Reviews

When this ended, my mouth sagged open and then the words "I get it" came out, helplessly. Over and over, I said "I get it".

In dozens of ways I've been thwarted by an endless succession of new and uinpredictable problems in helping my sick brother. Like an automaton, I've been fixing one problem after another, focusing on minutiae, dreading the next piece of bad news. "Exit Strategy" taught me to smell the roses along the way. I'm very grateful to the writers and actors of this excellent allegory for all we try to do to prevent death when, as someone once put it, life is what happens when you're making other plans.

A beautiful exploration of the hallways and mirrors of reflection on those lost, and that we too pass. We have photos to jog our memories, but the people in Haunting have only a cavernous mansion and anything that reflects, hidden in their faces, grief over those they've lost, with blurred features overtaking any precise recollection.

Having finished the series, I realize I've been seeing, transposed on open landscapes, blank walls, any backdrop really, the faces dimly remembered of those who have come and gone. The sound of dishes clattering in the kitchen just now snaps me out of it. I wonder who it might be. My wife? It takes enormous willpower to live in the here and now.

After all this movie's adventure and excitement fade from memory, the parallel exploration of the concept of lost vs gone somehow lingers. There was a moment early on when the elder brother dismissed -- quickly -- the younger's query about their deceased parents while explaining Magellan's map and the possibility of finding lost treasure. You mean lost, like our parents?, the younger asked. No, the elder said, they're gone, then quickly returned to the subject of adventure.

That moment was pivotal for me, and profound. As for all the machinations of the rest of the movie, the good vs bad vs gullible, eh.

What this series lacks in subtlety the pretensions of real-life academia make up for in droves. I've read the reviews that fault the writing's heavy-handedness, but the erosion of core curricula and the demise of student humility have been going on a long, long time, along with tuition inflation that outstripped the cost of living starting decades ago.

If caricatures need to be propped up to illuminate the farce of contemporary academia, I'm game. Won't change a thing, but it's cathartic the way that old white man Aristotle once defined redeeming drama.

Watching this again after ten years, what most moved me then does so again: the intense changes of expression that were Robin Williams'. Between then and now, it is unbelievable what happened and I try to read it in his face on the screen but I cannot. He veiled his pain and, like so many, used art to expiate it in front of others.

"Keep going till you smell money or step in chocolate!" has got to be the greatest pickup line in history.

Whatever his name was, 45, Drumpf, whatever, who will probably be suing the makers of this film for having the idea of crazy folk saying they won before he did. See this movie if you want to be named in his lawsuit as a coconspirator.

This was filmed just before the pandemic and presents one possible scenario, years in the future, of a government gone totalitarian -- just like crazy present-day anti-maskers and anti-vaxers are saying it will if we don't disobey. And yet The Barrier argues for deeply humane values, putting a spin on the idea that infecting others doesn't matter. Highly worth watching.

If you ever grew up in a twisted family and tried to straighten yourself out, you'll appreciate the cathartic humor in this movie. So many of the lines and responses to them are classic that Bartlett must be rolling over in his grave.

Summary: Edgy and refreshingly unpolitically correct.

At over $6,000 a month per person, care for the elderly is a cash cow for thousands of employees, managers, lawyers and other compassion-industry grifters. I wouldn't be surprised if Kare, Inc. funded this movie to exorcize their guilt. What a lucky surprise for them that viewers came away thinking it's a comical exaggeration.

So many time-machine movies operate on the assumption you just twist a dial but Blue Jay takes you back and forward and back again like a needle dropped on an old lp record, oh that song, then lifted and dropped somewhere else, oh that song, oh and that one too, oh, then let to play on, mercilessly even, till the tears flow and the song reaches such a pitch of emotion that all it can do is play to the end, where nostalgia and reality meet for coffee.

The acting is beyond acting here, the writing from the heart.

What does it take to beat life back with Morgan Freeman's cool demeanor in this movie? How many times a day I'm charmed, intrigued and horrified by the people around me yet can't muster the bemused expression of the portraitist he portrays, a man who's spent his life looking beyond facades before lifting his brush. But "worrying keeps me calm," Diane Keaton says in one scene, so I guess whatever works: I'll get through this day too, admitting at the end of it like these two people that, all along, I've really been enjoying the ride.

You know how you know how a dream, when it's a nightmare, is going to turn out when it becomes a literary adventure that turns out worse than you imagined ?

Don't bother with this then; it'll bore you

I grew up something like the boy in this movie. But I remember someone back in school whose home life was much worse. He was our best wrestler, weighing in at 123 lbs, and something happened between his folks just before a pivotal match. Watching him wrestle used to fire the rest of the team up but without him, we felt lost. I was to come on the mat at 136 lbs without having Steve pin his opponent before me. We were gonna have to tough it out without him, but the day of the match, he showed up at the last minute, didn't say a word and won his match by a close decision. His folks broke up shortly after, I heard. Yesterday, through that time machine the internet I found a photo of Steve from a couple years ago. Obese, bearded and smiling, he stood in a group photo with a girls' soccer team he was coaching. Go Steve. It was a close decision but you won and there you are.

As someone who sojourned through Goa before the hellfires of EDM packed its beaches, I saw many lost souls in embryo there and had no idea Ibiza was another place they'd sold themselves to the god of mind-numbing noise. The characters in White Lines carry their personalities to fantastical extremes, living for today, rebelling against rules, exploiting conception-free sex and merging like amoeba with their kind. Any shred of conscience or morality in White Lines is ritually crucified to the megawatt amplifier. Like worker-drones in Fritz Lang's Metropolis, all hope has been abandoned by those who enter, but they think they're having fun so it must be all okay.

Mindless hordes forming the world's largest democracy will love this series. Zealots will find it goes a little too easy on their worldviews. Lathi-wielders, line up for your automatic weapons today! Jai Aryavarta!

When a movie touches the heart, savvy critics go wild on it, picking on it like bullies. There's bullying in this movie too, a hurtfulness I know so well from my own family. That in the short space of an hour or two, the good fight you feel when victims stand up for themselves collapses in a heap, and you realize something much larger's going on here.

I used to thread 35mm film into an old Leica but never with the battle skills of an old pro like Ben or with such stories as, we are led to believe, his photos told, but I know Kodachrome had a way of brightening and softening them at the same time. This movie moved me like an old slide I'd forgotten about, left jammed in a carousel and finally freed, so many emotions with it too.

At first I didn't recognize Phylicia Rashad, then I remembered she played Bill Cosby's wife for eight years on The Cosby Show. Refusing to comment on his fall from grace, I can't help but think she accepted this role in memory of his victims.

A thoughtful and profound work filmed beautifully, with stirring lyrics to acoustic songs that reflect what Joey is going through, and perhaps thousands of artists, musicians, writers also caught in the mill of having to make a living while remaining themselves.

The innocence and energy of youth has its cynical equivalent in the reviews here. Asking for existential complexity in a simple road trip that skirts cities and appreciates nature is pretty dumb, in my opinion. Gorgeous music that strips away man-made depression and points to landscapes and vistas is exalting, in my opinion. What happened to us -- that we take pot-shots at these two people who have so much to say in what they do -- is what I want to know.

This film is pure magic without any use of cgi effects or cartoon simulation. It comes from that source of magic which is our need to believe in something. Maybe all religions came about when we had to face the deaths of our loved ones. Maybe the consolation we need, and which they strive to provide, is what makes for that harmonious whole of congregation, text and spiritual leader. In the Jewish faith there is the recitation of the Kaddish which sternly redirects our grief to praise of that which created this universe. This film does not come short of that, but takes a meandering (yet tightly-plotted) course of discovery unique to a man who has been broken like Job, whose faith in every last thing has been denuded as false. Leonard Cohen recently said not one of us is not being tested, not one of us is immune to suffering and loss. He was rephrasing what it says time and again in the Bible and elsewhere, wherever we look for comfort.

It is amazing Hollywood assembled such a stellar cast not as a box-office draw but to exploit each actor to the best of his abilities. Helen Mirren shines, Kate Winslet, Ed Norton, Michael Pena draw every laugh and tear out of you, while Will Smith's performance is exalting.

There is much to quietly reflect on in this movie, hours, days, weeks, months, years later....

It occurs to me that, if you have not been deeply affected by the death of someone, this movie will be utterly lost on you. I read the negative reviews and they savage the heart of this film like wild beasts, each trying to out-do the other with witty, cutting remarks. They read as a team effort to beat up a weakling, not knowing they will one day find out they were related to him.

All due respect to veteran stars as these, but this has been done before, rescuing aging Hollywood powerhouses from relative obscurity to negotiate with old age in On Golden Pond (1981), an equally tiresome film with Henry Fonda and Katherine Hepburn playing the octogenarians and Jane Fonda as the estranged daughter. Our Souls at Night revisits the plot, changes it slightly, and hopes our memories are going.

Somebody please shoot me if I end up as boring as these two old fools in the current effort. Their stilted conversations are only outdone by the contrived and inauthentic "plot". And if I'm ever surrounded by townspeople like in this movie who demand to know, at age eighty, how my sex life is, please shoot them too.

The dog that the grandson adopted was cute though.

Why all the sour, dyspeptic reviews here? They read as if all written by one and the same troll who may have auditioned for the cast and been panned. Can IMDb investigate this please? In the meantime, enjoy this awe-inspiring Sondheim contribution to our civilization, conveniently packaged as a "mere" movie, and think about what motivated so modern a retelling of familiar tales in between finding yourself absent-mindedly humming the heart-rending melodies so deftly latticed throughout them. Who knew Streep had such command of melody? Who knew Sondheim and Lapine had such a special passion for woods and for what they both conceal and reveal? Who has given thought to human death presented in such a gentle and wise manner? And who has laughed this hard at a song like the blame song near the end, each character finding fault in the other, the mistakes they each made and we missed or forgave rankling them into bursts of wit and melody? Such love, care and skill went into Into the Woods...