2 Guns 2013 109 minutes
I will see most any movie with either Mark Wahlberg or Denzel Washington
and this one has both. Wahlberg plays a
petty officer working undercover for Naval Intelligence, and Denzel Washington
is doing the same for DEA. Neither is
aware of the others status, and each thinks he has recruited a talented but
controllable criminal accomplice. They
mix it up with some thieving naval officers, a dishonest and corrupt DEA
officer, a murderous CIA agent and a Mexican drug lord who is all of those
things. The main character is $43
million, which CIA has stashed in safety deposit boxes in a small town
bank. As Washington observes in the
bonus features, there is no uplifting message here. But it’s fun.
.
The Bletchley Circle
2012 TV series of 3 episodes It’s nine years after WW II, and a housewife
who worked as a code breaker at Bletchley is following reports of a serial
killer in the newspapers. She thinks she
begins to see a pattern and asks three of her friends from the Bletchley days
to join her in trying to solve the puzzle, so that the killer can be
stopped. Each of them has a different
talent and together they are able to identify the killer. They succeed but the police won’t listen to
them, and they almost become victims themselves when the killer identifies
them. I don’t normally include TV here,
but this would have made a fine movie.
.
The Lark Farm
2007 120 minutes If you can stand having your heart ripped
out by a crime committed a century ago, see this Italian film on the Armenian
genocide perpetuated by the Turks. The
film follows one family’s fate from integration and success within their
community of Armenians and Turks to extinction, except for three children. I have seen at least one other film on the
ethnic cleansing in Turkey but nothing as powerful as this.
Lillyhammer 2012 TV 16 episodes This is a Netflix original series. It’s a little disjointed but so funny that
one can forgive anything. Stephen Van
Zandt, a former denizen of The Sopranos
plays Frank Tagliano, a Mafia gangster who entered the witness protection
program after testifying against members of the mob. He had seen the Winter Olympics on TV and
chose Lillehammer in Norway as a place the mob would never find him. Frank was known in the mob for his
organizational skills, and soon it looks like he will corrupt all Lillehammer
or maybe the whole country.
.
The Lost City
2005 143 minutes The first few minutes were kind of slow and
talky, but once the Cuban revolution got going this turned out to be pretty
exciting. I had just read T. J.
English’s Havana Nocturne so I was
prepared for what followed. When I saw
Dustin Hoffman in the opening credits, I knew he would play Meyer Lansky. He makes two brief appearances, but the film
is mostly Andy Garcia’s vehicle as actor and director. He plays Fico Fellove, owner and impresario
of El Tropico nightclub. He lives for
his family and his music and refuses to allow gambling at his club. As the revolution ramps up, he loses his two
brothers, a best friend and the woman he loves.
He has to leave Cuba to continue his life in music and as a free man. Fico is a fictional, but his story parallels
some real life characters. There is lots
of Cuban music throughout the film, sometimes you want to hear it and sometimes
it gets in the way as Garcia cuts back and forth between the revolution and the
stage of El Tropico. The film got some poor reviews but not from me. It’s a bit long and uneven, but it retells an
important bit of history.
.
The Wolverine
2013 126 minutes I didn’t realize that this Marvel Comics
hero is immortal. Superman has his kryptonite
problem, and it turns out the Wolverine is vulnerable to an implant around his
heart until he cuts himself open and pulls it out. Then he’s fine, and can dispose of a
dangerous mutant lady and the terrible robot she has built to prolong the life
of a Japanese industrialist. The
industrialist’s grand daughter who inherits his empire is very nice to be
around, but don’t cross her. She’s
trained in martial arts.
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