Chasing Mavericks 2012
116 minutes In this biopic, 15
year old Jay Moriarity persuades his neighbor, surfing guru Frosty Hesson, to
train him to take on the big waves called Mavericks. The big wave comes during an El Nino, and Jay
rides it with cameras trained on him and makes his reputation as a surfer. Afterwards he had a short and spectacular
surfing career until he drowned at age 22 in the Maldives. I did not expect to like this film but was
pleasantly surprised. It’s a good story,
well acted and the surfing sequences are spectacular.
Joe Kidd 1972
87 minutes You can’t go wrong
with an Elmore Leonard screenplay.
Robert Duvall plays the most unscrupulous land owner yet. His solution for dealing with Mexican-Americans who have competing claims to land is to
murder them, when he can’t get the courts to annul their land titles. Put your money on Joe Kidd/Clint
Eastwood. It’s nice to watch a Western
now and then.
Killing Them Softly 2012
100 minutes This is not the worst movie I’ve ever seen,
but it’s close. I put it in my queue
because Brad Pitt and James Gandolfini were in it. I won’t make that mistake again. Gandolfini replays Tony Soprano, only tired
and out of breath. He was called in from New York to New Orleans
to fill in for the local hired killer, Brad Pitt, for one or more of four
planned murders. Pitt didn’t want to do one of them it because he
was known to the target and that would make it personal instead of ”business”
or some such lunacy. Eventually Pitt has
to do all of the murders because Gandolfini spends so much time drinking and
whoring that Pitt gives up on him and arranges to have him arrested for parole
violation. Pitt is convincing as a
cynical, totally amoral hit man, but who cares.
Nothing happens except a couple of morons rob a poker game, and then
Pitt murders the moron who isn’t in police custody, the guy who sent the morons
to rob the game and the guy who ran the game.
Who needs it?
Lincoln 2012
150 minutes Spielberg had an
original script of about 500 pages based on Team
of Rivals from which he took about 70 pages to relate the maneuvering it
took to get the 13th Amendment passed in the House of
Representatives. The amendment had
already passed the Senate by there was strong Democratic opposition in the
House. Lincoln needed to find 20 votes
and to hold on to all that he already had in order to get the required
supermajority. Seward brought down a
couple of professional politicos from New York to lobby likely targets,
particularly lame duck Democrats. They
didn’t buy votes with money, although that possibility was discussed, but
instead offered government jobs as postmaster or revenue collector. It’s a good story and a film well worth
seeing, but I found I didn’t like Daniel Day-Lewis’s Lincoln as much as I has
expected. Sally Field was totally
repulsive as Mrs. Lincoln, a wonderful job of acting. David Strathairn was exactly my idea of
Seward.
Undefeated 2011
113 minutes This is an amazing
true story of a Memphis businessman, a
white guy, who volunteers to coach a perennially losing high school football
team in a black Memphis ghetto. He turns it around, and although they don’t go
all the way to a championship, the players learn to respect each other and the
coach and to be a real team. You have to
admire the coach for what he had to put up with and for the patient way he led
the young men who played for him.
Considering the circumstances of their lives, you also have to admire
the players.
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