Archive for category: Reviews

Not my cup of tea. There was a transition from home-video clips of a summer camp for handicapped teens to the fight for civil rights of the disabled leading to the ADA, but I was asleep and missed it.

It’s hard to “rate” a beautifully made film on the end of the world as we know it, just as it is hard to watch it. I don’t need to be reminded what humans have done to climate, habitat and the cause of biodiversity in the last 70 years, but Attenborough’s personal testimony, measured and even understated, bears witnessing. By drawing on the films he has made in Africa, in the Arctic, in the oceans, he reminds us of the treasures we took for granted and are rapidly losing. To end on a message of hope he lists in simple terms the steps we can take to reverse disaster, but their apparent, to me, impossibility is further cause for depression. All we need do is 1. stop population growth; 2. stop all deforestation; 3. change our diet to plant-based proteins; 4. create fishing-free zones in the oceans; 5. reduce agricultural lands while increasing output (a la the Dutch); 6. change energy production from fossil fuels to renewable sources; 7. and other items I’ve forgotten. And who will do this, I ask one night. Then the next I watch Quo Vadis, Aida?

This is either (1) a biting critique of sex-hungry men (i.e., all men) who take advantage of defenseless women and the women who enable them; and/or (2) a horror film about a psychopath who seeks revenge on all around her through a series of impossible actions. The climax is so implausible that you realize you’d better not think too much about what has come before.  On the plus side, the film is a showcase for Carey Mulligan and her ten-megawatt smile, which makes her unlikely character relatable in a way that Rosamund Pike’s in I Care A Lot never approaches.

This New York Times “Critics Pick” allegedly ” seesaws between comedy and horror,” but being neither funny nor scary, what is left? A cartoonish battle between an icy abuser of senior citizens and a Russian mafioso who exploits mules to traffic drugs. Do we care who wins or survives? Not really. There could be a bigger point of how the elderly are exploited by a corrupt, greed-driven system of nursing homes, conservatorships and oblivious courts, but that’s not the point here. In fact, the system survives, and all that stops the villainy is our lax gun control laws. We tried this movie to take a break from our TV series, but all it did was make us realize how much more we appreciated the real people of Spiral and Call My Agent.

This was a well-made dramatic reenactment of a little known chapter in the book of the FBI’s corrupt oppression of black leaders in the ’60s, a period we’ve visited in other recent films: Chicago 7, MLK/FBI, One Night in Miami. It didn’t, at least for me, go much below the surface. There was no ambiguity in the Panthers: we saw them only giving free breakfast to children. The FBI’s position, via a wasted Martin Sheen as J. Edgar Hoover, was little more than Blacks are bad and dangerous. We weren’t shown what made Fred Hampton a force at age 20. The story of Bill O’Neal, the Judas of the title, had the most potential, but we never really got inside him (and I often had trouble finding him in the crowd). The most interesting character was FBI agent Roy Mitchell, who recalled Jesse Plemons’s role in The Irishman. There were hints of moral doubt there that could have been explored. Maybe knowing how the story would end eliminated suspense, but somehow the emotional engagement wasn’t there. The contrast for me was with The Mangrove, where I was made to feel for the individuals. Here I felt I was watching a history lesson.