Category: Movies

Movie Review: The Rose Maker (2021)

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

Eve Vernet is one of France’s pre-eminent horticulturalist. She creates and cultivates roses. It’s been the family business for generations.

Now, however, the business is on the verge on bankruptcy. While she knows how to create roses, she does not have much business sense. The only employee she has left is her secretary and helper Véra, who shows more loyalty to Eve and the business than is probably warranted. To help out, Véra contracts with a rehabilitation agency and signs up three ex-convicts as employees to get the business back on its feet. However, none of them have any gardening experience, let alone know about roses.

Through creativity, hard work, and a little bending of the rules, they come up with a plan to rescue the farm.

The Rose Maker is a French comedy with subtitles. Due to that, I am sure I missed a lot of subtleties in the culture and the language that probably diminished my experience of the film. Nevertheless, I learned a lot about roses, and I have looked at my own roses in front of my house with new appreciation. The Rose Maker is a fun movie, and so non-Hollywood it’s refreshing.

Movie Review: CODA (2021)

On By Norbert HauptIn Four Stars, MoviesLeave a comment

Alright, before I get into the movie itself, it’s important to note that CODA is a “highly decorated movie” with three Oscars.

First, it won Best Picture of the Year, and by doing so it became the first movie produced by a streaming service to win Best Picture. This is an Apple Original Film, which by itself boggles my mind. I still remember when Apple became a company in 1976. Who would have thought that the company would eventually become the most valuable company on the planet – and, as a computer company, it would produce Oscar-winning movies?

Second, it won Best Adapted Screenplay by Sian Heder.

And finally, Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role for Troy Kotsur, who is also the first ever deaf actor to win an Oscar.

And boy did he win that Oscar, alone for the “my balls are on fire” scene at the doctor’s office.

I watched this movie on the airplane from London to New York, starting about two hours into the flight. The windows were all darkened, I sat in a window seat in the exit row, headphones on, and I was outright crying during the ending scene, when Ruby, the lead, sang Clouds From Both Sides Now in the ending scene. The man next to me was into his own movie and so I had my privacy. After wiping my eyes dry when it was over, I pulled up the window shades and looked down on the clouds of Greenland – from above.

I didn’t know what CODA was all about when I picked the movie, I just knew it had won awards. I also didn’t know what CODA even meant, until I actually did the research to write this review now. It means “Child of Deaf Adults.”

Ruby Rossi (Emilia Jones) is the only hearing person in her family. Both her parents and her brother are completely deaf. They operate a fishing boat. Ruby goes out with them early in the morning, they bring in their catch, they take it to the market, where Ruby leads a key role as the family’s communicator and negotiator, all before she gets ready to go to high school.

While life as a fishing family is hard, not only brutally hard and dangerous work on a boat, but also hard to make ends meet in a fickle market, the Rossi family is happy. The parents are madly in love and can’t seem to keep their hands off each other. They have wild sex in their bedroom with no thought to the fact that Ruby can hear the ruckus all over the house.

But what could Ruby possibly be interested in for her own life that is about as far removed from the appreciation of her family as it can get? Ruby has a passion and great talent for singing. Her parents need her on the boat and for the family business, and Ruby wants to pursue a life, passion and career that they can’t even comprehend, let alone appreciate?

So here you have it all, a powerful story, an emotional subject, a clash of cultures, and world-class acting – yes, a deaf man acting as a deaf man. It does not get any better than that.

I have seen clouds from both sides now….

Movie Review: Top Gun – Maverick (2022)

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

Captain Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Tom Cruise) is one of the Navy’s most decorated and skilled aviators after thirty years of flying fighter planes. Most of his companions from his years at the Top Gun school outrank him by two or three stars. He has purposely dodged being promoted to admiral so he could remain in flying status.

As one of the most skilled test pilots, he is called in to lead a mission in the Middle East that is nearly impossible. He trains a group of pilots half his age, but he uses his maverick instincts, much to the dismay and disapproval of his superiors.

Top Gun is a well-crafted sequel to the original 1986 movie. It’s full of tense flying scenes and I am sure any aspiring or actual pilot will very much enjoy it. I have to admit that the movie far exceeded my expectations. I enjoyed the story, the cinematography, the sound track and the acting. Even the plot made sense and tied very well back to the 1986 edition, with some of the key characters woven into it now.

Of course, I had to disregard a number of impossibilities, one of which I’ll describe here without it being a spoiler. At the beginning of the movie, Maverick makes a record-breaking flight on a new concept aircraft similar to the famed SR-71, only with today’s technology. To advance in the contract, the plane has to meet a milestone of flying Mach 10 – which is ten times the speed of sound. For comparison, the SR-71 holds the aircraft speed record of Mach 3.3 at an altitude of 85,000 feet. At that speed, the aircraft heats up the 450 degrees F near the back of the aircraft. When fired upon, it can simply outrun the missiles shot at it. Well, Maverick reaches Mach 10.3 when the aircraft breaks up. In the next scene, he is walking into a restaurant in the desert, a little battered up, helmet in hand, asking for a glass of water.

Needless to say, the human body would be torn apart by the g-forces and then burned to a crisp flying near space at Mach 10 without the protection of an aircraft around it. There is no way Maverick could have survived the fall from that altitude and speed to see another day. But it’s Top Gun, right, and we like our heroes.

Once I discounted all the crazy impossible stuff, what’s left was a very enjoyable movie that kept me at the edge of my seat.

You gotta go!

Movie Review: The Adam Project (2022)

On By Norbert HauptIn Movies, One Star, Time TravelLeave a comment

In 2050, time travel exists, and fighter jets can travel in time. Adam Reed is a pilot, trying to get to 2018, to save the future, but he crash-lands in 2022, conveniently in the backyard of his childhood home, where he meets his 12-year-old self. The two set out to fix a complicated future.

None of this makes much sense. The movie is an excuse for lots of Matrix-like action and video game scenes. There are even storm troopers who are wearing silver suits instead of white ones, but who are also just expendable ray gun fodder.

I was tempted to turn it off and leave it, but when I was half-way through, since it was, after all, a time travel flick, I stayed and watched it to the end.

Guess what, Adam fixed the future by fixing the past.

Movie Review: Death on the Nile

On By Norbert HauptIn Movies, Two and a Half Stars3 Comments

Hercule Poirot (Kenneth Branagh) is a Belgian veteran of World War I. He is on vacation in Egypt in the company of an elite group of travelers. When a murder takes place on their boat, he makes it his mission to investigate the case and hopefully solve it. It was not clear to me why a fellow traveler can just appoint himself to law enforcement, but that’s just a fine point. It’s a movie, right?

Of course, the cinematography is amazing. Who is not impressed with the backdrop of the pyramids of Giza? There are even some pictures of people climbing the pyramids. Everyone is always impeccably dressed in white suits and colorful, elaborate dresses and hats. If I traveled in Egypt, I’d be wearing a T-shirt, khakis and sandals or hiking boots. The movie makes a strong impression of the period which is sometime after WW I.

While the story is sometimes cheesy and stilted, the glamor makes up for it, and the plot is very carefully constructed, as is almost always the case with a murder mystery. We have seen hundreds of whodunnit movies, and this is just another one. It follows all the tricks and the playbook.

Still, it’s a great movie and an adventure to watch.

 

 

 

 

3.5 stars

Movie Review: Mystic River (2003)

On By Norbert HauptIn Movies, Three StarsLeave a comment

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.

Movie Review: Cry Macho (2001)

On By Norbert HauptIn Movies, Two StarsLeave a comment

It’s 1979. Mike Milo (Clint Eastwood) is a former rodeo star and horseman who has obviously aged beyond his prime. His former boss and rancher Howard (Dwight Yoakam) has a 13-year-old son named Rafael or “Rafo” who lives with his estranged ex-wife in Mexico City. He thinks he is being abused and wants to bring him home to Texas to live with him. But Howard has legal issues and cannot travel to Mexico himself.

Mike owes Howard a favor. Howard coerces Mike to go to Mexico in his stead and essentially kidnap his son. Mike drives his beat-up Suburban to Mexico City and promptly finds the ex-wife. She is completely self-absorbed and surrounded by dangerous thugs. Rafo is a wayward kid who has gotten into cockfighting, and it appears that the only thing in life he loves is his rooster Macho.

On their way home via the backroads of Mexico, the two face a number of challenges, which bring the unlikely pair together and each is forced to face his own demons.

Cry Macho is a feel-good movie, with a little of an unrealistic bent.

Based on the 1975 novel by N. Richard Nash of the same name, Cry Macho is another Eastwood attempt to make a movie similar to Gran Torino, which I thought was a masterpiece. But Cry Macho didn’t quite work the same way for me. Eastwood was 90 in 2021 when he made the movie and starred in it. I just couldn’t be convinced that the rancher would send such an old man to do his dirty work, and when Mike, during a stop on the way home, started breaking wild horses on behalf of a Mexican rancher, none of that seemed realistic. It could been a better movie if someone else had played that role.

Some of those flaws notwithstanding, I enjoyed watching Cry Macho. It was a good movie to watch with headphones on whiling away the hours during a long flight back from Europe.

Movie Review: Europa Report (2013)

On By Norbert HauptIn Movies, One Star, Science FictionLeave a comment

Jupiter’s moon Europa is widely thought to have the conditions to support life, particularly when we discovered a vast ocean of liquid water below the moon’s solid crust of ice.

When unmanned probes return data suggesting that single-celled life exists, Earth sends a mission to to Jupiter to explore. Six astronauts embark on the mission. They eventually land on Europa and conduct “moon walks.” As it happens, an alien environment hosts surprises that they cannot have expected, and things start going wrong very fast.

Europa Report is a hard science fiction story on a low budget.

The space scenes during the journey, the realistic-seeming set in the space ship (see picture above of a cockpit cam), and the various extra-vehicular activities are neat to watch. The movie is trying to remain within the realm of today’s science, with not too much fiction. And that works.

The movie is not as satisfying to watch as I expected it to be.

It gets a solid one star in my ratings.

Movie Review: Menari (2020)

On By Norbert HauptIn Movies, Two StarsLeave a comment

Korean family moves to Arkansas farm.

Jacob Yi (Steven Yeun) is a young Korean man with a wife and two children. They live in California and both work as “chicken sexer.” Yes, I didn’t realize that either, but young chicks are separated by gender. The males are useless and have no commercial value, so they are destroyed. Did you know that? The females get to live, to lay eggs, or to eventually end up on a rotisserie. It’s apparently not obvious to tell apart male and female chicks, and some people are professionals, who check this all day long on an assembly line of baby chicks. But I digress.

Jacob realizes that he wants more for himself and his family than working in an assembly line all his life. He takes his savings and moves the family to rural Arkansas. They buy a 50-acre farm. His dream is to grow Korean fruit and vegetables to sell at markets. Jacob loves the land, and he lovingly digs his hands into the rich Arkansas soil. But the wife is not all that happy with their situation, and grandma  Soonja (Yuh-Jung-Youn) plays a critical role in the future of the family.

Imagine a Korean family in rural Arkansas. What do do the people in the village think about them? How do their neighbors feel about them? There is definitely a lot of culture shock going both ways.

Seeing the plight of immigrants in America, trying so hard to just work and make a modest but satisfying living, is educational, especially at a time when our country’s leadership has been systematically vilifying immigrants against all common sense.

As the banner says: “This is the movie we need right now!”

I might note that this movie received a lot of Oscar nominations, and Yuh-Jung Youn, who played grandma Soonja, earned an Oscar for best performance by an actress in a supporting role.

Movie Review: Stillwater (2021)

On By Norbert HauptIn Movies, Two and a Half Stars2 Comments

Bill Baker (Matt Damon) is an oil-rig worker in Stillwater, Oklahoma. Things are not going well for him. He is unemployed and defeated. His college-age estranged daughter Allison is gay. She has already served five years of a nine-year sentence in prison in France for the alleged murder of her girlfriend.

Bill is sure of his daughter’s innocence, and without anything else to do, he travels to France and rents a place in Marseilles. He does not speak any French. When he tries the legal avenues to free his daughter, the language barrier and the complexity of the legal system get in the way. When it becomes obvious to him that the authorities are not going to help re-opening the case, he decides to take matters in his own hands.

Stillwater is a well-crafted tale of a vigilante father trying to make things right for his estranged daughter. The trailer made it seem like another Liam Neeson-esque story with lots of action by a bad-ass father getting even, but it’s not like that. Matt Damon plays Bill Baker like a real roughneck. Supposedly Damon went to spend time in Oklahoma getting to know oil workers to be able to become one.

He did that well, and it carries the movie. The plot has some interesting twists and that makes it worth watching.

 

Movie Review: Stowaway (2021)

On By Norbert HauptIn Half a Star, Movies, Science FictionLeave a comment

A crew of three astronauts takes off on a mission to Mars. Shortly after takeoff they discover there is a stowaway on the ship, somehow stuck in the life support system. After they get him out and discuss the situation, they figure out that they can’t turn around anymore (interplanetary orbital mechanics) and – this is worse – there are not enough resources (water, food and mostly air) on the ship to sustain a 4th person for the duration of the trip. There is not much in this movie that makes sense. There are some pretty interesting special effects, particularly during the EVA, which had me fascinated. But that was all.

Don’t bother.

 

 

*** Warning Spoilers ***

How did the stowaway get into the innards of the life support system? And not make a peep all the way through launch preparations and launch?

Why did they not use tethers during the EVA? Rule number 1, use tethers at all times.

Why did they not tether the canister?

Why did they not wait out the solar storm before going back for the second canister? What was the rush?

Seriously, a couple of canisters of oxygen will make a difference between four people living and dying on a two-year journey?

How were they going to land on Mars? There was no lander in sight. If there had been, they could have used the lander to return to Earth, right?

Who designs a two-year mission that has zero margin of reserve oxygen, so that one small extra canister the size of a scuba bottle, makes the difference between life and death?

Mission control was completely absent and it appears that only the commander talked to them on her headphones. Nobody else ever communicated with them.

 

Movie Review: Fatherhood (2021)

On By Norbert HauptIn Movies, Two StarsLeave a comment

Matt (Kevin Hart), a young professional, finds himself in an impossible situation. His wife dies a day after giving birth to their first daughter.

Against all odds, he decides to raise his daughter by himself. Nobody believes he can do it. His good buddies Jordan and Oscar are always available to provide support.

In the end, Fatherhood is like a sitcom, with plenty of fabricated “funny” moments that are all predictable and that we have all seen before. The most moving part of the film is watching father and daughter clearly be “in love” and getting along with one another.

I agree, this is not a very helpful review. Just know, it’s a Netflix movie, and when you flip through its offering and can’t decide on anything, and you want to just enjoy it, feel good, and don’t think very hard, Fatherhood will do the job.

Movie Review: Pig (2021)

On By Norbert HauptIn Movies, Three Stars2 Comments

Robin Feld (Nicholas Cage), who goes by Rob, is a truffle forager who lives alone, off the grid, in the wilderness in Oregon. He is a recluse. His only companion is a foraging pig, which helps him find the truffles. He obviously loves the pig, kind of like most people love their dogs. I know that pigs are very smart, but of course that’s something I have no direct evidence for.

In the middle of the night someone attacks him with a gun, shoots him, and steals the pig. Rob survives the attack, but is devastated and he embarks on a journey to find and recover the pig.

To do that, he has to face his former life and his demons. As it turns out, he used to be a renowned chef in Portland. Everyone in the culinary community looked up to chef Feld. But that was 15 years before. It all came crashing down when his wife died prematurely. He abandoned his life and career, and walked away into the woods.

Nicholas Cage is almost unrecognizable in this film. If I hadn’t known it was him from the advertisements for the movie, I would not have recognized him.

Pig is a dark movie and it takes an effort to watch, but the story is intriguing, and the unusual love of the man for the pig comes through strong.

I definitely recommend this. It’s one of the better movies of 2021.

Movie Review: Rollerball (1975)

On By Norbert HauptIn Half a Star, MoviesLeave a comment

Why would I possibly bother to review a movie that came out in 1975?

Because my commitment to myself is to review every movie I watch. Fortunately, I don’t watch too many, so I can keep this up.

In 1975, I was 18. I didn’t want to watch Rollerball then because it had a reputation of being a crappy movie. So I passed.

Over the years, it seems to have become a cult classic.

The other day it was my wife’s turn to pick the movie for the night. Not sure why she picked Rollerball, but “she made me watch it” even though I got sidetracked here and there by my iPhone.

It’s about a utopian culture in the future (of 1975) when all the power lies with corporations and executives are revered. Rollerball is an extremely violent sport, but it seems to rule the world. Teams are sponsored by big business and controlled by big business. Jonathan (James Caan) is the ultimate superhero of the sport. The chairman of the company wants him to retire from the sport, but Jonathan, ever the maverick, does not cooperate.

To get him out, they keep changing the rules of the game, making it ever more difficult to play (and survive). But Jonathan has plans for them.

The story is pretty simple, and the acting seemed horrible to me. But I am not sure if it was due to the fact that this was vintage 1975, and that’s just what they did then. I did get a kick out of what they thought the future would look like. This was before the first personal computers were even conceptualized. The computers they showed were DEC-like machines with big old RP06 drive cartridges we used in the late 1970ies.

I stayed with the movie – as a good husband will when the wife chooses and here is my rating. Please note that it’s half a star better than one of the worst movies I can ever remember watching: The Room (see review here).

Enjoy – at your own risk!

Movie Review: Don’t Look Up (2021)

On By Norbert HauptIn Astronomy, Movies, Political, Science, Three StarsLeave a comment

Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) is a doctoral student in astronomy. One night, when working with a telescope, she discovers a new comet. Researching the details with her professor, Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), they come to the conclusion that the comet is larger than that of the Chicxulub impact event (see details here) that wiped out 75% of all flora and fauna on earth 65 million years ago. The problem is that the new comet is on its way to hit earth head-on in 6 months and 15 days.

The two understand that they have discovered a planet-killing catastrophe, and that mankind only has a little over 6 months to do something about it. They manage an audience at the White House with the help of the president’s chief science advisor, Dr. Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan). But when they arrive, President Orlean (Meryl Streep) is completely indifferent. Her political ambitions don’t allow the distraction of an imminent extinction event. Jason (Jonah Hill), the Chief of Staff who is also her son, even ridicules the astronomers and eventually they are sent away. Nothing will be done.

Thunderstruck, the scientists decide to turn the the media instead. They are invited to the popular morning show The Daily Rip, where they are also received as curious, cute scientists and not taken seriously. They are trying to make the  world just “Look Up” and see what’s coming.

Don’t Look Up is a satire, of course, and it is extremely timely. It portrays a White House full of sycophants, staffed by nepotism, with a President who is completely self-absorbed and clueless. Facing a catastrophic event coming up, nobody wants to bother with it. The negative message it creates in social media is simply inconvenient. The industrial complex quickly figures out how they could possibly get very rich off of this, the danger and risk to the world be damned. Nobody takes the scientists seriously. They become the villains.

And that, my friends, is the state of our world today.

Enjoy a good laugh while you’re watching, and don’t worry that it will make you want to cry because of the insanity of it all.