Review: ‘Selma’

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It would be easy to just say that “Selma” is simply a Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. biopic or is about the Voters’ Rights demonstrations and marches that started in Selma, Alabama, but actually this movie is taking on a number of topics, including the point and purpose of non-violent protests, a behind the scenes look at the machinations of such a demonstration, a peek behind the curtain of the civil rights movement of which Dr. King was a part, and a look at the politics of the era.

“Selma” starts with a bang and doesn’t let up. With blacks in the South being harassed and murdered at a disturbing pace and with basic rights like the right to vote being systematically denied to a vast majority of black Americans, civil rights activist and leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (David Oyelowo) is called to Selma, Alabama, where a massive nonviolent protest is being planned, with the specific goal of obtaining equal voting rights for all citizens regardless of skin tone. Dr. King used his influence to get this issue in front of President Lyndon Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) but when the President didn’t seem ready to pounce on this initiative due to his attentions being pulled elsewhere, the protesters felts even more compelled to march and make their voices heard one way or another.Continue Reading …

Netflix pick for 1/12/15 – ‘ESPN Films 30 for 30: July 17, 1994’

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From the director behind the great Robert Evans’ documentary “The Kid Stays in the Picture” comes one of these awesome little sports documentaries that ESPN has commissioned in recent years, and this one in particular stands out among the rest because of its interesting and unique style, and this little 30 minute documentary is called “July 17, 1994.”

What makes this short film different from the rest is the approach to telling the events of that fateful day, which is to say that the whole thing is just news clips and previously unreleased media footage of all of these different events that happened all in the same day. Not only did golfing legend Arnold Palmer play his last round of pro golf that day, not only was it the start of the 1994 World Cup in Chicago, not only did that day feature an NBA Finals game between the New York Knicks and the Houston Rockets as well as a ticker tape parade in NYC celebrating the New York Rangers’ Stanley Cup win, but more weirdly and memorably and infamously, that was the day O.J. Simpson sat in the back of a white Ford Bronco and engaged in an hours long low-speed police pursuit through the highways of Los Angeles, fresh off the accusations of his alleged murdering of his wife and her friend.Continue Reading …

Book-to-film adaptations 9 – ‘First Blood’

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David Morrell’s 1972 novel “First Blood” is a fierce book, featuring two products of American wars, both of them so different from each other, but also so similar. A Korean War vet is determined to keep his town safe and clean and a Vietnam War vet is simply tired of being pushed around in a country that doesn’t appreciate him. So when these two people meet, and their desires are in direct opposition of each other, that little spark turns into an explosion that ends up being the end of both of them, as well as a lot of other people along the way.

Ted Kotcheff’s 1982 movie “First Blood” has the same rock and a hard place mentality when it comes to the interactions between the two main characters, but really does change quite a bit from the source material, while still being very similar from start to finish. Confused? Well then let me explain.

Morrell’s “First Blood” is a fast read, with very little fat in the narrative and written in a way that keeps the story propelling forward. The perspective bounces back and forth between our two guys. First is John Rambo, a 20-something year old Vietnam veteran and escaped prisoner of war, and he’s making his way across the country on foot, as was still very popular at the time. He had already been escorted out of 15 small shitty towns in this country because of his looks, with his long hair and beard, and rolling in to town 16, he’d be damned if another small town cop gave him any shit.Continue Reading …

#105 – How to Protest Properly

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In episode 105, Chris Crespo and Drewster Cogburn review Selma, and Chris also reviews Inherent Vice and Taken 3.

Also discussed in this episode:

Game of Thrones on IMAX.

Michael Keaton in King Kong prequel.

Fifty Shades of Grey gets rated.

Fargo season 2 gets cast.

The Purge 3 gets a release dat.

Can Batman be happy?

Plus so much more! Enjoy!

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Review: ‘Taken 3’

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Well here we go again. Sort of. “Taken 3” is here, long after the jokes about “Taken 2” and its inevitable sequels have disappeared into the wind. How many different ways can our hero and his family members get taken? How will it happen a third time? Who got took this time? And is there even a reason to care about it this time around?

Actually, that’s the funny thing. “Taken 3” doesn’t actually feature anyone really being taken. Sure, at some point, a character gets snatched into a van, but that’s not the focus of this movie. Unlike its predecessors, our hero has a totally different problem to deal with this time around. Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) still loves his ex-wife Lenore (Famke Jannsen) and someone has her killed and placed in his bed, making it look like he murdered her, which then sets him on the run. “Taken 3” is essentially “The Fugitive,” as Mills is out trying to find out who killed his wife and why, all the while evading capture from the police.

Leading the police is Inspector Dotzler (Forest Whitaker), and he’s supposed to be some sort of savant detective. He notices things the “normal” police officers don’t, and he’s constantly playing with a little knight chess piece, as if it had some sort of unspoken symbolism about something. Or maybe he’s just OCD, because if he’s not playing with the chess pieces, he’s constantly wrapping and unwrapping a rubber band around his hand, all the while supposedly being a genius detective. But the fact is, he figures out a couple of things early on without trying too hard, and then spends the rest of the movie not being so brilliant. And then at the end of the movie he reveals that he figured out a key piece of information at the very beginning, but we’ve seen movies before and we already know what he’s talking about so it’s not much of a big reveal.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Inherent Vice’

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“Inherent Vice” is a rambling, shambling, somewhat confusing, extremely colorful, fun yet melancholy film noir about a burn out private detective, his love for his ex-old lady, and how that love gets him embroiled in all sorts of trouble with all sorts of weird characters in a somewhat fictionalized 1970 California. Based on the Thomas Pynchon novel of the same name, this is Paul Thomas Anderson doing his version of Robert Altman doing his version of a PI story, and if that sounds delightful to you, then you need to see this movie right away.

Larry “Doc” Sportello (a delightfully unpredictable Joaquin Phoenix) is just laying around his home one night smoking that weed when his ex-girlfriend Shasta Fay (Katherine Waterston) shows up out of nowhere and enlists him to help her out of some jam revolving around a secret plot to kidnap a wealthy real estate developer named Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts). He agrees because he still loves her, that much is as obvious as the sun in the sky, and he’s off snooping around and asking questions and just getting himself deeper and deeper into some mystery involving Neo Nazis, the LAPD, heroin smugglers, a mysterious schooner with its own back story, a massage parlor, a presumed dead saxophone player turned government snitch, a drug abusing dentist, a privatized mental hospital and a lieutenant with aspirations that include becoming a big time movie star.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Imitation Game’

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“The Imitation Game” is a movie about secrets, whether it be having them or trying to crack them, and the toll some secrets can have on people and their relationships with others. It is also about Alan Turing (here he is pretty much credited with inventing computers as we know them), his work done in code cracking during World War II, and his subsequent government mandated persecution for his sexual orientation.

Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) was a mathematician who got himself hired by the British government to work on their code breaking team, trying to crack the ultimate puzzle, the Nazi Enigma machine, which randomized the codes daily and proved impossible for mere mortals to penetrate. So Turing, played here as if he is nearly crippled with Asperger’s, thought the best way to fight fire was with fire, hence setting out to create a thinking machine that could solve the Germans’ machine. It’s like a mega prequel for “The Terminator.” Had to start somewhere.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Foxcatcher’

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“Foxcatcher” is a true life drama made by a director who seems to be making nothing but great movies based on real lives. First he nailed a great Truman Capote biopic, then he made a non-fiction book about sports statistics into the most commercially successfully baseball movie ever, and now here is Bennett Miller with the real story of John du Pont and his, shall we say, interesting foray into mentoring the U.S. men’s amateur wrestling team, which ended in what can only be described as tragedy.

John du Pont (Steve Carell, in a career changing, perception shifting performance) has the benefit of having the last name du Pont, you know, like the Du Pont family, the one that started that huge Du Pont company that makes everything? Yeah, he’s one of those old money, entitled assholes. But at first, despite being a somewhat creepy dude, he doesn’t seem so bad. He’s a philanthropist (though probably for tax reasons), a published ornithologist, and for whatever reason a philatelist, and above all else he’s a wrestling enthusiast. And that’s Olympic style, amateur wrestling, mind you. Not that Koko B. Ware versus Ricky The Dragon Steamboat fake rasslin’ shit. We’re talking about the real deal! And all he wanted to do in the mid to late 1980’s was help fund the U.S. men’s wrestling team and give them the resources needed to win gold medals. Can’t really argue against that, especially when no one else was stepping up to provide ANY support at all to the athletes hoping to represent their country in this most ancient of sports.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Wild’

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“Wild” is an adaptation of a memoir by a woman who took a 1,000+ mile hike up the U.S. Pacific Coast without any experience or know-how, as a direct response to her life falling apart all around her, a desperate bid to find her center and to reconnect with the person she felt she once was and would like to be again. It’s a story of mistakes, bad luck, worse decisions, redemption, forgiveness…you know, all the stuff that makes us human.

Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon) starts her journey in Southern California and the first leg of her journey is a 100-mile trek through the Mojave Desert. And it doesn’t get much easier from there on out. She hits the trail and struggles mightily but keeps on pushing on and trying to make it, with a sense of stubborn determination that can only be admired. And as she walks by herself, her mind wanders and certain things trigger memories which then inform us as to who she is and why she is on this trip, why she felt so compelled to do something so drastic in order to shake up her life and the way she was living. Having suffered heavy personal losses, she was going down a very dark path, and she had to get out somehow, and throughout the movie we get to see her simultaneously get into trouble via flashbacks while she also hikes in the present one day at a time to personal redemption.

Being in pretty much every single scene (actually I can’t think of a single scene in which she does not appear), this is obviously the Reese Witherspoon Show, and she pretty much nails it. She had to run through a good array of emotional states throughout this movie and always pulled it off. I totally bought the hardship of the journey as well as her personal desire for a better path and a way to forgive herself, and this may actually be one of her better roles and performances. It also helps that the movie is directed well, with smart use of the varied geography Cheryl came across on her trip, as well as appropriating the free association memoir approach of the source material to tell the story, which keeps things energetic and interesting throughout.Continue Reading …