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.

Jumbo

Jumbo     3 stars (or suns in Sundance World)

Jumbo,  from Belgium by director Zoe Wittock tells us the story of a young withdrawn woman who lives with her very outspoken mother.  Jeanne is very shy and has trouble relating to men.  Her mother seems determined to do something about that.  Jeanne works in an amusement park as part of the cleanup crew. We find she has a certain fascination with the rides as she builds models of them out of pieces of metal and wire.  However, there is one particular ride she is fascinated by where the riders rotate in multiple directions that goes by the name of Move It. Jeanne’s name for it is Jumbo. She is so enamored by the ride that she imagines it has a soul and that it is something she can have a sexual relationship with.  So you can see it is your classic romance of girl meets machine,  girl gets machine,  girl loses machine,  then finally girl gets machine back.  It is certainly an odd movie and one hard to relate to. The filmmaker said she has been working on the movie for eight years and got the idea when she saw a story about a woman who “married” the Eiffel Tower.  The movie was done well enough with some excellent acting which helps make up for the very unconventional story.

Cold War

Cold War                              4 stars

Cold War by director Pawel Pawlikowski is a passionate and tragic love story between two talented musicians who are caught up in the tensions between the East and West during the Cold War in Europe of the 1950’s and 1960’s.  Music teacher Wiktor meets young student Zula in a dance and music ensemble where the talented young people are taught folk songs and dance in post-war Poland.  The two are obsessed with each other while also training for performances that serve the communist state.  Eventually, Wiktor comes up with a plan to defect to the west, but Zula is reluctant to leave her home and travel to Paris where life would be foreign to her.  The movie then covers the period in the fifties when tensions were the highest, but still the pair are able to meet in various European cities as the ensemble goes on tour.  Even though the two have their own separate lives by now they still have a passion for each other accompanied with fierce disagreements and fighting.  This is all set against the background of musical performances that compare the communist influenced folk music of the East with the decadent jazz and pop music of the west.  And the entire movie is shot in black and white giving it a depressing feeling.  Pawlikowski says that his inspiration was the marriage of his parents which was characterized by separations and fighting and a tragic ending, thus he had a real story to tell.  Pawlikowski made the movie Ida, another tragedy set in Poland back in 2014. Cold War was nominated for the Best Foreign Film Academy Award last year.

Little Women

Little Women                    4 ½ stars

Greta Gerwig, the writer/director behind Lady Bird brings us her take on Louisa May Alcott’s classic Civil War era novel Little Women.  In her version, the tale of the four March sisters is blended with Alcott’s struggle to be a successful author placing older sister Jo, (played by Saoirse Ronan) as the creative writer of Little Women.  Another difference from earlier movies, of which there may be as many as seven, she puts the timelines in parallel showing us the older siblings trials alongside scenes of the girls living together in their family home with their mother (a good natured Laura Dern).  And it is done using the same actors in both settings where previous versions have used younger actors to portray the teenage sisters.  They may not all look like teenagers, but I thought the approach worked well especially with how active and energetic the actors are.  The movie shares the aspect of the earlier films that shows how dependent women were on finding a good husband in order to succeed in life.  Of special note is the role of Amy (Florence Pugh) as Gerwig makes it clear that she is the obstinate and ambitious one, as she is seen maturing the most of the sisters and the one who ends up with the boy next door, Laurie played by Timothee Chalamet.  The film is rather long but I find I didn’t really notice it all that much as the scenes seem to fly by at a fast pace keeping us engaged the whole time.  Gerwig is said to have read the book Little Women multiple times growing up and it is clear that she gave it her best effort as a writer/director.  Be sure you see it.  It is bound to earn a few Academy Award nominations.

1917

1917                       5 stars

1917 is a war movie that features no great battles of armies and no grand strategies of generals.  Yet it succeeds in conveying the horrors of war and the dangers of being a soldier in one of the greatest conflicts in human history.  Sam Mendes tells us the story of two British Lance Corporals who are sent on a mission to deliver a message to the commander of a British force that is about to launch an attack into what is described as a trap set by the German army.  This force is otherwise cutoff from communication in the days before wireless radios, so these two must venture through No Man’s Land in daylight to deliver the critical message.  Mendes, through the miracle of today’s special effects and tiny mobile cameras manages to film the scenes with an absolute minimum of cuts.  The result is a feeling that the audience is right there with the soldiers as one horror after another unfolds before them.  In addition the effect is aided by a superb score from Thomas Newman that captures the feeling of dread in No Man’s Land and the fast pace of the action sequences when the enemy is confronted.  The sets are just as I imagine what World War I looked like including the dead soldier’s bodies peering from the mud and the contrast of the construction of British trenches vs. German trenches.  Mendes used two unknown actors in the parts of the Corporals in order not to distract from the film’s focus.  The two young men are very effective in their roles so he made a good choice.  There are some well-known actors in supporting roles including Colin Firth and Benedict Cumberbatch as commanding officers who perform well.  I had been rooting for Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood“ to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, but now I will have to go with 1917.  I find it even more compelling than Dunkirk from a couple of years ago.

Yesterday

Yesterday            3 stars

Recently we have been getting a string of movies that honor musicians of the past.  See Bohemian Rhapsody, Rocketman and Blinded by the Light.  Last year’s Yesterday was Danny Boyle’s tribute to the music of The Beatles which imagines what it would be like if the legendary British rock group never existed.  In this movie an alternate timeline suddenly appears where nobody remembers The Beatles except for one struggling British musician, Jack.  After a mysterious bus accident when the lights go out all over the world, Jack discovers that he is the only one who can remember the band’s songs.  Thus, he has moved into an alternate timeline where not only the Beatles, but also Coke and cigarettes do not exist.  Jack is so obsessed with remembering and recreating the songs that after singing them he goes a step further and claims that he actually the songs himself, a move that brings him wide acclaim and fame.  He even gets the aid of singer/songwriter Ed Sheeran who appears as himself.  In the end though the thing that is most important to Jack is his manager, Ellie, who he has known since childhood.  Thus, the movie becomes more of a romantic comedy than an exploration of what made the Beatles so great.  There is really no exploration of the group or the times that their music was born in.  I understand that the original script was more about the occurrence of the alternate timeline and less of a romantic comedy.  I can’t help but wonder what an interesting movie that would have been.  Nevertheless, it was very entertaining to hear many of the Fab Four’s great hits again.

Just Mercy

Just Mercy                          4 stars

Just Mercy, written and directed by Destin Daniel Cretton is mainly a legal drama about a young lawyer, Bryan Stevenson (Michael B. Jordan) from the East coast who has taken a case to free a wrongly convicted black man of a brutal murder in rural Alabama in the early nineties.  Walter McMillian (a superb Jamie Foxx) is a private logger who was sentenced to death for the killing of a white teenage girl based solely on the unsubstantiated testimony of a convicted felon who was pressured into identifying McMillian as the killer by a corrupt local sheriff.  There was no physical evidence linking him to the crime.  The film is based on a true story about an attorney who is still active today fighting for unjustly convicted, mostly black prisoners.  It is the type of story we have seen frequently from Hollywood, but is aided by the quiet reflective scenes involving Foxx who just wants his previous life with his family back.  The villains of the story are the usual corrupt district attorney and sheriff who care more about their own records than about justice for the citizens.  The movie is a long one at 136 minutes, but the viewer stays involved due to the performances of the three main actors, Jordan, Foxx and Brie Larson as Bryan’s support advocate.  The movie clearly portrays the prejudices against black men that tear communities apart.  Despite the fact that it has been nearly thirty years since the events in the movie took place, many of these same problems are still with us today.  At the end of the movie, the postscript tells us that prisoners on death row are proved innocent at a rate of one out of nine, clearly an intolerable situation.  Please try to see Just Mercy when you get a chance.

Hustlers

Hustlers                               4 stars

Hustlers stars Constance Wu and Jennifer Lopez as strip club dancers who come up with a scheme to get even with their rich clients and former employers who have been taking advantage of them for years.  It stars Jennifer Lopez as an exotic dancer is probably the best role of her career.  What is there not to like about that?  How did Jennifer not get an Oscar nomination for this?

Ad Astra

Ad Astra                               4 stars

Ad Astra is last year’s emotional and grand science fiction movie that starred Brad Pitt as an astronaut sent on a mission to make contact with a rogue astronaut who is threatening the solar system.  It is a quiet contemplative film while also containing moments of intense action.  Past movies it has been compared to include Apocalypse Now and 2001: A Space Odyssey.  It opens with a thrilling scene where astronaut Roy McBride (Pitt) is helping in the construction of an enormous space antenna when disaster strikes sending him hurtling toward earth.  Later, he learns that a series of electrical disruptions may be due to a lost space mission sent to Neptune twenty years earlier that was commended by Roy’s father, Clifford (Tommy Lee Jones).  The Space Command has decided that Roy is the best suited to try to make contact with the rogue mission.  The movie has a realistic feel to it and the events in space seem to be plausible.  Private interests seem to have taken hold on the moon that even leads to space pirates with raiding parties!  The movie really succeeds with the quiet performance of Pitt aided by a fine Tommy Lee Jones.  There is also a small role for Donald Sutherland that is carried off well.  So, see Ad Astra for the role that Brad Pitt was not nominated for.

The Irishman

The Irishman                      5 stars

Much has been written about Martin Scorsese’s newest gangster movie, The Irishman, about the relationship between Teamster union president, Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino) and mobster hitman Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro).  It is quite a masterpiece and at nearly three and a half hours in length, a challenge to last through in a single sitting.  There are plenty of brutal murder scenes as one would expect in a mobster movie and strained relationships between family members especially the women involved.  The special language used by the gangsters is always present as the characters have a certain way with words that sanitizes their true intent.  We hear Frank talk about how he is sorry about his life when we all know he doesn’t really mean it.  The movie was especially expensive to make which is partially due to the special effects used to “deage” the main characters to allow us to see them over a span of fifty plus years.  Never before have we seen what aging mobsters are like. (Since they typically don’t live to see their later years.)  Here we see Frank in a nursing home after all his associates are long gone and his family will no longer see him.  I especially want to take note of the performance of Joe Pesci as Russell Bufalino, the Italian mob boss in an understated role different from how we are accustomed to seeing him.  He deserves his Academy Award nomination.  The film earned ten nominations altogether and deserves its standing as one of the best films of the year.

Sentimental Value

Sentimental Value           5 stars

From filmmaker Joachim Trier comes one of the best films I have seen about family dynamics and the lasting effects of trauma on generations. Renate Reinsve stars as stage actress Nora who still lives in the family house in Oslo that has been in the family for multiple generations. She has just had the memorial service for her mother, who raised Nora and her sister, Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) when their long absent father, Gustav (Stellan Skarsgard of Dune and Nymphomaniac: Vol. 1 & II), a famed filmmaker, who walked out on the family when the girls were young suddenly shows up. The two sisters still resent their father leaving, but Gustav acts like things are still normal between them. On top of that he offers Nora the starring role in his new movie that he has written especially for her. Nora says no way to the offer and soon after Gustav shows up with a famous American actress, Rachel (Elle Fanning of Somewhere and Maleficent) to whom he has offered the role. Things then become personal when the location of the film is to be the family home. In addition, Gustav convinces Rachel to dye her hair the same color as Nora’s plus he wants to cast Agnes’ young son, Erik, as the son of Rachel’s character. It gets even more shocking when it is revealed that the film will feature a suicide in a manner like an actual suicide that happened in the family many years before. In this way the film becomes art imitating life, something that is just too much for Nora to contemplate, given the events in her family. Both Lilleaas and Fanning are both stunning as actors in the movie, but the film really belongs to Reinsve and Skarsgard, who play well off each other and make you realize that neither is the villain here. They are just trying to work through the pain of their circumstances. This is the second time that Joachim Trier and Renate Reinsve have worked together with their previous film being The Worst Person in the World (which I previously reviewed). Don’t be turned off by the subject matter as things work out in the end, but I won’t say how. Sentimental Value, I believe will be seen as one of the best films of the year.