2017 - CHRISTMAS GETAWAY, is the prototypical Hallmark Christmas movie

Christmas Getaway is a good example of the Hallmark Channel's November and December Christmas movie onslaught.  The film is competently put together by the director Mel Damski who was a veteran of many TV movies and series.  The film features a cast of very good looking people who if they will probably never star in a big budget action movie franchise (like most of those are ever any good) are professional performers who know how to deliver their corny dialog without bumping into the furniture as they say.

This constantly recycled Hallmark plot goes something like this.  A big city writer journeys to a small mountain town to write an article on what else, Christmas in a small mountain town.  She meets a widower with a young daughter naturally.  It's all incredibly easy to guess what will happen next, the travel writer and the widower will make goo goo eyes at each other for the next hour and a half.  There will be romantic misunderstandings but eventually true love will find a way. This story all takes place during Christmas but the reality is that the Christmas setting is really not important to the story.  This romance could have been set during the 4th of July, Hanukkah, Ramadan or National Spaghetti Day for that matter.

 

The film has the usual supporting cast, the white writer has a black female friend she can rehash her romantic troubles with.  The widower has a mother who looks like she's only about 2 years older than him. There's and old guy hanging around for no particular reason.  Finally there is an overly cute little girl to bond with the travel writer who will become her surrogate mom.  The women all have the famous Hallmark hair style with half of it flipped over their shoulders. The men always have that rugged mountain man look with their sort of facial hair which is not quite a beard.  It usually makes me think that the female lead is kissing a face that must feel like a Brillo pad.

It's really hard to criticize a movie like this, it is what it is.  Christmas Getaway is a well done feel good holiday film, and it is well made.

This movie was written by Marlene McPherson, Elizabeh Snyder and Tracy Andreen.  That's a lot of writers for such a cookie cutter of a script.  The running time is 90 minutes.

2017 - AMERICAN MADE, a very entertaining Tom Cruise film

From Tom Cruise and the always erratic but interesting director Doug Lyman is one of those based on a true story films.  Cruise isn't playing his tiresome Ethan Hunter character this time. Instead he is a gun and drug smuggler named Barry Seal who appears to be working for the CIA.  He's running guns for the Contras in Nicaragua as part of a plot to destabilize the government under the Reagan Administration.  

 

At the same time Barry Seal was also smuggling drugs for the Medellín Cartel into the United States. This is almost a classic comedy farce as Seal has to juggle all these very dangerous South American bad guys while making boat loads of money.  But the reality is his activities affect a number of people's lives.  

 

Tom Cruise was always good at comedy and his character of a too smart for his own good criminal who finally runs out of cleverness is fun to watch.  The film has a good supporting cast with Domhnall Gleeson as his very sleazy CIA contact, Sarah Wright as his wife, smart enough to see what's going on but enjoying the money that Barry Seal is bringing in.  Also in an amusing role is Caleb Jones as the white trash brother in law whose stupidity starts to bring this whole house of cards down.

 

The director Doug Lyman was honest enough to admit that the film was only "based on" incidents in Barry Seals life  but you just have to spend a little time on the internet to see that a lot of the film wasn't that far from the actual truth.  A well made and very good film from Tom Cruise who can rise to occasion when he wants to instead of just playing it safe,

The film was written by Gary Spinelli, the running time is 115 minutes

2017 - BAAHUBALI 2: THE CONCLUSION, sequel/prequel to Baahuvali The Beginning obviously

The writer/director S.S Rajamouli wraps up his medieval Indian action epic with this odd prequel/sequel to the first film. This film is even longer than the first one if that was possible

There's still plenty to enjoy in this series but it does seem that a lot of time is spent on this "who is the rightful ruler of the kingdom" stuff at the expense of the action elements that made the first film so much fun. It appears that the filmmaker Rajamouli attempts to make up for some slow parts in his story by really pouring on the larger than life pageant scenes at the court which consists of lots of soldiers marching and standing around in impressive formations. 

 

This film is split into two parts, a prequel and a sequel as it were.  In the prequel we see the rightful ruler of the kingdom of Mahishmati, Amarendra Baahubali deal with court intrigue and betrayal as his cousin schemes to take the throne away from him and marry his wife.  This plot line goes on for most of the running time of the film and ends with Amarendra Baahubali's defeat.  From there the last 45 minutes of this film is a sort of sequel as Baahubali's son sets out to avenge his father and become the rightful heir to Mahishmati.

 

I suppose it was probably asking a lot for this film to be as exciting as the first one.  That's the way it usually goes with sequels it's hard to capture the excitement and thrill of the initial story.  Still this is an entertaining film

The running time is 171 minutes, the film was written by S. S. Rajamouli.

2017 - THE POST, another late period Steven Spielberg film

The days of Spielberg making Indiana Jones adventure films  have been over for a while.  Towards the later part of his career he has been concentrating on more intimate chamber pieces.  As intimate as Spielberg can get anyway.  The Post is Spielberg's tribute to the nation's free press.  The heroic publisher and journalists of the Washington Post defy the White House and publish The Pentagon Papers which were a major criticism of the Vietnam war.  The only problem with this film is that the New York Times had already printed this story a while ago after three months of investigation.  The Washington Post for the most part was basically rewriting the story for their readers as they tried to play catch up.  But you would never know it from the point of view of this film.

The Post is actually kind of a boring film. It's hard to make reporters sitting at their desks typing stories interesting.  At times Spielberg races the camera around the newsroom to get some action into the film.  This was the approach Lewis Milestone took in his version of The Front Page, another newspaper story.  The only problem is Milestone's film came out in 1931, so we were hardly treading new ground here. It doesn't help matters that the photography is so dingy and dark (courtesy of Spielberg's regular cinematographer Janusz Kamiński) at times you can hardly see what's going on.  I kept worrying the actors were going to bump into the furniture it was so gloomy.

 

The Post has a good cast since it's a Spielberg film after all.  Tom Hanks is tough guy editor Ben Bradlee.  Bradlee was a legendary figure in the newspaper world and while Hanks is okay, his mister tough guy editor can't really compete with Jason Robards Jr.'s portrayal in All The Presidents Men.  Meryl Streep is the publisher Katherine Graham, a society matron who had the job of publisher thrust on her after her husband died.  Streep's performance is not very interesting.  It's just Meryl wearing a lot of ugly early 70's clothes and hairstyles as she gives her usual phone it in performance. 

 

The Post was kind of recognized as a film taking a shot at Donald Trump at the time of its release.  If this is true, Spielberg and the gang really didn't get this across.  Maybe an approach like the one Costa-Gavras took for his political thriller Z would have worked better, now that was an exciting film.

The film was written by Josh Singer and Liz Hannah, the running time is 116 minutes.

2017 - LOGAN LUCKY, an amusing heist film

The director Steven Soderergh must have a thing about making heist films, because he has sure done enough of them.  Oceans 11, Oceans 12, and Oceans 13 are the three that come to mind and Logan Lucky would be on a list with those films.  However Soderbergh manages to tweak the heist genre with  some amusing ideas.

The film is set in West Virginia as I recall and the plot involves two southern brothers played by of all actors, Adam Driver and Channing Tatum. The brothers conceive of a plan to rob a NASCAR racetrack during an actual race.  They recruit a convict called Joe Bang played by of all people British actor Daniel Craig to help them execute their plan.  Joe Bang has a couple of goof ball red neck brothers who also get involved in the heist as well. Also a quick shout out to Riley Keough (Elvis Presley's granddaughter) playing a hair dresser who appears to specialize in big hair styling at her beauty salon. The overriding joke in this film is that these supposedly stupid red necks are actually a lot smarter than they seem. 

Soderbergh is good at setting up the mechanics of the NASCAR heist and he has his cast play the whole thing in an amusing deadpan southern style.  Soderbergh is also a good director and a great story teller.  He never lets the camera get caught up in stylistic tricks at the expense of the film's story.  The film is very entertaining.

 

The film was written by Rebecca Blunt, the running time is 119 minutes.

2017 - VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS, a large scale science fiction film

A very expensive science fiction film from the writer/director Luc Besson.  The film did not really find favor with the critcs and audiences stayed away basically bankrupting Besson's production company.

I don't really understand why the film flopped.  It seems better to me that the recent Star Wars films and the action scenes and special effects are very good.  I think the problem may have been in the casting with the two leads Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne who don't seem to have any type of chemistry between them, their love scenes are very stilted.

 

The film certainly has an eccentric cast, Rihanna, Ethan Hawke, the voice of John Goodman and Herbie Hancock.  

 

I enjoyed the film, I liked the world building, enjoyed the story line and was impressed with the visuals.

Running time, 137 minutes.

2017 - ATOMIC BLONDE - a violent spy/action caper

Sort of a violent remake of Funeral In Berlin except this time Harry Palmer is an ass kicking female spy/assassin called Lorraine Broughton.  There are lots of shootings and beatings for the action fan to enjoy.  The film also throws in some exploitative lesbian stuff for the titillation of the male audience.

 Charlize Theron joins the ranks of other women who are carving our pieces of the traditionally male dominated action genre.  She's in there kicking and shooting and punching with the best of them in the great tradition of Linda Hamilton and Angelina Joli.

 

 

The film has a rather subdued color scheme to it as if the production wanted to emphasize the chilly nature of the location and the violence.  The film was directed by a 2nd unit and stunt coordinator named David Leitch who certainly knows how to arrange a scene for maximum violent bone crunching content.

Is this film any good? Beats me, but it did keep me awake.  The plot is one of those complicated spy vs spy things but I basically lost track of who was doing what to whom after about 45 minutes.

 

The writer was Kurt Johnstad who did the screenplay for the equally violent 300.  The film is on the longish side, running about 115 minutes.

2017 - WONDER WOMAN, fell for the hype again.

Without a hair out of place Wonder Woman takes on the evil Germans during World War I in this way too long superhero film.

A lot has been made about the fact that the film stars a woman and was directed by a woman.   All this goes to prove is that women can make these boring cookie cutter superhero movies the same as any male director

I'm surprised this film got such good reviews because I've already seen this movie several times before right down to the overblown action scenes.

When you finally get down to it I suppose Wonder Woman is as good a piece of junk as anything else in the theater this summer.

141 minutes, written by Allen Heinberg.

2017 - JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 2, see John Wick

John Wick is back shooting a lot of people again in this sequel to John Wick.  It seems that John is indebted to some Italian bad guy who wants his sister killed so he can take over her crime business in Rome.  To persuade John to take the hit he blows up John's house.  So off John goes to Rome to shoot a lot of people before returning to New York to shoot more people.  It seems that the populations of Rome and New York are about 50% assassins as John blasts his way through about every other person he meets.  

Keenau Reeves must have spent a lot of time playing with guns as he practically caresses some of them.   There is no mention of a female love interest in this film as well as the first one.  The real sex scenes are the bullets that come blasting out of John's guns into every hit man and assassin he meets up with.  It's very Freudian.

This is basically an action movie with a somewhat sick sense of humor.  The whole idea that there is a secret society of assassins operating in broad daylight in major cities with a code of assassin ethics is actually pretty funny.  The long uncut scenes of John Wick running around the streets of Rome and New York City just constantly shooting people has a sort of twisted black humor all it's own.

I actually preferred this John Wick film over the first one.  I don't believe for a second the filmmakers took this secret society of assassins seriously for a moment and the constant violence became absurdly funny after a while.

122 minutes, written by Derek Kolstad.

2017 - BECOMING BOND, a film about a man who made a bad decision

The life story of one George Lazenby the one film James Bond who probably gets a footnote in film history as the man who turned down the James Bond film series after On Her Majesties Secret Service.  Probably one of the worst decisions made in the history of film production.

Lazenby narrates the film and comes off as an amusing fellow as he relates his life story to the camera which is inter cut with a series of recreations of his life.  Is it all true?  Who knows but it is pretty entertaining.   

Is this an important film?  Not really but it is kind of fun.  Did Lazenby make the worst career decision of his career?  Probably, but he comes off as a guy who learned to live with his life choice.

Worth a look.

92 minutes, written by  Josh Greenbaum.