Movie Review: Snowden (2016)

Posted on September 21, 2016 by Brian Wright

“Truth is only treason in the empire of lies.” (10/10)
Directed by Oliver Stone

Watching Snowden will be a life-changing experience for just about anyone who cares about civil liberty… around the world as well as on (and inside) our own US doorsteps. [The next day I placed these pimple band-aids over the camera lenses on my two computers… even though I have never configured or used my cameras. I’m also thinking about storing my smart phone in the microwave oven when not in use, and regularly sweeping my cat’s whiskers for listening devices.] The constant underlying theme that I take away from Snowden: the snooping capabilities being applied to anyone and everyone can literally pick pepper out of gnat feces… from a distance of, like, say, Jupiter.

Stone is brilliant in laying out how unbridled high-tech spying along with the military’s super weapons, that we KNOW about—chiefly Hellfire-missile-equipped drones—, is used to basically to murder men, women, and children in any of the 156 countries (staging from the 700+ American military bases) where we have a military presence around the world. Check this photo collage below, I superimposed the prestrike still and the poststrike still from this YouTube video on an American flag.[1]

About the Movie

I do want to get into the details of the horrific attacks that unlimited surveillance sets up in conjunction with terminally corrupt government. But let me begin my review in a more standard way, namely by listing what’s so special to me about this once-in-a-lifetime film: Continue reading →

Movie Review: Hairspray (2007)

Posted on September 14, 2016 by Brian Wright

Remake of a lightweight (or is it heavyweight?) charmer 7/10

Probably very few Academy Awards will be in the offing for this remake of a rather obscure movie on which was based a more widely appreciated musical stage play. Though John Travolta playing a cross-gender Edna Turnblad may be worth a special category.

Some movie critics may comment on the formulaic nature of this 60s throwback. What was the movie that John Travolta starred in with that Australian hotty, Olivia Newton-John? Grease, I guess. I don’t remember what era that one went back to, probably the 1950s, because I don’t think there was any sex or black people.

On the other hand, Hairspray makes quite a deal out of the racial integration issue and learning to accept people as they are, especially people who are considered “rrroomy.” Edna Turnblad, being played by John Travolta with fluffy accouterments, is gargantuan while Edna’s daughter Tracy (Nikki Blonsky) may be considered dangerously short for her weight. Continue reading →

Movie Review: Stranger than Fiction (2006)

Posted on September 7, 2016 by Brian Wright

Creative blend of cinema and literature (8/10)

Walking through the video store, my lady friend and I like to look for slightly offbeat movies that receive critical as well as popular raves. Stranger than Fiction gets the double whammy: Ebert and Roeper give it two thumbs way up toward the ceiling, then later we find out Rotten Tomatoes has given it like a 75% positive for both critics and ordinary civilians.

I learned my lesson about going only with the critics a few years ago. We were at the video store during the holidays with her sister and brother-in-law; I picked up Wit, also a movie with a big role for Emma Thomson. Ol’ Roger had praised it to the rafters for being, well, witty; so I more or less sold everyone on taking it home. It was the most dreary and depressing movie any of us had ever seen, and my movie- selection privileges were henceforth revoked.

Stranger than Fiction rewards you from the very beginning; you hear the voice of a woman narrator recounting every repetitious step in the life of IRS agent Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) while you watch his tedious life unfold on the screen. He rises exactly at xx:yy a.m., brushes his teeth precisely zw times, walks across the street at the cross walk careful to step on the white markings, catches the bus at such and such a time, etc., etc. Continue reading →

Movie Review: The Replacements (2000)

Posted on August 31, 2016 by Brian Wright

Football movie in the “guilty secret” category (7/10)

The football season approaches and I searched around for football movies that “make a difference.” The most notable high-impact, philosophy-of-life football movie made recently is probably Oliver Stone’s gritty, dizzying Any Given Sunday (1999), starring Al Pacino, Jamie Foxx, Cameron Diaz, and Dennis Quaid. Well worth seeing, especially for the unsubtle symbolism that the brutality of professional football is emblematic of the dog-eat-dog politics that give rise to it.

Going back further in time, no doubt the classic football movie of all time is the 1979 North Dallas Forty, probably Nick Nolte’s finest hour. What’s particularly great about North Dallas is they give you the magnitude of the pain these players live with, both physical and mental, again in a similarly politically harsh world.

Other football movies on the lighter side, such as Michael Ritchie’s Semi-Tough (1977) and a couple of other Burt Reynold’s vehicles, Longest Yard I (1974) and Longest Yard II (2005), are supremely entertaining. And who can forget Knute Rockne: All American (1940) where our greatest actor-president (or is it the other way around?) Ronald Reagan plays the immortal George “the Gipper” Gipp. And I just thought of Jerry MaGuire the quintessential jock/chick flick. Continue reading →

Movie Review: The Lives of Others (2006)

Posted on August 24, 2016 by Brian Wright

Chilling reminder of the essence of Eastern Bloc tyranny 10/10

“A great socialist once said, writers
are engineers of the soul.”

The Lives of Others (Leben der Anderen, Das) won last year’s (2006) Oscar for best foreign-language film. Deservedly so, and I regret I have only just this week have managed to view the DVD.

It is set in Berlin, East Germany (GDR) roughly five years before the collapse of The Wall, a period when few ordinary residents of that glorious communist paradise imagined they would ever be free of its soul-deadening, omnipresent yoke.

An aspiring Stasi (East German secret police) true believer in the supremely ordered perfection of this grandiose yet drab insane asylum, Herr Hauptmann Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) wants to do the right thing. Wiesler is a poor imitation of Andre Taganov in Ayn Rand’s We the Living: he believes in his heart socialism can work. By rooting out defectors, enablers of defectors, and sundry critics of the ideal society, he’s doing “the Lord’s business”—the lord of regimented collectivism. Continue reading →

Movie Review: The Island (2005)

Posted on August 17, 2016 by Brian Wright

Another ‘Minority Report’ future: pessimistic but unfortunately plausible (7/10)

The first summer I was in the Free State in a little bucolic hill town of New Boston, and without my NetFlix, it was easiest to travel half a mile down the old highway to New Boston Pizza and Video… Nice folks with a small store that still carried a pretty wide assortment of VHS video tapes. The cover of this movie caught my eye; the studio was trying to sell it as a high-octane action movie.

Which the second half of the movie is.

But fundamentally The Island is a science fiction movie that deals with some fairly controversial ideas in an intelligent fashion. Unfortunately, it fails to rise above the stereotypical “Don’t fool with Mother Nature” attitude toward technologies that promise human life extension and/or life enhancement. Continue reading →

Movie Review: Shooter (2007)

Posted on August 10, 2016 by Brian Wright

“The Patriot” and “Enemy of the State”
meet Dick Cheney on the grassy glacier (9/10)

Shooter is the ultimate thrilling and inspiring movie for people seeking an end to the depredations of “the Cartel.” It’s V for Vendetta applied to the real-life cabal in the White House today. Instead of VP Dick Cheney, “the Conglomerate’s” operational point man for murder and mayhem is a US Senator from Montana (played with a pure dictatorial sliminess by Ned Beatty).

Great timing now that the Blackwater corporate army has been running amok in Iraq and generally showing the real purpose of that conflagration. As Alan Greenspan states in his recent tome, The Age of Turbulence, it is all about oil, silly! More precisely, it’s about power: seizing revenue from oil and other natural resources for one’s crony-capitalist sleazeballs… all the while chillingly wrapping oneself in the Flag (and/or the Cross).

In Shooter, the Conglomerate’s (C’s) farflung contractor army—as well as coopted US military forces—inflict horrific damage on local populations in their worldwide operations. In particular, C’s merchants of death have wiped out a village in Africa that hesitated to make way for an oil facility. In the opening scene Marine sniper Bob Lee Swagger (Mark Wahlberg) and his spotter shoot several “bad guys” from a mountain nearly a mile away. Swagger does not know the connection between these targets and the C’s operations. Continue reading →