Movie Review: You Can See Everything (2026)

On By Norbert HauptIn Movies, One and a Half StarsLeave a comment

Before I review this movie, I need to give a synopsis of who Elizabeth Holmes is – in case you didn’t know.

She is the founder of Theranos, a Silicon Valley medical technology company that promised to revolutionize blood testing. Her story is one of the most notorious corporate fraud cases in American business history. It is a story of ambition, technological deception, enormous wealth, powerful investors, and ultimately criminal conviction. Born in 1984 in Washington, D.C., she attended Stanford University, where she studied chemical engineering.  Chemical engineering is one of the most difficult majors I can think of in college. She is obviously smart. However, in 2003 at just 19 years old, she dropped out of Stanford and founded Theranos. The idea: instead of drawing several tubes of blood from a patient’s arm, Theranos would perform hundreds of medical tests using just a few drops of blood obtained from a finger prick.

The company reached a valuation of approximately $9 billion, and her estimated personal net worth reached $4.5 billion on paper. She became an instant celebrity and was known as one of the world’s youngest self-made female billionaires. She attracted highly sophisticated investors.

There was only one problem: the technology didn’t work. Being an entrepreneur myself, I know what it can be like. Some ideas just don’t work out. You believe in them, you drive hard, but no matter how far you push, it’s not happening. This is obviously more challenging when physical devices and chemical tests are involved. The machines could perform only a limited number of tests reliably. For many others, Theranos secretly used conventional laboratory equipment manufactured by other companies. Despite these problems, Holmes continued promoting the technology to investors, business partners, and the public.

In October 2015, investigative journalist John Carreyrou of The Wall Street Journal published an investigation in which he revealed that Theranos was not actually using its own technology for most of its blood tests. The company finally shut down in 2018. After charges and trials, she began serving an 11-year prison sentence in May 2023.

The movie You Can See Everything is a movie dramatization of the making of a documentary about the period of Holmes’ life just before she reported to prison. It is critically acclaimed and the director Nathan Fielder is generally praised for “…creating a groundbreaking, thought-provoking documentary that challenges assumptions about truth and performance through its complex, layered narrative…”

It runs for 2 hours and 54 minutes, and I was bored through most of it. There are many pointless scenes where we see closeups of faces staring for a long time without any action. The viewer is left to decide whether Holmes was guilty of fraud, because it portrays her as fully believing in what she is doing is right. If I truly believe it, it’s not a lie, right? If I repeat a lie often enough, people start taking it as truth.

The way I see it is that there was a jury that spent much time and deliberation and eventually decided she was guilty and she was going to prison. Having a movie try to make me doubt that reality didn’t make much of an impression on me.

It did prompt me to go and get the book Bad Blood by John Carreyrou, the journalist who first exposed the company and started its eventual downfall. I will read that next and review it separately.

Unless you are a movie critic and want to witness this supposed masterpiece of innovative filmmaking,  I do not recommend you see You Can See Everything? 

Movie Review: Digger (2026)

On By Norbert HauptIn Atrocities, Energy, Environmental Protection, Movies, Three StarsLeave a comment

The most powerful man in the world is not the president of the United States, it’s his handler, the richest man in the world. It is Digger, a Texas oil man who is totally obsessed with his power, his mission, his money and nothing can stop him, not even the impending doom of millions of people.

Digger is played by Tom Cruise, and if I hadn’t known that, I would never have recognized him, fat suit, prosthetics, makeup and all. Digger does not even talk like Tom Cruise. It’s an absolutely amazing acting performance which will no doubt win awards. John Goodman plays the President Compson, and I didn’t quite recognize him either until about halfway through the movie. I knew I knew the actor, but could not place him. Goodman has lost a lot of weight, and that probably threw me off. Goodman, too, delivered an amazing acting performance.

Digger is way over the top in the story, in the plot, in the message and in the delivery. It’s exhausting to watch, particularly in today’s political climate, when there is actually a powerbroker out there in the real world just as crazy as Digger, and a president as incompetent and corrupt as Compson. We’re facing serious crises with our environment, our climate, our runaway consumption, our debt, our total lack of morality – and watching Digger just brings it all home. Yep, that’s what’s going on right now. Digger is right on! Fuck them all!

There will be critics who will say the movie is heavy-handed and tilts far, far to the left. There will be supporters who will call it brutal satire and a message completely necessary today to jar us all. Some will find it boring and patronizing. Some will find it though-provoking. Most everyone will find it deeply offensive.

Digger jars you, from the first frame on, until the last one. This is a movie where I ended up sitting through all the credits because I didn’t want to miss something at the very end.

I don’t want to see this movie again, but it will win awards.

Movie Review: Somewhere in Time (1980)

On By Norbert HauptIn Four Stars, Movies, Time TravelLeave a comment

Somewhere in Time is one of my all-time favorite movies, and it was from the beginning when it first came out in 1980. It’s a time travel movie.

Richard Collier (Christopher Reeve) is a playwright in Chicago in the 1970ies. He gets a mystery visit from an old woman who puts a watch into his hand and says “Come back to me!” On chance he stays at the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island in Michigan, where he notices a historic display featuring the actress Elise McKenna (Jane Seymour). He feels drawn to her. As he researches her life and the history of the hotel, I figures out that he himself was there in 1912. He researches time travel and eventually uses self-hypnosis to travel back in time to the hotel where he meets the actress. They fall in love almost instantly and both their lives are changed forever.

Somewhere in Time is a love story, a bit corny at time, but hey, it was made in 1980. Yes, the romance is overly sentimental and unrealistic. Yes, the time travel mechanics are questionable. Yes, there are flaws, but the musical score by John Barry is otherworldly, the story is deeply romantic, and the overall movie is an emotional experience that I can watch over and over again.

When I first watched it in 1980 I bought the record featuring Rachmaninoff — Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Variation 18, which is the central melody of the film and one of the most beautiful and recognizable melodies in classical music.

Take a listen here if you like:

 

And now you need to watch Somewhere in Time and then I’ll ask you:

Where did the watch come from?

Book Review: The Postman Always Rings Twice – by James M. Cain

On By Norbert HauptIn Audio Book, Books, Two and a Half StarsLeave a comment

The Postman Always Rings Twice starts with the now famous sentence:

“They threw me off the haytruck about noon…”

It’s the early 1930ies. Frank Chambers is a 24-year-old drifter who comes north from Mexico and ends up in Glendale, California, just east of Los Angeles. He stops at a rural diner for a meal. He talks with the owner, an older Greek immigrant by the name of Nick Papdakis, who offers him a job helping with the gas station, filling up cars and  doing occasional repairs. Nick’s much younger and beautiful wife, Cora, runs the diner. She cooks and serves the meals.

The minute Frank and Cora’s eyes meet there is strong sexual tension between them and soon they are a couple behind the old Greek’s back. It does not take long before they plot to kill Nick to be able to be together.

The Postman Always Rings Twice is a crime novel that became an instant success when it was first published in 1934. It’s print length is 399 pages and due to the fast pace it’s a quick read. It is still considered one of the most famous crime novels of the 20th century. It is also on my list of the 100 Greatest Novels  on slot 98.

 

Book Review: Prodigal Summer – by Barbara Kingsolver

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, One and a Half StarsLeave a comment

In Zebulon County in southern Appalachia (a fictional location) is near the border of Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee.

Deanna is a reclusive park ranger in her late forties who lives in a log cabin on the mountain. Her job is to maintain order, including fixing trails, clearing downed trees and keeping the local farmers from poaching. One day a young hunter comes around and he arouses new yearnings she has long been suppressing.

Lusa has a masters degree in entomology and she spent her short career studying moths. She falls in love with one of her students at the university, Cole Widener, a young and struggling farmer, and she marries into a family that does not seem to accept her.

Garnett is an 80-year-old widower, retired vocational agriculture teacher, and fundamentalist Christian who has lived his entire life in the southern Appalachian valley of Zebulon County. He  is living next door to Nanny, a 75-year-old woman who runs an organic apple orchard. He has spent the last few decades trying to crossbreed American and Chinese chestnuts to come up with a strain that can fight off the chestnut plight that wiped out the species in America.

All of these protagonists have one thing in common: their love of the land, of biology, evolution (well, not Garnett), and the natural order of wild things. The story brings forth the reality of small farms in America, the plight of displaced animal species, and the eradication of the American chestnut trees.

I finished the book feeling that everything is connected, the people, the animals, the plants, the land and the history.

A couple of years ago I read Demon Copperhead, which Kingsolver published in 2022 and which won the Pulitzer Prize. I gave it 4 stars. It prompted me to pick up other books by the author, specifically this one.

In contrast, Prodigal Summer was published much earlier, in 2000, and I don’t feel it is as refined. I enjoyed reading and learning about nature, the balance of flora and fauna, predator and prey, moths, coyotes, farmers, hunters and conservationists. But the story didn’t flow enough, and in particular, it didn’t have much of an ending. Things did not “come together” for me in the end.

Book Review: Whistler – by Ann Patchett

On By Norbert HauptIn Audio Book, Books, Two and a Half StarsLeave a comment

Daphne and her sister Lela are in their early fifties and live in New York City. They are both happy in their careers, successful, and married to loving husbands. Their mother, Abigail was married to their father, Buddy, when they had the two girls. Buddy was a fisherman, in love with the ocean, his live, and his daughters. But it was not enough for his wife. She divorced him when they were little girls. Along came her second husband, Eddie, who bounded into the family and was the best stepfather the girls could have dreamed of. Due to unexpected circumstances, Abigail threw out Eddie after less than two years. Daphne was nine years old, Lela seven, and they were devastated. They never saw Eddie again. Children are resilient, and they eventually forgot him. Their mother married a third time. His name was Lucas. They had two more boys. While they were a happy family, Lucas was never a father figure to the girls but they accepted him as their dad.

When Daphne and her husband Jonathan visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, they have a chance meeting with Eddie. That fateful encounter catapults Daphne back to her childhood. She and Eddie decide they will not be separated again and the event does not only change both their current lives, but it unearths forgotten memories and family secrets.

The title of the book is Whistler, which is the name of a horse, but surprisingly, Whistler does not have much to do with the plot. It’s a story about modern American life, the balance of career and family, homosexuality, health, cancer and the fragility of life, and finally death.

It’s a sad story, yet uplifting in its own way, and I can see how it would make a great book club selection.

The audiobook I listened to was narrated by the author herself, which gave it emotional depth I might not have felt if I had just read the story.

It’s a Free Country, Right?

On By Norbert HauptIn Are We Great Yet?, Atrocities, PoliticalLeave a comment

I could buy myself fatigues, boots, a bullet-proof vest, a gun and a club.

I could put on a vest over it with big white letters spelling out POLICE or ICE. It does not really have to look like a uniform. Just thuggish.

I could then drive an unmarked white van and remove the license plates.

I could put on a black beanie hat and a face mask.

I could pull over on any busy city street, get out, and forcefully drag any random person into my van. If they resisted or struggled, I could threaten them with my gun. If anybody asked, I could say I am ICE and I don’t need to identify myself.

I could then lock the abducted person into my van and drive away.

I could do whatever I wanted with that prisoner.

Nobody would know who I was, there would be no recourse.

It this still a free country?

Kansas State Capitol

On By Norbert HauptIn State Capitol BuildingsLeave a comment

I visited the Kansas State Capitol in Topeka yesterday. It was too late in the day to go in. I heard it was recently renovated and it was beautiful. I have to schedule another time to come back for a proper tour of the inside.

Above is a shot of the building from the west side in the evening sun.

And here is the obligatory picture with me in front, courtesy of a passerby who accidentally cut off the top of the dome. I enjoyed my visit to Topeka, Kansas.

Taking Out Los Angeles and San Diego

On By Norbert HauptIn Are We Great Yet?, Atrocities, Political, TrumpLeave a comment

The White House has stated that Trump’s comments about Iran “taking out Los Angeles and San Diego” were taken out of context. Here is his exact quote, with context:

I want to see a tremendous victory. You want to see a tremendous victory because it verifies all the things we did. And again, remember, with the war, it’s just artificial. It’s a little bit high. It’s a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe.

They can take out a city. Let them take, let them take out Los Angeles; let them take out San Diego. That’s — this is a very small price to pay, and it’s going to be over with very soon. It’s essentially almost over with.

And they might keep going a little long. You know, they always say they have a big threshold for pain. They need it. Let me tell you, they need it. But it’s going to end very soon. And it’ll end one way or the other. And your gas and your gasoline and all of the things.

And don’t forget, we also took on a country known as Venezuela. They never talk about that. They never talk about Venezuela. And we’re taking in hundreds of millions of barrels of oil every week. We’re pouring oil. We’re pouring oil into this country like nobody’s ever seen before.

There was laughter and applause after this statement at a rally in Nebraska. Seriously? How can any human being applaud this?

On Tuesday morning, the White House’s communications director, Steven Cheung, responded:

The media freakout over President Trump’s comments is not rooted in reality. He was clearly stating U.S. cities would have been threatened if a nuclear Iran hadn’t been stopped. America is safer because of the president. Iran has no nuclear, no navy, no air force, and no money.

You judge for yourself.

I live in San Diego. About 16 million people live in the San Diego and Los Angeles Metropolitan areas combined. That’s 4.6 percent of our nation’s population. We generate about 5% of our nation’s GDP. There are currently about 115,000 active-duty military personnel stationed in San Diego County, representing approximately 8.5% of the total active-duty military population in the United States.

Remember when Congress grilled Hillary Clinton about Benghazi in 2013 and then again on October 22, 2015, lasting for 11 hours? It was one of the longest congressional hearings in history. I clearly remember the outrage of the right-wing media at the time because “four American’s lost their lives.”

Four. And they were ready to crucify Hillary Clinton and called for locking her up.

It is truly frightening to me when the sitting president can make such a statement and our guardrails don’t hold up. If this lackadaisical attitude about the lives of millions of Americans and military staff does not meet the threshold of removing him from office, clearly nothing ever will, for this president, and any future president.

Are we doomed?

Movie Review: Lonesome Dove (1989)

On By Norbert HauptIn Movies, Two and a Half StarsLeave a comment

After reading and reviewing the novel Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry in July 2026, I learned that there was a TV miniseries made after the movie in 1989.

Above are Gus on the left (Robert Duvall) and Call on the right (Tommy Lee Jones). The series is comprised of four movies of 90 minutes each. Other notable actors, who were not as notable yet back in 1989, are Danny Glover as Deets – a perfect casting, and Steve Buscemi as Luke, and Chris Cooper as July Johnson.

The script follows the book very closely, sometimes to minute details. Of course, it leaves out much depth. After all, the first edition of Lonesome Dove was 840 pages. All that detail can’t be crammed into a 360 minute miniseries.

I very much enjoyed the visuals the movies  provided to round out my imagination concerning the characters. When I eventually read Lonesome Dove again, I won’t be able to think of Gus and Call without thinking of Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones.

If you read the book, you will enjoy the miniseries.

Books I Have Read Twice (or more) – Take Three

On By Norbert HauptIn BooksLeave a comment

I have added a few more books to my list of books I have read twice or more times. I am not sure there is much value to this list for my readers, but it does help me remember my books. And, I guess,

Time Tunnel: The Twin Towers – by Richard Todd (2.5 stars)

Foundation Trilogy – by Isaac Asimov (1.5 stars)

Timeline – Michael Critchton (2.5 stars)

A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving (3 stars)

The Songs of Distant Earth – by Arthur C. Clarke (2 stars)

Die Blechtrommel – by Günter Grass (in German)

Le Petit Prince – by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (in French, Spanish, German and English)

The Stand – by Stephen King (4 stars)

An American Tragedy – by Theodore Dreiser

Fathers and Sons – by Ivan Turgenev

Anna Karenina – by Leo Tolstoy

Sons and Lovers – by D. H. Lawrence (3 stars)

Treasure Box – by Orson Scott Card (2.5 stars)

Vox – by Nicholson Baker

Time Pressure – by Spider Robinson (3 stars)

Illusions – by Richard Bach

Jonathan Livingston Seagull – by Richard Bach

The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway

Catcher in the Rye – J. D. Salinger (4 stars)

King Rat – James Clavell (4 stars)

Orphans of the Sky – by Robert A. Heinlein

Forever War – by Joe Haldeman (3 stars)

Uncle Tom’s Cabin – by Harriet Beecher Stowe (4 stars)

Book Review: The Correspondent – by Virginia Evans

On By Norbert HauptIn Audio Book, Books, Three StarsLeave a comment

Sybil Van Antwerp is 73 years old in 2012 when the story starts. She is a retired distinguished lawyer who later clerked for a prominent judge. That was her career. She lived her entire life in the Washington, DC area. She had a husband, three children, and a lot of friends. Her favorite way to communicate was in writing. She started writing early as a young girl and kept it up all her life.

In the mornings, four days a week, she sits down at her writing desk and hand-writes letters on custom stationery with a fountain pen. Of course, there are also just notes and emails in the later years, but she always prefers the pen.

She makes sense of her life through writing correspondence and literature.

The entire book has no exposition and no dialog. It is all correspondence, spanning from 2012 all the way to 2022. Through letters and emails from her to a variety of recipients, family, friends, colleagues, suiters, writers of novels she reads, university professors, tech support agents, neighbors and even children in some cases, we learn about her life and her views. And of course we learn from the responses the receives through the various channels. It’s an entire book of correspondence.

She is an avid reader, and she discusses the books she reads with her friends. Often she would write “I am reading XXX by YYY, what are you reading?” Notably, she writes a long letter to Larry McMurtry about her feelings about his book Lonesome Dove and he writes back. I say notably because I myself just recently read and reviewed Lonesome Dove, so I could relate. The connection between my reading that book recently and the book being referenced here is purely coincidental.

However, there are many references to literature in The Correspondent, which provided me with a valuable reading list. I thought I’d extract and show it here. I will likely use this list for my own future reading.

Here it is. I have linked the books I either read with my rating, or I didn’t finish reading, for quick reference.

Books referenced in The Correspondent
  1. State of Wonder — Ann Patchett
  2. Bel Canto — Ann Patchett
  3. Cutting for Stone — Abraham Verghese
  4. Murder on the Orient Express — Agatha Christie
  5. Crossing to Safety — Wallace Stegner
  6. Blue Nights — Joan Didion
  7. The Year of Magical Thinking — Joan Didion
  8. The Satanic Verses — Salman Rushdie – not finished reading
  9. Never Let Me Go — Kazuo Ishiguro
  10. The Remains of the Day — Kazuo Ishiguro
  11. Ulysses — James Joyce – not finished reading
  12. The Orphan Master’s Son — Adam Johnson
  13. 84, Charing Cross Road — Helene Hanff
  14. Travels with Charley — John Steinbeck – 3 stars
  15. Mary Poppins — P. L. Travers
  16. The Space Trilogy — C. S. Lewis
  17. The Lord of the Rings — J. R. R. Tolkien
  18. The Chronicles of Narnia — C. S. Lewis
  19. The Emperor of All Maladies — Siddhartha Mukherjee
  20. Inferno — Dan Brown
  21. The Round House — Louise Erdrich
  22. Stoner — John Williams – 4 stars
  23. Outlander — Diana Gabaldon
  24. The World Below — Sue Miller
  25. To the Lighthouse — Virginia Woolf
  26. Wuthering Heights — Emily Brontë – not finished reading
  27. Amongst Women — John McGahern
  28. That They May Face the Rising Sun — John McGahern
  29. The Collected Stories of William Trevor — William Trevor
  30. Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen – not finished reading
  31. Lonesome Dove — Larry McMurtry  – 4 stars
  32. The White Album — Joan Didion
  33. Rebecca — Daphne du Maurier

Overall, The Correspondent is a delightful book, a very different book, almost an experiment, due to the unusual format, but it worked for me.

I used the audio version, and it was expertly narrated by a whole host of different readers, all with custom accents to match the writers.

Book Amnesia – Reading Books Twice

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, MemoryLeave a comment

A couple of weeks ago someone (unidentified) posted a comment to one of my book reviews of March 2022:

The first book, Time Tunnel: Twin Towers was well done. Empire was not. I know science fiction can be interesting, but Todd’s “Empire” is molded into pure unrealistic fantasy. Worse, it shows a real left leaning bias. It portrays southern people, particularly Texans as far right nationalists and stupid. Todd chose “Empire” to change history at Wounded Knee. He even uses the “stolen land” phrase as if the native Americans were not as bad, when in fact the war like tribes, stole land, murdered, raped and enslaved peaceful tribes. Todd’s preachy revisionist utopian fantasy is just that. One army female officer is portrayed as a special forces soldier. Fantasy yes, plausible? No. It is a shame Empire was science fiction with ridiculous plot. I haven’t read ” Eclipse”yet, I hope it is not looney left wing propaganda again.

I had to check, because I didn’t remember the books, so I checked my trusty log and found that I reviewed the series of three Time Tunnel books all within a week in March of 2022. Here are the reviews:

Time Tunnel: The Twin Towers

Time Tunnel: The Empire

Time Tunnel: Eclipse

I wrote those only about four years ago, and when I read them again, I could not remember anything about those books. Is it my memory that’s failing? Is it that I just read too many books and they all blend together over time? Is it that these books were not very good and therefore didn’t leave a lasting impression? Whatever it is, I was intrigued, and I simply picked up The Twin Towers again last week and read it again. I liked it again. Re-reading it, there were passages that I remembered, vignettes only, that reminded me I had read the story, but I didn’t remember enough that it spoiled my second reading.

One of the passages I remembered was good enough I thought I’d quote it here:

Annika is a Blackhawk helicopter pilot, flying a General (an African American) out of a battle zone in Iraq. To pass the time during the flight, they chat:

“Forward Operating Base Cobra. Roger that,” repeated Annika as she banked the Blackhawk east-northeast toward the new destination.

“So, what’s your story, Captain?” asked the general.

“The short version is that I tried to get into Special Forces, but I was denied because of a birth defect.”

“What’s that?”

“Born without a penis.”

The general nodded. “If it’s any consolation, Captain, we black folks know a thing or two about bias.

I have read a number of books multiple times – I’ll have to do a post about that sometime – but never because I could not remember the first time. This was unique.

I have committed to myself that I review every book I read partly for this reason – so I read more conscientiously and remember more about the books. It certainly didn’t work this time, for these three books. But it did validate my practice to review and log all the books, so I can quickly look them up and re-read if necessary.

And now for my memory…..

 

 

Fear – Never Forget

On By Norbert HauptIn AtrocitiesLeave a comment

Alex Jeffrey Pretti was a 37-year-old intensive care unit nurse and U.S. citizen who was shot and killed by federal border agents in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on January 24, 2026.

Pretti protested. He was a caring person who wanted to help others. He didn’t agree with the practices of the government. He believed the government had turned against its own citizens. He was a lawful gun owner with a permit to carry a firearm. Video analyses and media investigations indicate that a federal officer removed his weapon from his holster or waistband seconds before he was shot. Pretti has been vilified by the right-wing media and the federal government.

In contrast, Kyle Howard Rittenhouse is an American man who gained national attention at age 17 for shooting three men in Kenosha, Wisconsin, two fatally, amid protests and riots in response to the police shooting of Jacob Blake in 2020. A jury found Rittenhouse not guilty on all five felony charges on November 19, 2021. He is currently working as a full-time employee at Gulf Coast Gun & Outdoors in Milton, Florida.

Rittenhouse is alive.

Pretti is dead.

Below an unfinished painting I did in 1980, showing a shooting of German Jews by government agents in the 1930s, titled “Fear – unfinished”.

12/80 Oil 45×65

Movie Review: The Weight (2026)

On By Norbert HauptIn Movies, Two and a Half Stars1 Comment

Samuel Murphy (Ethan Hawke) was a single father of a very young girl in 1933, four years into the Great Depression. He had no job, he lost his apartment, and in the desperate struggle to find a roof over their heads he was attacked by thugs and eventually arrested and hauled off to a hard labor camp in the back county of Oregon. Knowing that his daughter, in the custody of the state, would soon be adopted away from him, he was desperate.

When widespread bank failures during the depression made people lose trust in paper money and hoard gold, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 6102 on April 5, 1933. It required U.S. citizens to surrender their gold coins, bullion, and certificates to the Federal Reserve for $20.67 per ounce, in an effort to control the economy by removing gold out of private hands. After the seizure, the price of hold was raised to $35.00 per ounce.

There were many gold mines in Oregon, and people tried to steal or smuggle gold away before the government could take it from them.

Murphy and several of his companion inmates were coerced into smuggling a fortune in gold from one mine across impenetrable wilderness in rural Oregon. With fortunes of gold in their backpacks, and lawlessness all around them, things quickly got out of hand.

The Weight has a powerful soundtrack. Sometimes it was not music, but just loud noise to create tension and pressure. The music and noise were so loud, I wished I had brought my earplugs (which I use at every concert). Loud it was, but it was also immersive and intensive and it helped the movie. I walked out in a daze, glad I didn’t have to live through the Great Depression, aware of the fragility of our economic system, empathetic to the love of a father for his daughter and the length to which he will go to save her. The movie left me stunned for a while, not sure what to think of it.

My wife gave it two stars, I am upping it a bit.