Our nation has been sending young men and women into endless wars in faraway continents for many decades. We supposedly revere our military, we thank them for their service when we see them in airports or in the lines at stores. They go overseas and many of them come home broken. Some never come home. Some come home with limbs missing. Some come home with terrible diseases due to exposure to poisons. Some come home with broken spirits. When they come home, we owe them.

But we don’t seem to pay our debts.

We have the Veterans Administration, or short the VA, whose mission it is to “take care” of our veterans. I am sure sometimes they do. But, as we all know from anecdotes of people we know, from the stories in the media in general, and from the crazy political machinations we watch on TV, all too often our veterans are not taken care of.

Sometimes they end up homeless, begging on street corners, rejected, abused and  addicted to drugs.

According to a study completed in 2021, 30,177 American active duty military and veterans after 9/11 have died by suicide. During that same 20-year period, 7,057 service members were killed in combat. Suicide kills four times as many service members as combat does.

Breaking is based on a true story of the soldier Brian Brown-Easley, a former Marine whose disability check gets diverted due to no fault of his own. In a crazy scheme, to get public attention to his plight, he holds up a bank – not to rob money, but to get his $850 check that he says the VA owes him. That’s all he wants.

As he finds out quickly, holding up a bank to get on TV does not work, and he tries to somehow exit the situation with honor and alive.

After the movie, on the way home, I was not really able to talk. The images of the deep pain and despair haunted me. The pictures of the waiting room at the VA kept flashing through my mind, where seemingly hundreds of dejected men and women were languishing in endless lines, their dignity taken, their spirits broken, almost like cattle at the trough, just to collect what is due them, what we, as a country, owe them for their service: To care for their wounds – that’s all.

Breaking puts a spotlight on their blight.

Thank you for your service.

At the beginning of World War II, the British were desperate for information, and the traditional methods of espionage didn’t seem to work sufficiently.

In an age were women in war were not a common occurrence, Churchill requested that the spy agency, the SOE or Special Operations Executive, recruit women to work behind enemy lines and pass information back home via wireless Morse code transmitters.

Using those transmitters was a very dangerous activity. The units were bulky, the size of a suitcase, had to be set up in secret locations and could only be used for a short time. The problem was that they were easily traceable, so the users had to be on the move all the time. And if a “wireless operator” was intercepted by the enemy, the team that depended on him or her were left stranded without a connection home and had to operate “in the dark.”

Vera Atkins (Stana Katic) was the head of the spy department at the SOE. Among many other men and women, she recruited two very unusual candidates: Virginia Hall (Sarah Megan Thomas) was an American woman who had been turned down in her quest to become a diplomat because she had a wooden leg. She was very capable and ambitious, and took on the challenge. The other was a Muslim woman named Noor Inayat Khan (Radhika Atpe), a pacifist, but a soldier nonetheless, because she believed in defending her and her people’s rights. Noor was the wireless operator, and Virginia the relentless spy and operative.

Together they helped to undermine the Nazi regime in France. Albeit at a terrible cost, they left a powerful legacy in their wake.

A Call to Spy was inspired by true stories and the credits at the end listing the fates of the players left me inspired about the heroism of that generation and the tremendous sacrifices they made – so we all could live in this world we built for ourselves after the war.

I read the book when it first came out in 2019 and I gave it four stars in my review.

Having read the book gave me a much better understanding of the movie, and I believe I benefitted from that. I don’t know how much a viewer would understand only from the content of the movie alone.

Kya is a little girl when the story starts in 1953. The family lives in a ramshackle house in the coastal swamps of North Carolina. The father is a drunk and he regularly beats his children and his wife for minor reasons. One morning, Kya’s mother walks out and never comes back. In the coming months, all her older siblings disappear, until only she is left living with her father. Then one day, he too does not return. Kya is left fending for herself. She avoids interaction with people, dodges Social Services and maintains herself by selling fresh mussels early in the morning to a friendly local storekeeper. She grows up illiterate, but has an intense love of nature and great artistic ability. She catalogues the ecosystem of the swamp world around her.

Two local boys attract her attention. Tate is a true friend, teaches her to read and write and eventually love. When Tate goes off to college, Chase, another boy from town, courts her. His motives are not as pure as Tate’s and soon Kya’s trust is broken.

Where the Crawdads sing is a wonderful movie that stays quite true to the book, but of course leaves out a lot of detail. As I said above, I think viewers who read the book first will get more out of the experience. The characters and the feeling of the location the movie portrays matched very closely those in my head and rounded out my view of the story.

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is a wacky movie that works exceedingly well. Remember when John Malkovich starred as himself in Being John Malkovich? 

Well, here is Nicholas Cage playing himself: Nick Cage. He is an actor, and when his accountant tells him that his finances are disastrous, he is at a loss as to what to do. Then there is this obscure gig to appear at a billionaire’s birthday party on the island of Mallorca in the Mediterranean. Apparently, the playboy is a huge fan of Nick. After turning it down outright, he later comes to his senses and ends up going.

When he finally meets his fan, Javi Gutierrez, the two quickly become friends. That is, until the CIA approaches him, tells him that Javi is a drug lord and crime boss, and forces him to become an informant.

The action quickly gets out of control, and Nick and Javi are drawn in to a cat and mouse game that could end up deadly for both them and their families.

The film supposedly plays on the island of Mallorca, but it was mostly filmed in Croatia over a period of 15 days in October 2020. Croatia Weekly stated that several scenes were shot in and around “Dubrovnik at Villa Sheherezade, as well as in Konavle, Cavtat, Popovica, Trsteno, and Čilipi Airport.”

Reading this meant more to me than it would have otherwise, since I just came back from a two-week vacation in Croatia, with a stop in – yes – Dubrovnik. While there we saw extensive evidence that many episodes of Game of Thrones were filmed there. We actually saw a number of the locations. This has spawned an entire industry of paraphernalia and tourist attractions related to Game of Thrones. Yet nobody talked about Nick Cage that I remember.

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is a delightful action comedy that you will enjoy, unless you absolutely hate Nicholas Cage – which is unlikely. At the same time, I can’t imagine any other actor pulling this off – well, maybe John Malkovich could.

Mystic River is an old masterpiece. I had watched it when it first came out, and while I remembered it “was a good movie,” I had forgotten what it was about.

Sean Penn won an Oscar for best actor in a leading role, and Tim Robbins for best actor in a supporting role.

The story is about three friends from a rough neighborhood in Boston who were best friends as boys. Jimmy Marcus (Sean Penn) was an ex-convict when his daughter Katie was murdered. His friend Dave (Tim Robbins), a blue-collar worker, saw Katie last, making a fool of herself late at night, dancing on the bar in a local watering hole. His other friend was Sean (Kevin Bacon), who happened to be a homicide detective, and he was put on the case. As the three childhood friends deal with this tragedy each in their own way, events unfold that pit them against each other.

There is a backstory, which is woven into the main plot. It turns out that Dave was abducted by child molesters one afternoon in the summer of 1975, when the three boys played in the streets. After days of sexual abuse he escaped and returned, but things were never quite the same for the three friends. The demons of the summer of 1975 come to haunt all three of them when Jimmy’s daughter was killed.