They also receive periodic visits from Prescients, a highly advanced society that apparently lives offshore.  One day, a Prescient, Meronym, asks a Valleysmen leader to guide her to a remote mountain peak where she hopes to send an SOS signal to off-world colonies.

Confused yet?  Don’t be.  The editing keeps everything crystal clear.

But that’s just the clinical description of the movie.  What catapults Cloud Atlas into the stratosphere is how the fancy editing and visual effects occasionally take a back seat to a really deep philosophical question that leaves me with a sense of awe.  It’s really a what-if question, one of the greatest what-if questions of human existence.

What if…death isn’t the end?

I know that countless other movies have asked this question. We all have our own answers and beliefs.  I am not suggesting that Cloud Atlas has somehow figured out THE answer to this question, or that the answer it provides somehow trumps your own beliefs. But of all the movies I’ve seen on this topic, Cloud Atlas is the only one that really, genuinely, truly left me in awe of the possibilities it proposes.

I mentioned earlier that key roles are played by the same actors over and over again in each of the stories.  While that was initially distracting, I realized that the filmmakers were actually making a genius move.  It was nothing more than a simple way of illustrating the concept that a life in one era is echoed in another, decades or centuries later.  Heavy makeup is used to indicate how one person’s life as an Asian woman could, in theory, be echoed in the life of a Mexican woman in another era.  Or perhaps the life of a British man might be echoed later as a British woman.

And then there’s the question of that recurring birthmark.  One key character from each storyline bears a birthmark that resembles a shooting star.  So many people (including me the first time around) wanted to attach some kind of conventional story-based meaning to that birthmark.  Did it mean these characters were all somehow blood-related?  Was it a prophecy of some kind?  Something mentioned in the book, perhaps, that had to be left out of the film for pacing reasons, or some such thing?  No.  It’s just another visual reinforcement of the idea of recurrence, or reincarnation.

And that’s where I get awestruck by the movie.  Reincarnation is not a new concept in films, but Cloud Atlas really got under my skin.  Imagine.  What if…the person you love, your soulmate, the one you’ll love until the day of your death…what if, centuries hence, you’ll meet each other again?  Maybe you’ve walked down the street, or been eating in a restaurant, and for a fleeting second you lock eyes with a total stranger across the room, and you think, “I KNOW that person,” but the moment passes and life goes on.  What if that happened because you have met in some past life?

Or maybe you go on a date, and it goes phenomenally well, as if you’ve known each other for ages?  Well…maybe you have.  It’s your destiny to meet and love this person because you’ve already done it before.

I know I’m getting a little woo-woo/touchy-feely here.  It’s not a new idea.  It’s just that Cloud Atlas presents the idea so well that my breath gets taken away when I think about its implications.

I just have to bring up the stunning visuals again.  There’s a scene where the composer, Frobisher, is writing to his lover, Rufus Sixsmith, and there’s a passage where, in his mind, he meets Sixsmith in a china shop.  In a wonderfully poetic moment, they start smashing the china in slow motion as Frobisher’s composition plays in the background.  Then, just as the music reaches a crescendo, the two of them stop in place, and hundreds of china vases and plates rain down from the ceiling in slow motion, hanging in space, descending slowly to the ground like gigantic snowflakes.

I’m at a loss.  I’ve come to the end of whatever I can discuss about this movie without repeating myself endlessly.  I want to reiterate that I don’t believe this movie has THE answer to what lies beyond death.  But it has a truly lovely hypothesis, one that leaves me awestruck with its implications.

So let me just end with a line from the movie that makes my heart swell every time I hear it.

“I believe there is another world waiting for us, Sixsmith. A better world…and I’ll be waiting for you there. I believe we do not stay dead long. Find me beneath the Corsican stars, where we first kissed.”

MONEYBALL (2011)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Bennett Miller
Cast: Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Robin Wright, Chris Pratt
My Rating: 9/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 94% Certified Fresh

PLOT: The general manager of the Oakland A’s attempts to assemble a winning team on a lean budget by employing computer-generated analysis to acquire new players.


On paper, Moneyball should not work as a movie. What have you got?  A feel-good sports story about the 2002 Oakland A’s utilizing the science of statistics to assemble the right combination of players to get them into the playoffs.

I mean, really?  Specifics aside, a Cinderella story about an underdog sports team trying to make it to the big game is one of the oldest, most predictable tropes in film.  Shall I count them off? Major League, The Bad News Bears, Bull Durham, The Mighty Ducks, Little Giants, Cool Runnings, Hoosiers…need I go on?

And in Moneyball, we barely even get to see any baseball action itself.  The movie is more concerned with the behind-the-scenes action, beating the trade deadline, shaking up the scouting crew, trying to get the manager to believe in the new system.  We don’t really see any major baseball action until we get close to the finale.

[SPOILER ALERT…unless you’re a HUGE baseball fan, in which case you were already aware of this.]

And let’s talk about that finale, while we’re at it.  The A’s make it to the 2002 ALDS elimination game, and what happens?  They LOSE.  Say what???

So why, oh why, does Moneyball work the way it does?

…no, really, I’m asking.  Because I’m not 100% sure myself.  Let me just tick off my thoughts as they occur to me here.

  1. There’s the screenplay.  Here’s some good advice: when you want to make a movie about a potentially dry subject, get both Steven Zaillian AND Aaron Sorkin to write your script.  The pace of the movie is stately, even sedate, but the dialogue is crisp, clean, and precise, getting to the point as efficiently as possible without being flashy.  In one memorable scene, someone walks up to the General Manager’s office and says just one word: “Peña,” and then walks away.  The GM takes it in, says, “Okay”, and calmly stands and flips his desk over.  The whole thing is over in 15 seconds.  I can imagine another movie wasting a lot of time with extra words or edits, but not “Moneyball.”  (SPARTAN.  That’s the word I’m thinking of.  The dialogue is spartan.)
  2. There’s the editing.  The dialogue is sleek and uncluttered, but there is a lot of information that has to be conveyed to those audience members who may not know what a box score is, or what a DH is, or why Billy Beane (the GM, played by Brad Pitt) doesn’t CARE whether his new first baseman can even field the ball properly, as long as he gets ON BASE when he’s batting.  Rather than use flashy editing to generate false suspense or excitement, the Oscar-nominated editors use more of that spartan vibe, with occasional jumps to real-world film clips of the actual team or individual players.  This is especially helpful when the film’s middle section details the woeful first half of the season under the new statistics-based system.  Again, not flashy, but effective.  Very hard to pull off, and deservedly recognized.
  3. There’s the structure…which I guess points back to both the screenplay and editing, but I’m just saying.  As I said, it’s a classic, well-worn trope.  Good guys get knocked down for the count – the A’s flat-out suck for the first half of the season – but then they suddenly start winning games and crawling back into contention.  As many of these films that I’ve seen, I still found myself unwittingly getting caught up in the spirit of the comeback.  In actual fact, the 2002 season is the one where the real Oakland A’s threatened to break the American League record for longest winning streak.  And it all comes down to one at-bat in the bottom of the ninth.  Because of COURSE it does.
  4. …and that sort of brings up another point.  Is there another sport that has as much innate mythology as baseball?  Sure, football has its share of comeback stories, and so does hockey and everything else.  But with baseball…lemme tell you.  A few years ago when the Chicago Cubs were on the verge of winning their first World Series in a hundred-and-eight years, I watched Game 7, rooting for the Cubs.  For those Cubs fans who watched as well, you’ll recall: that game was unmerciful.  The Cubs blew a three-run lead, they ended nine innings in a 6-6 tie, and then there was a RAIN DELAY before the 10th inning started.  But I will never forget that moment when the Cubs made the final out, and they wound up winning 8-7.  It was glorious.  …well, watching Moneyball, watching that section when the A’s are creeping up to winning twenty games in a row, I found myself grinning and laughing spontaneously, without even realizing I was doing it, and I remembered what it was like to watch the Cubs win.  And a big part of it has to do with that unexplainable psychic connection we have to the game itself, that sense of the romantic when someone clobbers a game-winning homer, or makes a dramatic catch to save a no-hitter, or when a relief pitcher retires the side with bases loaded.  I’m not a true baseball fan, I’ll admit…but I know good drama when it happens.  Moneyball gets that aspect of the game just right.

(I haven’t even mentioned the sterling performances from the principal actors, particularly Jonah Hill, who nabbed an acting nomination for one of the most underplayed characters in history.)

In the end, Moneyball is exactly like the Oakland A’s in the film.  It’s an unlikely combination of talent that generated surprising results and was critically acclaimed, gathering six Oscar nods.  It failed to win a single Oscar…much like the A’s were eventually eliminated from the playoffs in 2002.

But in the end, it’s not the shutout at the Oscars that I remember.  It’s the fact that this is still one of the best sports movies I’ve ever seen, and definitely one of the top 2 or 3 baseball films I’ve ever seen.

INCENDIES (2010, Canada)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Denis Villeneuve
Cast: Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin, Lubna Azabal, Maxim Gaudette
My Rating: 10/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 93% Certified Fresh

PLOT: Twins living in French Canada journey to the Middle East to fulfill their mother’s last wishes by discovering their family history.


A few years before French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve made a big splash in American cinema with Sicario, Arrival, and Blade Runner 2049, he directed Incendies [French for “flames” or “fires”…I had to look it up].   This is one of the best films I’ve ever seen.  It’s a mystery, a melodrama, and an urgent plea for peace, all at once.  It’s heartbreaking, engaging, absorbing, and beautiful to look at.  There are two directors currently working who I believe have successfully picked up the mantle left behind by Stanley Kubrick.  Denis Villeneuve is one of them.

(The other is Alejandro G. Iñárritu [Babel, The Revenant], but let’s not get sidetracked…)

A mother dies.  At the reading of her will, her twin son and daughter receive a mission: go to the Middle East and track down their previously unknown father and brother, and give them letters in sealed envelopes.  Only then will the mother allow a headstone to be erected on her gravesite.

The brother, Simon, is skeptical, owing to the mother’s strange behavior in her later years, but the daughter, Jeanne, dutifully follows her mother’s wishes and travels to an unnamed country in the Middle East and begins the laborious process of tracking down anyone who knew her mother and father.

We also get flashbacks of the mother, Nawal, in her younger years, paralleling the daughter’s search.  We learn that Nawal, a Christian, fell in love with a Muslim, Wahab, which is a BIG no-no, to say the least.  Soon, Wahab is out of the picture, and Nawal gives birth to a son who is immediately taken from her arms and delivered to an orphanage.

So far, this is standard soap opera material, but it’s depicted with gorgeous cinematography and spot-on direction.  Director Villeneuve uses a lot of wide shots that have a stark beauty; they reminded me of some of the memorable vistas from Bonnie and Clyde and The Deer Hunter.

When Nawal gets a little older, she decides to track down her son.  This is made difficult owing to the state of war that now exists between Muslims and Christian Nationalists.  Attacks and reprisals make it nearly impossible to find accurate records.  She travels alone from one burned-out orphanage to another looking for clues.  At a key moment, she flags down a bus, but is very careful to first hide her crucifix necklace and put on a head-covering.  Can’t be too careful.

At this point, regrettably, I have to abandon summarizing the story, because the less you know about what happens after Nawal gets on that bus, the more effective those events will be.  Suffice to say it’s a life-changing event, one that sends her on a wildly careening path from activist to assassin to political prisoner.

All of this, naturally, comes as a shock to her children, Jeanne and Simon, who are starting to think this search for missing family members may be a mistake.  At one point, someone makes an important statement: “Sometimes, it’s better not to know some things.”

So…what is this movie really about?  It’s not just about the mystery of the missing family members, which is enough of an engine to make a compelling movie on its own, especially when it’s intertwined with the mother’s past.  But there is a deeper, much more profound level to Incendies that is not apparent until the movie’s final sections, when the threads of Nawal’s past converge in a moment of shattering revelations.  The movie beautifully hides its real motives along the way so you get blindsided by its true message, its true heart.

I dunno, maybe I’m getting too mushy.  But that’s the effect this movie had on me.  I’ve only experienced this kind of emotional catharsis after a precious few films.  It’s impossible to fully describe it without giving away the secrets lying at the heart of Incendies.

THE SQUID AND THE WHALE (2005)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Noah Baumbach
Cast: Jeff Daniels, Laura Linney, Jesse Eisenberg, Anna Paquin
My Rating: 9/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 92% Certified Fresh

PLOT: Two young brothers deal with the divorce of their parents in 1986 Brooklyn, specifically the Park Slope neighborhood.


I started writing this as a “conventional” review, and I found myself unable to make it more than a simple summary of the plot.  I have rarely seen a movie that has left me more inarticulate than this one.  I can tell you the movie works, and works extremely well, but I am unable to explain exactly why.

It’s a simple story of a husband and wife going through divorce, deciding on joint custody of their two sons, and the complications that ensue.  The husband, Bernard (Jeff Daniels), is a literature professor and a published novelist, but who hasn’t had anything published for some time.  The wife, Joan (Laura Linney), is in the final stages of getting her own first novel published.  This fact may or may not be one of the causes of the divorce, but Bernard is pretty sure it is.  Their sons, Walt (high school senior, played by Jesse Eisenberg) and Frank (maybe 12 years old), deal with this news in a predictable manner: initial numb acceptance, then some acting out a little later.

Bernard, whose well-educated narcissism is impossible to miss, almost cheerfully informs the sons that he and Joan will share joint custody evenly during the week.  One of the sons asks, “How can you share us evenly?”

“I’ll have you every other Thursday,” Bernard explains helpfully.  This answers the question without making anything better.

Walt starts a relationship with a classmate whom he coldly describes as “cute, but not gorgeous.”  Bernard casually invites a female student to live in a vacant room in his new house.  Joan and Bernard fiercely protect their “days” with their sons.  Frank starts drinking beer and masturbating in public places (this is handled with much more discretion than that description would have you believe).

But the story itself is not what makes this movie such a pleasure.  It’s the movie’s style and editing that create a unique experience.  The movie clocks in at an unthinkable 81 minutes, WITH credits.  I learn from the bonus features on the Blu-Ray that it was shot on Super-16 film stock with a mostly hand-held camera, lending the film a low-budget, documentary look that enhances its “reality”.  Scenes last only long enough for us to get the point before a jump cut takes us to the next plot point.  Normally, this creates in me a sense of nervousness or anxiety, but for some reason it didn’t work that way.  I never felt cheated or short-changed.  It all just felt “right.”  It gave me the same sensation I get when I’m reading a really good short story with sharply-drawn characters and impeccable dialogue.

That may sound like more details than I had promised at the beginning, but it’s really just a clinical description.  Words can’t express how the film’s brevity, atmosphere, dialogue, and characters all combined to produce one of the most touching films about family and/or divorce that I’ve ever seen.

(No, I HAVEN’T seen Marriage Story by this same director, Noah Baumbach, but I will get around to it one day.  Today is not that day, though.)

1917 (2019)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

Director: Sam Mendes
Cast: Dean-Charles Chapman, George MacKay, Colin Firth, Mark Strong, Benedict Cumberbatch
My Rating: 10/10
Rotten Tomatometer: 89% Certified Fresh

PLOT: Two British soldiers during the First World War are given an impossible mission: deliver a message deep into enemy territory that will stop 1,600 men, including one of the two soldiers’ brothers, from walking straight into a deadly trap.


Bear with me for a second…I promise I’ll actually get to the movie in a second.

I’m not a professional movie critic.  I write reviews simply because it amuses me to do so, and because one of my friends made it possible for him and I to post our reviews in an online forum.  For about two months, though, I haven’t written a single review.  I pondered this with Marc a little while ago, and the only reason I could come up with was that I didn’t feel INSPIRED to write something.

Not that I haven’t seen good movies in those two months. Waves, Uncut Gems, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Jumanji: The Next Level, Frozen 2, Little Women, Bombshell, maybe one or two others – they were all good, even great.  (In the case of Uncut Gems and Waves, I’d even call them “must-see” events.)  But I never felt compelled to run home and put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard.  I simply felt that I had nothing to contribute where those movies were concerned.

Well, tonight I saw 1917, and now I have to say, this is a different case altogether.

For anyone who’s not quite aware of why this movie is so special, aside from it just being really good, 1917 was hyped as being told in one single shot with a camera that follows two soldiers through battlefields and countrysides as they attempt to deliver an important message to a distant company of English soldiers.  No cuts to different angles, no cuts at all, in fact.  (Actually, there IS a single cut, but more on that later.)

While I originally felt it was a bit of a stunt to get it noticed at Oscar time (remember Birdman [2014]?), after seeing the movie it was abundantly clear that this was no mere trick to dazzle an audience with.  This specific story is particularly suited to this specific method of filming.  It forces the audience to empathize with these two soldiers immediately, and only them.  I was reminded for some reason of Saving Private Ryan, and a line spoken by Tom Sizemore: “This time the mission is a man.”  Well, this time, the men are the mission, and the mission is paramount.  The single-take strategy has the uncanny ability to put us in the shoes of these soldiers more so than many other war films.  You feel like you’re right there in the mud with the empty artillery shells and the corpses and the rats.

And that’s the supreme achievement of the movie: its ability to put us there and KEEP us there for two hours without ever calling attention to the fact that, “Hey, we haven’t cut yet and it’s been over a half hour!”  A lot of that has to do with camera placement and movement and, of course, the actors’ ability to keep us engaged.

But one thing that I kept noticing throughout the movie was the small details.  I’m not going to remember them all, but they included:

  • At one point, the British soldiers walk through an abandoned German bunker.  In a throwaway detail, the name “KLARA” is seen scrawled on one of the walls.  The camera doesn’t focus on it, but it just passes by.
  • We encounter a group of British soldiers, and of them is a Sikh.  The other soldiers are doing bad impressions of their superior officers, but the Indian’s impression is clearly better than the other Englishmen, with proper diction, upper-class accent, everything.
  • In the British trenches, various sections have unique names.  The one I remember most clearly is “Paradise Alley.”
  • As they walk, one of our two heroes notices cherry trees, and he quickly rattles off several different varieties of cherries.  He knows them because his family has an orchard back home.
  • An intense scene where someone has to literally wade through dozens of corpses.
  • In one remarkable scene, the movie pauses to listen to a song. Fighting is imminent, death may arrive at any moment, but for a brief moment, everything stops. It’s a brilliant moment…almost holy.

Little things like that.  The reason I bring them up is because some of them seemed unnecessary to the story, but they colored the story so that it felt more real than most.  And the closing credits reveal that this movie is based on stories told to director Sam Mendes by his grandfather, who served in World War One.  So many, if not all, of those little details were probably one hundred percent REAL details, the kind of details that could only be remembered by someone who was there.

Another reason the movie is so suspenseful is because we’ve become subtly programmed to believe that, in a war movie, the ending can’t be too Hollywood; otherwise, it’s not real enough.  The soldiers must deliver a message.  Will they even survive long enough to deliver the message?  Assuming they do, will the officers receiving the message even follow the order?  A civilian appears at one point…will they live?  They engage in combat…who will live and who will die?  I was on edge the whole movie because I never really felt “safe”, which was EXACTLY the kind of feeling you want when you’re watching a war movie.  In my opinion.

Now, about that whole single-shot thing.  There actually IS one cut, a SINGLE cut, during the whole movie.  You’ll know it when it happens.  But when you’ve seen as many movies as I have, you’ll also notice “invisible wipes”, where the camera passes by something in the foreground – a pillar, or a rock, or a tree – that comes in between the camera and the person/object being filmed.  Using clever editing and lighting, you can cut two shots together using that pillar/rock/tree as the splicing point.  And there is a LOT of that going on in this movie.

I’m not taking anything away from the achievement of the film, it’s spectacular.  It’s just something I noticed that I could not UN-notice for the duration of the film.  A minor quibble, nothing more.

1917 is definitely a top contender for Best Picture of 2019.  I have only seen a handful of World War I movies, but this is certainly one of the very best.  I’d rank it up there with Kubrick’s Paths of Glory any day.

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.