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MOVIE REVIEW: An Inconvenient Sequel

If I thought it would do any good, I would recommend a certain party watch at least the Paris section.

The irony of our family seeing An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power is that we drove about 40 miles to see it on Labor Day weekend. The movie came and went in the local theaters too quickly, so we trekked to Williamstown, Massachusetts, where my wife and I had been just the week before, and we noticed it would start playing there.

Image Cinema is a nonprofit entity in the town where Williams College is located. My daughter, on a school field trip, had visited there in the last year.

Matt Souza of Salon wrote: “Would I still recommend ‘An Inconvenient Sequel’? Sure, although I doubt there is much one could glean from this movie that couldn’t be obtained by rewatching ‘An Inconvenient Truth.'” I think that was my problem is that it was Al Gore forming groups of people to take on the fight, or occasionally reminiscing, and that it wasn’t quite enough…

Until the footage of the 2015 devastation from Typhoon Koppu, known in the Philippines as Typhoon Lando, that struck Luzon in October 2015. Somehow, the sheer enormity of the storm made me sit up. And soon thereafter, the movie showed recent (2015) storms in east Texas and Louisiana. Obviously they were not the storms from 2017, and THAT was the point.

Maybe it’s because I’m a poli sci geek, but my favorite part of the film, near the end, involves getting India to agree to more solar power in some sausage-making horse trading for the Paris climate accord. And then, just before the end credits, the news that the US was pulling OUT of said accord, which I knew, of course, but it still ticked me off. (If I thought it would do any good, I would recommend a certain party watch at least the Paris section.)

It’s sometimes difficult to connect the dots, and we treat each rain event, massive fire, and drought as unconnected from each other. In the Weekly Sift piece Houston, New Orleans, and the Long Descent, the author noted that while “President Obama had at least managed to include climate change in the federal government’s own building plans,” his successor has – foolishly, to my mind – reversed that policy.

I found An Inconvenient Truth compelling movie making, and the sequel not so much, although I happen to like it when Al Gore gets angry occasionally. Still, the Daughter had not seen the original movie, so An Inconvenient Sequel was an instructive enough use of our time.

MOVIE REVIEW: The Glass Castle

Woody Harrelson is Rex, who is forever promising to design and build the titular structure.

Three or four years ago, someone recommended to my wife that she read The Glass Castle, a memoir by Jeanette Walls about her unconventional growing up with her two sister and a brother. So she was anxious to see the movie in which “a young girl comes of age in a dysfunctional family of nonconformist nomads with a mother who’s an eccentric artist and an alcoholic father who would stir the children’s imagination with hope as a distraction to their poverty.”

The good news is that, in all the story jumping back and forth in time, I always knew when we were in the narrative, even with three sets of children. Movie magic at its best. For instance, Jeanette was played by Chandler Head as the youngest iteration, the one who suffers a defining accident in the movie. My wife says that in the book, the child was even younger, three or four.

Then the growing up Jeanette, who ends up in the deep end of the pool, was played by Ella Anderson, who, heaven help me, I recognize from the Daughter watching the annoying show Henry Danger. Both the younger iterations were quite good.

Jeanette as an adult was played by Brie Larson, who was so good in the movie Room that she won an Oscar. Here she plays one note for a long time, a fairly blank facial expression. I suppose she’s supposed to be showing how closed off she’s become by her upbringing. But it isn’t until an arm wrestling match between her fiance David (Max Greenfield) and her father (Woody Harrelson) that she shows much emotion at all.

Harrelson as Rex, who is forever promising to design and build the titular structure, is very good as an maddeningly intelligent dreamer, whose views on the economic system are not entirely wrong. (You see the REAL Rex at the end of the film.) Naomi Watts as the mom, Rose Mary, has less to do, but is fine.

I guess the problem is the disjointed storytelling made me feel that 127 minutes. Perhaps if with a different linear flow, and some judicious editing, it worked better for me and the critics.

But The Wife and The Daughter evidently enjoyed The Glass Castle more than I.

I is for I Was a Communist for the F.B.I.

It was a film so important to the Hollywood film collective that “it was nominated for the 1952 Academy Awards in the Best Documentary Feature category

The movie I Was A Communist for the F.B.I., it seems, was on television a LOT when I was a kid. And I’d usually watched it.

We only had two TV stations. One was the CBS affiliate, Channel 12, WNBF-TV at the time, which also carried some ABC shows. The other was the NBC affiliate, Channel 40, WINR-TV. And one or both of them would play this 1951 melodrama regularly, to fill their weekend afternoon programming.

From the Wikipedia:

“The story follows [Pittsburgh steelworker Matt] Cvetic, who infiltrated a local Communist Party cell for nine years and reported back to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on their activities.

“The film and [1952-1953] radio show are, in part, artifacts of the McCarthy era, as well as a time capsule of American society during the Second Red Scare. The purpose of both is partly to warn people about the threat of Communist subversion of American society. The tone of the show is ultra-patriotic…”

From Rotten Tomatoes:

“The real Matt Cvetic was a borderline alcoholic with a nasty disposition (he once allegedly beat his sister-in-law so badly she required hospitalization). But Cvetic was also a fervent anti-communist, and so, for a brief period in the early 1950s, he was a folk hero. I Was a Communist for the F.B.I. is the semi-true story of how Cvetic (played by Frank Lovejoy) renounced his friends and family and embraced the Red cause–on behalf of the F.B.I., for whom he was a volunteer undercover agent.”

It was a film so important to the Hollywood film collective that “it was nominated for the 1952 Academy Awards in the Best Documentary Feature category, though it’s about as much a documentary as On the Waterfront.” It rightly lost to Kon-Tiki.

Oddly, I think the movie had the opposite effect on me than it was supposed to. I haven’t watched it again. But YOU can here.

For ABC Wednesday.

Rotten Tomatoes’ BEST SCI-FI MOVIES, part 2

“thinly-veiled examination of McCarthy-era hysteria”

Continuing my Lazy Summer Blogging series: here’s the second half of Rotten Tomatoes’ Best Sci-Fi Movies of All Time

A * indicates one of the paltry number of films I’ve actually seen.
The links at the titles are of my reviews from this blog.

50. ALPHAVILLE (1965) – I’ve heard of it, but have never seen it

*49. A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971) – saw it at the cinema. Brutal; I’ve never heard Gene Kelly crooning Singing in the Rain quite the same way Oddly, it was the sex scene to the sped-up Lone Ranger theme that got this movie an X rating, not the violence.

48. STAR TREK: FIRST CONTACT (1996) – another Trek movie I want to see
47. INCEPTION (2010) – I REALLY wanted to watch this at the time – it was the most intriguing film that year – and it just never happened
46. STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS (2013) – probably will see eventually

*45. THE FLY (1986) – one Cronenberg film I did see, based on my affection for the actors Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis. I found it quite sad, actually.

44. MINORITY REPORT (2002) – yet another “planned to see it”
43. THE WORLD’S END (2013) – another one from the Shaun of the dead folks I didn’t gravitate to

*42. MEN IN BLACK (1997) – I tend to eschew summer blockbusters, but somehow caught this one, which was a lot of fun, actually

41. GHOST IN THE SHELL (1996) – don’t know this animated piece
40. ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY (2016) – yeah, I should see this
39. TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY (1991) – ANOTHER Arnold movie unseen
38. THE HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE (2013) – nope
37. SOURCE CODE (2011) – missed this entirely

*36. DISTRICT 9 (2009) – “technically brilliant and emotionally wrenching.” I’ll buy that.

*35. INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1978) – may I say that I think this better than the original?

34. BLADE RUNNER (1982) – I think the original bad press steered me away from this; hope to see someday
33. CHILDREN OF MEN (2006) – this was Oscar-nominated, and still the violent content steered me away

*32. CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977) – I loved the movie when it first cqame out. Saw the extended version and didn’t think the extras were necessary

31. DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (2014) – I balked at seeing its predecessor, so I was unlikely to see this
30. BRAZIL (1985) – I was torn between fascinated and nervous about seeing it

*29. JURASSIC PARK (1993) – it was good for what it wanted to do. I had no need to see the sequels, though

28. SOLARIS (1976) – only a vague recollection of the ads
27. MAD MAX 2: THE ROAD WARRIOR (1982) – this too I saw bits and pieces on TV
26. EX MACHINA (2015) – usually seeing a movie is a negotiation; I was inclined, but my spouse was not, if I recall correctly
25. GOJIRA (1956) – sounds intriguing

*24. THE IRON GIANT (1999) – I LOVE THIS MOVIE

23. LOOPER (2012) – another “should I see this?” film

*22. BACK TO THE FUTURE (1985) – “inventive, funny, and breathlessly constructed” –

*21. 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) – I’m not sure I “got” all of it, but an important, inventive and influential

20. LIVE DIE REPEAT: EDGE OF TOMORROW (2014) – saw the trailer, and I considered it

*19. THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (1951) – pretty sure I saw this at college; enjoyable cautionary tale

18. FORBIDDEN PLANET (1956) – I should see this

*17. STAR WARS: EPISODE V – THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (1980) – the middle of a trilogy is tough -this is “Dark, sinister, but ultimately… satisfying”

16. SNOWPIERCER (2014) – don’t know this

*15. THE MARTIAN (2015) -“Smart, thrilling, and surprisingly funny”

14. ALIENS (1986) – the first film was quite enough for me, than you

*13. INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1956) -“thinly-veiled examination of McCarthy-era hysteria”

*12. HER (2013) – not only did I like it, I vaguely related to it…

*11 STAR WARS: EPISODE IV – A NEW HOPE (1977) – for the record, I’ll always hate the retronym renaming of this film- still it brought me to this new place (fictional geographically and emotionally)

10. THE TERMINATOR (1984) – saw bits of this on TV

*9. WALL-E (2008) – it took me a LONG time to warm up to this film, but I saw it on DVD rather than the theater

*8. ARRIVAL (2016) – it’s very heady, yet emotional. I talked to total strangers afterwards groping with its meaning.

*7. STAR TREK (2009) – nice reboot, but this is higher than Wrath of Khan? Oh, please.

*6. STAR WARS: EPISODE VII – THE FORCE AWAKENS (2015) – I liked this well enough, but it’s not better than the original trilogy, certainly not the first two, for reasons well explained by Jaquandor.

*5. ALIEN (1979) – not only did I see this film, I used to have some memorabilia from it. Still, I didn’t need to see any more of this world

*4. GRAVITY (2013) -“eerie, tense.. visually stunning”

*3. E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL (1982) – somehow, the family dysfunction was more interesting to me than the alien

2. METROPOLIS (1927) – I’ve seen parts of this, and it was incredibly modern
1. MAD MAX: FURY ROAD (2015) – my buddy Chuck Miller was SO enthusiastic about this movie that I ALMOST went over to a second-run theater in a nearby city to see it. But I didn’t.

So there it is. I’ve seen a pathetic 33 out of 100, though 24 of the top 50.

Also, The 10 Most Overrated Science Fiction Films. I tend to agree about 10, 7 and 3, but not 6, 4 or 1.

MOVIE REVIEW: The Wedding Plan

The wedding Plan is an interesting meditation on faith

The Wedding Plan is, as the LA Times put it, “not your mother’s rom-com, even if it may start out that way.

“Michal (Noa Koler) is a 32-year-old Orthodox Jewish woman in Jerusalem whose fiancé, Gidi (Erez Drigues), announces that he doesn’t love her. Crushed, yet bound and determined to get married anyway, the lonely Michal decides to keep her planned wedding date (22 days away, on the eighth night of Hanukkah); pay up with Shimi (Amos Tamam), the bemused and dashing owner of the banquet hall she’s already reserved; send out invitations, and put her faith in God that a suitable groom will appear in time.”

I note that on Rotten Tomatoes, the critics are 84% positive, but only 65% the general public enjoyed it. I suspect that the audience expected that it would be funny in a more familiar and obvious manner, the way a movie such as The Wedding Planner (2001), the film with Jennifer Lopez and Matthew McConaughey, presumably was supposed to be. (I’ve seen only bits and pieces of that one.)

I will admit that The Wedding Plan really started getting interesting as we get closer to the established betrothal date, especially after she meets cute/odd with Yos (Oz Zehavi), the international pop star who couldn’t possibly be interested in her, could he?

Michal has an interesting group of cohorts, including her mother (Irit Sheleg), who is not so secretly mortified by this public embarrassment, her not-happily married sister, and her friend/partner in a mobile petting zoo business.

As you can see from the trailer, the film is in Hebrew with English subtitles. Of course, I saw it at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany, during its last week of its run. I was uncharacteristically alone, since my wife was resting after her foot surgery.

If nothing else, it’s an interesting meditation on faith. If you don’t expect to be falling out of your seats with laughter, you may enjoy it.