Author Archives: Ron

About Ron

I like to watch movies and share my thoughts on them. I have been writing reviews and distributing them since 2013.

The Whale

The Whale          4 stars

Darren Aronofsky’s adaptation of the play, The Whale is a devastating character study of a broken man on a path of self-destruction, but with real redeeming qualities. We meet Charlie, (played by Brendan Fraser who we have not seen on the screen in several years) a severely obese man living in a dirty, cheap apartment who is an English professor still teaching classes online. His laptop camera is always turned off when talking with his students. We slowly learn of his circumstances through his interactions with the other characters that include Liz, his friend and a nurse (the great Hong Chau), his estranged daughter, Ellie (Sadie Sink of Stranger Things), a young door to door missionary (Ty Simpkins) and his ex-wife (Samantha Morton). Charlie is a man who has suffered great pain in his life and abandoned his family years earlier. His great weight gain is attributed to this pain, resulting in his massive size of over 600 pounds and restricting his movement inside the apartment where he can only get around with the help of a walker. The entire movie takes place in the apartment where Charlie spends the majority of his time on the couch with his laptop and watching TV. The sight of his massive body created by a fat suit and some effective special effects is something that the audience cannot forget. Fraser does the best acting of his career, as the critics have said, expressing a wide range of emotion, from despair to self-loathing to hope for those around him. His greatest moments come when he sees the best aspects of others including seventeen year old daughter, Ellie, when others can only see failure. Much of the movie will feel like a real downer, but Charlie’s eternal optimism brings some real uplifting moments by the time it ends. Look for Fraser to be nominated for the Best Actor Oscar and I would not be surprised if he ends up actually winning. As for director, Aronofsky, The Whale adds to a list of successes that includes Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler, Black Swan and mother! (the last one especially for horror fans). For those that have yet to see The Whale, the title does not refer to the main character. I highly recommend it.

Women Talking

Women Talking                 4 stars

The title of Sarah Polley’s new movie Women Talking is indeed very descriptive of the events that transpire on screen. There are both plenty of women and talking. We are introduced to the women of a religious community where something horrific has occurred that must be dealt with. At first it is hard to tell when and where the movie takes place as the furnishings and the wardrobe are fairly primitive. It could be in the early 1900’s but the events eventually reveal that the year is 2010. Periodically, a woman of the community wakes up with bruises or an infection or is pregnant resulting from being raped while being drugged. The elders of the community (all men naturally) attribute this to “an act of wild female imagination”, but the women are not fooled. The movie consists almost entirely of a debate among the women held in a barn to decide what action they should take. They can stay and fight for their rights against the men or they can collectively leave the community and start over somewhere else. The women are brilliantly portrayed by actors Claire Foy, Rooney Mara, Michelle McLeod, Sheila McCarthy, Judith Ivey and Jessie Buckley, among others. Each has their own way of expressing their feelings ranging from relative to calm to outrage. The violent acts are never portrayed on screen and we only capture brief glimpses of the men. There are peaceful scenes that take place in the fields with the children that remind us that there are more lives at stake here. The only man with a film role is August (Ben Whishaw), a teacher who was educated at a university and is present to take the minutes of the meeting because none of the women can read and write. Also, August is secretly in love with one of the women. The movie, written and directed by Polley is based on a book of the same name by Miriam Toews, itself based on actual events that occurred in Bolivia. The actor turned writer/director has been away from filmmaking for many years, but has created some memorable works including Stories We Tell, Take This Waltz and Away from Her. This present work is a subdued and effective way of dealing with a culture of violence against women that is all too prevalent worldwide.

Tár

Tár                          4 ½ stars

I returned to the theater to see Todd Field’s long awaited treatment of a successful female first class orchestra conductor who may be a monster in Tár. Cate Blanchett takes on this challenging role in what must be one of her best performances as the talented and arrogant Lydia Tar who conducts the Berlin orchestra and fills in her time with a book tour, writing original compositions and teaching at Julliard. The movie starts with her doing an interview with The New Yorker about her conducting. Most of the time I couldn’t understand what she was talking about, but Blanchett makes you believe that she is an expert, so convincing is her acting. After seeing examples of how she can control and damage the lives of those around her, including her assistant Francesca (Noemie Merlant), events catch up with her and her world begins to unravel. Much of the movie will make you feel uncomfortable which is what Fields is going for. Some of the scenes are meant to make you believe that Tar is mentally not well. Two of Field’s previous works are In The Bedroom and Little Children, both telling stories that are unsettling. The success of the movie rests on Blanchett who commands your attention every minute she is on screen. It is hard to imagine her not winning the Best Actress Oscar for this performance.

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery           4 stars

Rian Johnson brings us the return of Benoit Blanc, the world’s greatest detective in Glass Onion. The sequel to Johnson’s 2019 hit Knives Out finds Blanc (Daniel Craig) at the scene of a gathering of wealthy friends at a private Greek island owned by entrepreneur Miles Bron (Edward Norton) that includes a giant glass enclosure that Miles calls the Glass Onion. This time the friends are there for a game of whodunit prepared for them as an amusement for one weekend. There we find Bron with his old pals that include Claire (Kathryn Hahn), the governor of Connecticut, Lionel (Leslie Odom, Jr.), an engineer at Bron’s company, Alpha, Birdie (Kate Hudson), a model and “social influencer” who can’t avoid making accidental racial slurs, Duke (Dave Bautista) a YouTube channel host who promotes conspiracy theories among other popular subjects on social media and Andi (Janelle Monae), Bron’s old business partner who dropped out of the business after Miles screwed her over. All were brought here by solving an elaborate box filled with puzzles that revealed the invitation. That is; except for Blanc, who seems to have shown up for mysterious reasons. Bron refers to this group as The Disruptors, but I prefer Blanc’s name for them: the shitheads. Since this is a classic murder mystery we eventually get to a point where bodies start dropping and everybody present seems to have a motive for wanting someone dead. At this point I have to be very careful about not revealing too much of the plot. The situation is well written following the rules for a murder mystery. All of the characters are suspects and we gradually find out more about them and events that happened in the past like as Blanc says, the layers of the onion are peeled back until we reach the center. Each of the actors brings out notable aspects of their character like Norton’s Miles who only cares about himself and Monae’s Andi who has a mysterious air about her. I think I preferred the original Knives Out slightly more, but this one will certainly keep your interest and keep you guessing until the startling conclusion.

Missing

Missing                 2 stars

For my first 2023 release I saw Missing. Just five years ago the groundbreaking film “Searching” brought us a mystery told in the unique way of viewing images on computer screens and surveillance cameras as a father goes searching for his missing daughter. Now filmmakers Will Merrick and Nicholas Johnson have made Missing, using a similar approach to story telling about a mother (Nia Long) who goes missing while on a vacation to Columbia with her new boyfriend, leaving 18 year old daughter June (Storm Reid) to try to find what happened to her with only a little help from the FBI. June, however, is quite accomplished at using social media and various online apps, making use of them to find clues as to what happened to her mother. She has clever ways to break into the boyfriend’s online accounts and find previously hidden details about him. And she is aided by a Columbian freelance investigator by way of Taskrabbit who is very helpful, leading to even more discoveries. About every 20 minutes or so a new startling revelation is discovered that completely changes June’s perception of some person or other including her mother. The movie feels like the ultimate in Things Are Not as They Seem genre as we follow things further and further down the rabbit hole. Unfortunately, this movie goes beyond the breaking point, with events that are just too much to be believed. I wanted to like the movie but by the end I felt that it had gone too far with the various twists with too much for me to accept. I am betting others will be disappointed by the ending. For a better treatment of this type of online mystery, go back and see 2018’s “Searching”.

Aftersun

Aftersun              3 stars

I picked Aftersun to watch because I saw that one of the stars of the film, Paul Mescal, is up for the Best Actor Academy Award for his role. I would say he does give a good performance, but in a movie that is well understated, telling a story that leaves much to the imagination of the viewer. The entire movie follows Mescal as Calum at about 30, a young father taking his eleven year old daughter, Sophie to a resort hotel in Turkey for a few days. We watch as the two do typical father daughter things like hang out at the hotel swimming pool, play a game of pool, go to the beach and do some Karaoke. We pick up a few details like we know that Sophie lives with her mother in the UK and we surmise that Calum doesn’t have a lot of money. Some of their trip is caught on video camera which is important because years later the adult Sophie is looking back on the occasion, but says nothing about that trip. We have the feeling that things did not go well for Calum in his life. He obviously cares about his daughter, but he is too young and not prepared for fatherhood. In the movie no details about his life before or after the vacation are shared. We really only see this short time that Calum and Sophie share in the hour and a half runtime of the movie. We will have to be satisfied with the writer/director’s (Charlotte Wells) choices in leaving out the background of these characters in this, her first feature film. Some of this information I had to glean from movie reviews as I was left wondering after only watching the movie. Mescal gives a good performance but I can’t help but think what other male performers were passed over for this nomination.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga              5 stars

Mad Max. The name conjures up visions of gangs on roaring motorcycles and tricked out old cars racing through the desert wasteland after a nuclear holocaust has destroyed most of civilization. This is the world first created by George Miller back in 1979 with the release of Mad Max. Now we have Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, the fifth installment of the series and it is as full of action and mayhem as any of the others. Plus, we get a fuller view of the life of Furiosa, the woman who raged across the desert against a murderous gang in the movie Fury Road that starred Charlise Theron nine years ago. Furiosa gives us the young hero’s origin story told over five acts and two and a half hours of car and motorbike chases with death defying stunts and murderous mayhem with some of the weirdest looking odd balls we’ve encountered since Fury Road. And it is the first time that Mad Max, last played by Tom Hardy, does not appear in the movie. For the first hour we follow the journey of the young girl, Furiosa (Alyla Browne) who is abducted from The Green Place, a sort of paradise in the desert, by a group of biker degenerates and brought back to the base of their outlaw gang, but only after Furiosa’s mother tracks them and kills almost all of them. There, she meets the leader of the gang, a self-absorbed psychopath named Dementus (Chris Hemsworth playing the villain in a most unusual casting choice). Dementus kills the mother, giving the young Furiosa the rage that so defines her character in the times to come. In this society, located in the Wastelands of Australia, the various gangs are led by warlords who rule cruelly over their subjects. They live in places with names like The Citadel, Bullettown and Gasland. These characters have some very descriptive names like The People Eater, Rictus Erectus and Scrotus. Eventually, Furiosa is traded to one of these warlords where she is to live with the leader’s harem of women. There, she learns the ways of the gangs, disguised as a boy, taking on a new role as a valuable sidekick to Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke). The adult Furiosa is played by Anya Taylor-Joy, the striking model from Last Night in Soho and The Queen’s Gambit. Taylor-Joy has an intensity in the role that can be seen in her face as she methodically goes about making repairs on the war-rig, stares down her enemies or puts a bullet in them. One feels the pain she goes through and can then better understand the actions of her future self in Fury Road. George Miller said that it was after seeing Anya Taylor-Joy in Last Night in Soho, that he knew he had found the young Furiosa. Taylor-Joy can seemingly easily handle maneuvering a car in the desert though she says she has never had a driver’s license. The action set pieces as imagined by George Miller are astounding in their execution. In one sequence we see a chrome plated diesel truck defended by the white War Boys from an attacking horde of bikers, some of them on hang gliders. One by one each attacker is picked off by physical assault, gunshot or being crushed by the truck’s wheels. This scene lasts probably fifteen minutes and is accompanied by a heart pounding steady beat the entire time. Such scenes are designed to get the viewers’ adrenaline pumping and they succeed. This is just one of the many thrilling action scenes brought to the screen. I understand that the story was actually written by Miller before Fury Road was filmed and that it took ten years of preparation to assemble the collection of hot rods, bikes and trucks to make such a wonder of a film. If you are a fan of action movies, this is the one you should not miss this summer.

Emily the Criminal

Emily the Criminal            4 stars

I saw this surprise of a movie during my return flight from Sundance, but had not written about it before. When I saw the awards coming its way I thought I should correct that. While completely fictional it represents the situation that many young people find themselves in today’s economy where one cannot escape their past. Emily (Aubrey Plaza of Parks and Recreation) has a load of student loan debt and needs a good job. The trouble is she has a minor record that keeps coming up in job interviews, thus preventing her from reaching her goals. (Background checks can follow you everywhere.) She has to take menial service jobs in the gig economy that allow the employer to take advantage of the workers. So what is she supposed to do? The answer is in the title. She meets a Lebanese man (Theo Rossi) who runs a theft ring where the participants make purchases using stolen credit cards and fake id’s. Emily gives it a try, has some success at it and is undeterred even when getting beaten up a bit in the process. Things escalate when she finds that she is actually good at it and rises in the ranks of this criminal enterprise leading to some dangerous experiences. The movie has an interesting premise, perhaps taking it in an implausible direction, but it is entertaining and keeps your interest mainly due to Plaza’s excellent performance as Emily. Most of her roles have been in comedies, but here she shows that she is equally talented in dramas. The movie received nominations for both Best Lead Performance (Aubrey Plaza) and Best First Feature (Aubrey Plaza and John Patton Ford) at this year’s Film Independent Spirit Awards. I am glad I gave it a try.

Living

Living                     4 ½ stars

A long time ago a masterpiece of a film called Ikiru was created by Akira Kurosawa about a Japanese bureaucrat in the 1950’s who has found out that he is dying of cancer. I never saw that groundbreaking film but feel that much of its feeling has been recaptured in the British remake Living. Bill Nighy (of Love Actually) stars as Mr. Williams, the London bureaucrat in the Public Works department in Oliver Hermanus’s film. The opening sequence looks so much like an early 50’s film you at first wonder if it is a long lost treasure from that era. The first scenes move slowly and feature very stilted conversations among the bureaucrats that convey how repressed British society is at this time and Bill Nighy is the perfect actor to portray a man hiding his emotions. When the cancer diagnosis is made we can hardly tell what effect it has on him. We follow him as he explores various avenues of spending his final months like going out on the town to strip clubs and having lunch with a young woman he used to work with. Ultimately, he decides to make a difference by doing some good for the community, seeing a project to construct a playground to completion, all the while keeping his condition a secret. The slow pace of this film may turn some viewers off, but the challenge the filmmakers took on pays off mainly due to the talents of Nighy in what is probably one of the best roles of his thirty plus year career. I don’t know if he will receive an Oscar for the performance but he certainly deserves his Best Actor nomination.

Cocaine Bear

Cocaine Bear      3 ½ stars

The title of the hit horror “Cocaine Bear” tells just about everything you can imagine about this movie. “Inspired by true events”, in 1985 the body of a drug dealer with a failed parachute Is discovered in Tennessee, accompanied by a duffle bag of cocaine. Somewhere in a forest in Georgia the rest of the plane load of cocaine was dumped leading to a trio of the dead man’s drug dealer colleagues going in search of the missing drugs. Unfortunately, for them and the rest of the characters in this comical and bloody situation, a 500 pound bear has discovered the drugs first, getting stoned out of its mind after eating at least one brick of cocaine. What follows for the next hour and a half are some of the most hilarious encounters between said bear and the humans unlucky enough to cross paths with the ravenous animal. Besides the drug dealers (including the late Ray Liotta) there are the two teenage kids, Dee Dee and Henry, Dee Dee’s mom (Keri Russell), the local park ranger (Margo Martindale) who has gotten a raw deal on recent mishaps in the park, her activist friend, Peter (Jesse Tyler Ferguson), a trio of teenage boys who get their kicks out of attacking park visitors and a local cop (Isiah Whitlock, Jr.) who aims to get to the bottom of the bizarre happenings in his jurisdiction. All find their way to the woods where the insane bear is hunting its prey. Although it is a comedy, Cocaine Bear deserves its R rating since there is no shortage of blood and gore as one person after another meets their fate at the claws and teeth of the angry bear that includes some missing limbs and at least one disembowelment. There also may be some valuable lessons to be learned when confronted by a bear in the woods, though I wouldn’t be real sure about that. The movie is directed by longtime actor and occasional director Elizabeth Banks known mainly as Effie Trinket in The Hunger Games movie series and is much in the tradition of recent horror comedy movies Werewolves Within and Shadow in the Clouds.