Irene in Time, A Movie?

Sorry, but I don’t get the 67% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes for what I would call a docudrama rather than a movie. When I read that IRENE IN TIME was about how a daughter’s relationship with her father affects her romantic relationships, I thought, “Hey, a movie that goes deeper than “Sex and the City.”

Yes, but, the problem with IRENE is that there are too many messages from too many women with too many kinds of relationships, including a lesbian who tells the truth that being gay has nothing to do with her parents. The effect of these “talking heads” for me is that I didn’t feel anything, not even empathy for those I related to. More time should have been spent on development of the main character and her mother and father (who we never get to meet “in person.”) And the plot was pretty narrow. For example, I wanted to know how the family of a man who made his living gambling could live so well in Southern California?

Then we don’t even know if Irene’s daddy is really dead or just gone, nor in the end what happens to Irene. It felt really hopeless to me: we women are so weak that our happiness not only depends on having a good romantic relationship, but that having a lasting one at all depends on whether or not we had a normal father? Please, that would mean no one has much of a chance at happiness.

I’m sorry, IRENE, but I’m not willing to bet my happiness in life on the men in my life, past and current. There is too much at stake.

Keep “The Unusuals”

Note to ABC: Keep “The Unusuals“. This mid-season TV NYPD dramedy is fast-pased, entertaining, and competitive with such shows as “Rescue Me” on FX and so much better than the too-usual “Law and Order’s” and “CSI’s”.

Check it out on Wednesday nights or free online episodes at ABC. Be sure to watch the pilot to catch all the unusual cop behaviors as well as cases from the beginning. It won’t take you long since the 4th episode is tonight.

Then tell ABC to keep making TV shows like “The Unusuals”.

Sunshine Cleaning the movie

Sunshine Cleaning is a comedy with heart, starring Academy Award nominee Amy Adams and Golden Globe winner Emily Blunt as two sisters and Academy Award winner Alan Arkin as their father. It’s been called this year’s Juno, but I think it’s better because we end up actually understanding all the characters by the end of the movie. I never quite understood Juno’s playing with sex when she seemed more intelligent than that.

The women of Sunshine Cleaning, however, slowly let us into their world and we get it. And because we get it, we really care about them and want things to work out. By the time the credits roll, we know one sister’s future but not the other, yet we’re hopeful. So we feel good even though we’ve cried as well as laughed. And it’s believable to boot.

So I, Dianne, give it a High Five, which means it was worth driving a few miles to see as well as forking over the money for a ticket and popcorn

Goodbye ER

It was just another 24 hours in the ER of Chicago’s County Hospital. I had expected the roof to cave-in, the ER to close because of the financial crisis (or the opening of the Carter Center), or at least for John Carter and his wife to get back together. The one thing I really liked was the pan-out at the end showing the hospital (complete with its neon sign and the EL going around it) and the staff responding to yet another large catastrophe.

It was an okay sendoff, but I wish everybody had come back for the finale. At least we got to see them in the retrospective hour before the finale and in some of the episodes this last year. I will definitely miss ER, but as one of the cast members said about the soundstage/set: “It is not the Berlin Wall, it is only a TV show.” Even so, it touched my life along with thousands, maybe millions of other viewers. It was something to look forward to. It took me out of my own problems. ER will be missed.

Tell me what you thought of the finale or why no show can really replace ER. (Of course, that’s what I thought about St. Elsewhere when it ended after only five seasons in the 1980s!)

P.S. Thank goodness for reruns and Tivo!!

Academy Awards Wrap-Up

Dianne here: I haven’t been blogging much, but I have been going to movies because awards season has been upon us. Now that the Academy Awards have been given out, I’d like to quickly sum up what I thought about some of the nominations and wins:

Best Picture: Slumdog Millionaire

If you haven’t seen it, do so. It’s entertaining and enlightening and very deserving of its awards, including Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Original Song, Best Cinematography, Best Sound Mixing, and Best Film Editing – a Total of Eight Academy Awards (that I’m aware of).

Best Actress: Kate Winslet in The Reader

I ended up going alone to this movie because noone wanted to join me. It was much better than I thought it would be because it isn’t about an older woman having an affair with a younger man, like I thought. It goes much, much deeper than that, but for me to tell you would spoil the movie. Let’s just say that Kate Winslet’s performance was superb, but the story and the writing, directing, and everything else that goes into making movies were all excellent.

Five Nominations (that I’m aware of): Doubt

I went to watch this Sunday afternoon and was pleasantly surprised. Along with the serious nature of the film were some funny moments, plus the writing, directing, and acting were outstanding. I especially liked Phillip Seymour Hoffman as the priest – opposite of his spy portrayal in Charlie Wilson’s War (2007).

Best Actor: Sean Penn in Milk

Sean Penn was my favorite to win the Oscar since he was so different from who he is in real life and believable at the same time. The other award handed out to this timely movie is Best Original Screenplay, whose young writer gave an extremely moving speech at the Academy Awards. We truly must stop discriminating against people in our society just because they are different from us. We must adopt more tolerance and live with less narrow-mindedness.

Two Awards (that I’m aware of):  The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Although nominated for nine other awards (that I’m aware of), this movie won only two – Best Makeup and Best Visual Effects. Although I enjoyed watching it, even though it is almost three hours long, it is not one of those must-see-agains. You either like it or you don’t. And even though Brad Pitt has proved himself more than just a leading man, an actor with range as he matures, if one goes to see Brad Pitt as himself, one has to watch a lot of him as someone else to get to those few “precious” scenes.

So that’s all for now. I’m going to rent all the other movies nominated, especially the foreign films and will let you know when I’ve seen one worth passing on to you, my readers.

DEFIANCE the movie, and bombing Afghanistan/Pakistan

In defiance to watching the Super Bowl, Liz and I took in the movie DEFIANCE yesterday. Daniel Craig is excellent as a smuggler turned hero in this up till now unknown story of Jews during WWII surviving against all odds. Directed by Edward Zwick (Blood Diamond) and also starring Liev Schreiber and Jamie Bell as Craig’s brothers, DEFIANCE holds your attention from start to finish, although there are scenes you want to turn away from even though you’ve been subjected to movies and photos of this horrible period in human history many times before. There was one scene I did not expect, and that was the bombing of the forest where the Jews were hiding.

What made it worse for me personally was the knowledge that the United States under our new “Anti-Iraq War President” continues to bomb the Afghanistan/Pakistan border using drone jets rather than manned ones.  Supposedly, they are accurate in hitting their targets, terrorists, although there is still some collateral damage – meaning innocent civilians including women and children are getting killed. Since I had just found out about this via Bill Moyer’s Journal on Friday night, I was particularly sensitive to the inhumanity and ineffectiveness of bombing civilian areas during warfare. Historically, it has never achieved its mission. It didn’t work for us in Iraq – we still had to hunt down Hussein after killing many innocents – and it didn’t work for us in Vietnam – we lost that war.

Neither did the bombing of Germany work for Churchhill during WWII for the same reason it didn’t work for Hitler to bomb England. In fact, it worked against them as the people became stronger and more intent at winning. Thus is the result of Obama’s signing off on the continued bombing of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Such action breeds more hate against the “Empire of the United States” and recruits more terrorists. As a supporter of Obama from the beginning, I am especially disappointed, no, shocked, as I thought he was against such actions, even though I knew he planned on building up our forces in Afghanistan. I thought that was to find and bring to justice Osama and his crew. As one of the guests on Bill Moyer’s said: 9/11 was not an act of war, it was a criminal act and its perpertrators should be hunted down and brought to justice.

So I’m confused about Obama’s telling the Muslim world that we will respect them at the same time we’re bombing them. I’m also confused why it is wrong to hold and torture suspected terroists in Cuba when it seems to be okay to outright kill them along with whomever else happens to be around in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is NOT CHANGE as promised. This is not looking forward, it is looking back to use the same techniques that did not work in the last century, the most violent one on record, I believe. Most of us who supported Obama believe that war should always, always be the last resort, especially when it wasn’t a particular country that attacked us on 9/11 and one of the countries we are now bombing has nuclear weapons. This is not just a slippery slope Obama is on, it is downright dangerous.

I for one am going to email the White House and urge all my readers to do the same to ask our new President to change his mind. Think how different things would be right now if the previous president had changed his mind on so many levels. As far as the movie, DEFIANCE, I give it a High Five. It shows us the wages of war and makes us not want to repeat our mistakes, while letting us see that the actions of a few people can save many. We owe it to those who have suffered so we can live in freedom to respect the rights of people everywhere to live without the terror of getting bombed. Just because no American soldier is involved, that the current bombing is taking place by remote control, doesn’t mean it is the right thing to do, not at all. Yes, the economy is bad but we need to pay attention to why we voted for Obama in the first place – he was always against the Iraq War.

Frost/Nixon the movie

As an 18-year-old, I voted for Nixon as did most Americans in 1972. But I barely remember the details of the Watergate scandal, just that it soured me and many others in my generation to not trust those in charge. So I wasn’t sure I’d like Ron Howard’s movie, Frost/Nixon. I didn’t think it could be interesting, because I didn’t think Nixon was an interesting man. But I was wrong. The writing, casting, directing, and acting make this a must-see movie, especially in light of the outgoing Bush administration which seems to have broken the law on many more counts than Richard Nixon’s did. Frost/Nixon reminds us why we lost faith in our leaders and why it was important to vote for someone who we hope will give us back that faith.Frank Langella did a superb job of portraying the angst-ridden Nixon and the movie deserves all of its 5 Golden Globe nominations, including Best Actor.  It definitely gets a High Five from me.

W. makes us think past the politics

W. It really does matter who is president and who is vice president. It does matter what these people believe and how they make their decisions. It does matter who they rely on or what they rely on. Oliver Stone’s latest movie about George W. Bush gives us something important to think about as we are about to elect the next President of the United States:

Do we really want another president who goes with his gut, who reacts more often than responds? Or do we want someone who seems to be steady in his beliefs and calm amidst the storm? Do we want someone who like George W. Bush was not the best student, or someone intelligent enough to make it to the top against the odds? Do we want someone who achieved his position in life with the help of a well-heeled family, or someone who is truly a self-made man?

I used to admire John McCain. I voted for him in the Republican Primary in 2000. But he is not the same man he was. He changed his image so he could win the nomination. He changes daily. He is now more like Bush than the maverick he used to be, using the same Carl Rove political tactics of W. To prove my case, here is a Daily Show video meant to make us laugh, but it is also frightening.  Enjoy and pass it on, and then vote for the best man, in my opinion, Barack Obama:

McSame Video

Watch RECOUNT now available on DVD

Then read this blog on Colorado being the Florida of 2008 re the presidential election: Square State.

Then no matter what state you live in, email the people in charge in Colorado at the email addresses at the bottom of the blog, if you want to try to help the presidential election be fair.

What’s really amazing is that Colorado Secretary of State Mike Coffman (R) is overseeing his own election to COHD6 and has refused to resign due to conflict of interest. I will definitely vote for Hank Eng (D) who  always shows integrity as well as intelligence in everything he does.

The HBO movie RECOUNT recounts the events of November and December 2000, when the electoral process in Florida became the deciding factor in electing George W. Bush as president rather than Al Gore. Watch it and come to your own conclusions. It could happen again, and this time in Colorado.

By the way, the movie does show both sides and provides us with some well-needed humor at this time via Katherine Harris and her lipstick.  So I guess “lipstick” via Sarah Palin’s pitbull joke and all the other references (before the banking and financial crisis took its proper place in the news) may be THE word we will remember from 2008. Hopefully it won’t be “Coffman”…

Henry Poole Is Here

The only thing I didn’t like about the new movie, Henry Poole Is Here, was the noise coming from one of those summer “lacklusters” in the theater next door. The change from a comic-book-turned-movie to a believable script with real human beings, full of faults, was as refreshing as the late-August breezes telling us that finally, fall is on the way. And with it, better movies as we head toward Oscar time.

Speaking of which, Academy Award nominee Adriana Barraza (Babel) stood out as Henry’s (Luke Wilson) caring albeit nosey neighbor. She might just get another nod for this performance. On Mr. Poole’s other side is a single mom and mute daughter. We hope and know there will be a romance, and we even know from the previews what moves the movie along – the face of Christ on Henry’s house.

What surprised me was how much I cared for all the characters and wished, almost, I lived in L.A. so I could have neighbors like that. (I was moved to tears several times.) Most of the time what I see of L.A. (on the big and little screen) are dysfunctional families whose members are involved in various crimes from drug-dealing to murder. New York comes across like that, too. So it’s pleasant to see “normal” people living outside of the heartland.

I’m just glad to finally see a movie this summer that I can genuinely recommend. High Five to independent films.