Reviews

This needed to be a much better movie because it was so historically biased it became just another civil rights movie and not an American movie of successes and an otherwise amazing story of a man who found something he was good at and rose to the top of his profession, serving many U.S. Presidents along the way. This was not that story. The beginning of the movie might have been true but it was also unbelievable and oafish in the way it was told and left me skeptical. Who was the plantation owner and why was he like that? Did nobody call the cops when he shot Cecil's father? It was just unbelievable. The movie did some justice to Ike who ordered force to enforce desegregation in the South, made Kennedy appear a saint which he was not, LBJ about right, Nixon not at all-first as a Vice President asking the coloreds for votes and then on the last day of his Presidency, skipped Ford and Carter, and Reagan as a racist and ignorant dope who thought it would be a good idea to have the butler as his guest. What an honor, right? So I did not understand was bothering Cecil here. He quits shortly after over what? Equal pay? By the time he quit, pay was equal. Everybody was on the GS system which pays in steps, grades, and experience. Apartheid was the only thing Reagan was judged by in this movie so was this apartheid that caused him to leave the White House and join his son? You just don't know.

The movie is extremely poor on its history and rates each president featured based on what he did for civil rights with Reagan doing the least even though he hired General Colin Powell as the nation's first black National Security Adviser and made plenty of other decisions that benefited minorities. But causes like class warfare and apartheid so warped and corrupted Cecil Gaines's life that he cannot make an honest evaluation of the men he served with beyond race, assuming the movie portrays his life accurately. And that is sad. It wasted so much opportunity to tell a better story about America.

I watched this three times because I fell asleep during the first two. Overall, I would rate this maybe no more than three out of five stars. The film starts out with the line, "I am not a Christian. I am not an atheist. I am not a Muslim. My religion is the Constitution of The United States.' No wonder George Clooney lost Ohio with a line like that. Perhaps George could have said something more spicy like, "My religion is the Ten Commandments" or the Hammurabic Code, maybe even the Magna Carta. What a silly opening line. But instead he identifies the Constitution as his religion. Weird and a total turnoff. Who replaces God when he worships the Constitution? The Founding Fathers??? As Paul Giamatti says shortly after, "When was the last time the Democrats ran an atheist?"

So, the campaign has severe problems and it seems like my most difficult time staying awake was through the first ten minutes of the film. The political dialogue was all clichés and silly promises like when George Clooney threatens to make us all change from combustion engines to electric cars within the first ten days of his presidency. Yeah, so how did that Guantanamo closing thingy go again? Good luck with that, George. Ridiculous dialogue like that subtracted a star from my rating, bored me and made me wonder why I rented this movie again.

The best part of the movie was looking at Evan Rachel Wood. That is two stars right there. This could not have been a good movie for Gosling who tried to play sexy but looks like a 15-year old Jay Leno. Poor casting. Had Clooney made this all about screwing interns like Evan Rachel Wood and not tried to communicate an agenda through the dialogue, he would have a better movie. In the end, this is about people screwing over other people within the DNC to rise to power. And that is about it. Do you like these characters? No. Except for Evan Rachel Wood. And the hottie who takes her place at the end of the movie.

I had no reason whatsoever to see this in the theater. It just looked like another Mad Max, dirty, dusty, and depressing. Like a poorly done horror/slasher movie. This proved to be something else: A stranger on a journey with incredible survival skills with a book capable of immense change and has been the subject of intense counterculture and has changed the world and lives for thousands of years. Of course, it could only be The Bible. And a battle ensues to capture the book and the power of the convicting words in that manuscript which also guide Eli's life.

There are things you should have seen from the opening minutes of the film that you are going to miss until the end. This warrants a second watching. For instance, the movie all but tells you that Eli is blind from the opening scenes but you may not realize that until the end. And the Bible he is carrying is in Braille.

A very clever movie.

Very good comedy, but not factual whatsoever. It was very interesting in the beginning of the movie, but also a little too obvious. They tried to make Ron Klain, whose story this is, as a unbiased author by having the Gore administration demote him in the administration. But the story was very heavily biased and that was why it got the Emmy.

I loved David Boies as the klutz and class clown. I thought they really went overboard in making Katherine Harris the ditzy villain. James Baker came across as ruthless, but I still thought was well played by the British actor Tom Wilkinson.

But the movie flat out lied in the beginning by switching the positions. In the movie, Gore wanted all of Florida recounted. In real life, Gore only wanted the most liberal counties recounted, while it was the Bush campaign, led by Baker, that demanded a recount of the entire state. The movie also lied when it implied that Pat Buchanan was amazed by the number of votes he got and thought Gore clearly won Florida. That was not what happened. Buchanan, in an interview during the recount, said he was not at all surprised he got so many votes in Palm Beach because he lives there, has breakfast at the pancake house down the beach and talks politics regularly with the patrons there. The movie was not at all truthful. But at least it was a little funny.

I saw the 1979 film starring Peter Falk and Alan Arkin. Ingenious script-writing. "There is no reason to shoot at me; I'm a dentist!!!" Or the scene where Vince and the cabdriver are at the bar discussing The Price Is Right, which Vince has never seen. When Vince tells him, "I'm out of the country a lot" because he has never seen The Price Is Right, David Paymer (the cabdriver) says, "What do you do?" "I work for the CIA," Vince (Peter Falk) responds. "Are you interested in joining? The benefits are fantastic. The key is: Don't get killed. That really is the key to the benefits program." Or, Vince's line during a car chase: "I am such a good driver it is incomprehensible to me why they took my driver's license away." Normally the CIA looks glamorous, flashy, secretive like in James Bond and other Cold War spy movies. This looks like the goof-ball neighbor next door and the last thing you would ever expect the CIA to look and feel like. It was hilarious and still is.

This remake was nothing like the original. The jokes are jokes you hear all over the elementary school playground, Sheldon is now a sensitive foot doctor and the villain is gay. Everything is predictable and it takes very little thought as to predict what the next gag is going to be. Very predictable and not really all that funny. At the end of the movie, you think, "Whew, this thing is finally over!"

Saw her first documentary "Journeys With George." A high-quality documentary that really favored George Bush after all. She covered more people this time in "Diary of a Political Tourist" and finally centered on John Kerry. Some of the candidates were open to Pelosi and played to her camera, but came across as a little hokey like Gephardt and Graham(?). Others came across as stiff, like Wes Clark bagging groceries and saying, "We're here to serve, ma'am." The rest looked like caged animals and were totally uncomfortable in front of her camera such as John Edwards, Howard Dean, and John Kerry. Kerry actually kicked her off his plane, but pretended not to know about it until his aide nearly took her by the arm and escorted her off. And then subsequent coverage showed Kerry standing Pelosi up for scheduled interviews and dodging her altogether. What did he have to hide? The film's greatest contrast is when she showed up at a White House event. Her mother was almost hiding behind Bush and the entire senior leadership made her feel like she was one of them. The Dems were not nearly as interesting or fascinating as subjects for media attention as George Bush in her first documentary.