In World War II, the British need to deceive the Germans that they are about to attack Greece, turning German attention away from Sicily, their actual target.

To do that, they float a corpse of a British officer in the ocean to be found by the Germans. The officer holds a briefcase of classified material, fabricated to support the story. The problem is, how to make it convincing and foolproof. The Germans are smart and the whole plot turns into a game of “do they know that we know that they know that we know?” Thousands of lives of the soldiers attacking Sicily on the fateful day depend on the Germans falling for the ruse. If they don’t, it will be a bloodbath on the beaches of Sicily.

Operation Mincemeat shows the shadow warriors behind the scenes, who do their work from desks. It’s a spy thriller, based on a true story.

 

We like to go to a movie on Christmas Day in the afternoon. What were we thinking when we chose a movie titled Nightmare Alley to give us Christmas cheer?

Nightmare Alley plays in the late 1930s somewhere in America. Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper) is a hapless young man who hates his father enough to make him freeze to death before he burns down his house with his body in it in the opening scene. As he escapes from the law, he ends up at a carnival by coincidence. Out of sheer desperation, he hires on and becomes a “carny.”

He learns quickly from his boss Clem (Willem Dafoe) and several other characters. The mystic Zeena lures him in, and her older and alcoholic husband Pete (David Strathairn) teaches him mentalism – appearing clairvoyant, revealing secrets about random people in the audience by verbal clues from an accomplice. He makes a name for himself in the carnival and is quite successful. Eventually he is put to he test by the female psychiatrist Lilith (Cate Blanchett) in the audience, who eventually becomes his accomplice and partner in crime in a series of ever more daring pursuits.

Watching Nightmare Alley is a nightmare. It is based on the 1946 novel Nightmare Alley by William Lindsay Gresham. In 1947, it was turned into a movie of the same name the same name starring Tyrone Power. So this is another remake. It’s over two and a half hours long, which is easily 45 minutes more than would have been necessary. It moves very slowly, and you never know where the story is going. For the longest time, there really does not seem to be a plot. It portrays the times in a moody and depressing light.

I learned what a “geek” is. Geek was originally an early 20th-century term for a carnival worker who was so unskilled that the only thing he could do at the carnival to entice an audience was to bite off the heads of live animals. Essentially, a geek was a socially undesirable person who lacked any skill or ability. Obviously, the term has morphed into something entirely different in the last three or four decades from those gruesome beginnings. But the geek in the carnival is more important than meets the eye at the beginning of the story.

This is a very well-done movie with an intricate plot and powerful cinematography which makes the experience depressing. It was too long. Too crazy.

It’s 1927 in Chicago. The legendary “Mother of the Blues,” Ma Rainey (Viola Davis) is recording two songs at a music studio. While everyone waits for Ma to arrive (as she is usually late), the director and the producer are nervous. The band is trying to rehearse, but arguments arise quickly. One after the other, the band members get to tell the stories of their lives.

I didn’t know what to expect from this movie, but I felt like I was watching a play. Sure enough, it was based on a play as I read later. The dialog, the structure, all were taken from the play.

The racial tensions of the 1920s come out loud and clear, and Ma Rainey knows that she has power over “white folks” only because she is a star and “they need her.”

This movie won two Oscars, one for Best Achievement in Makeup and Hairstyling, and the other in Best Achievement in Costume Design. It was nominated for three others, including Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role, Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role and Best Achievement in Production Design. Needless to say, it is highly acclaimed.

While I appreciated the illustration of racial discrimination and the subject matter in general, I found it was a hard movie to watch and I had to work at staying engaged and interested. It didn’t do too much for me as a movie.

I had to google to figure out why the movie was called Bullet Head. It turns out a Bullet Head is a name for the dog breed Presa Canario. Here is a picture of one:

A few thugs, after a heist, crash their getaway car near an abandoned warehouse or factory. The driver dies, and the other three hapless robbers get out of the car and hide out in the warehouse. When I say “abandoned” I mean long abandoned, completely dilapidated, with broken roofs and jagged concrete.

The trio of of robbers are Stacy (Adrien Brody), Walker (John Malkovich) and Gage (Rory Culkin). What they don’t know when they enter the facility to hide out is that it’s also being used by a gang to stage dogfights. While Gage scours a locker room to service his heroin addiction, he makes a gruesome discovery. There is an injured dog on the loose. And that’s all I have to say about the story.

The movie is gruesome, gory, and due to the horrible environment and the despicable characters, extremely depressing. There is nothing good about this story, just bad luck becoming worse luck by the minute.

Of course, John Makovich does a phenomenal job as a crook, as one might expect, not to be upstaged by his two partners in crime, except for Bullet Head. The dog scenes are amazing, frightening and disturbing. It must have been a very difficult job for the director to get the dogs to do what they needed to do. There is no question, the hero, the protagonist of this movie is the dog named DeNiro.

The movie made me think about the cruelty and insanity of dog fighting, and I have a hard time imagining what kind of man it takes to be a participant in such an activity.

In the credit it states:

A portion of the proceeds of this movie will go toward eliminating dog fighting, rehabilitating its canine victims, and promoting awareness and education about the humane treatment of man’s best friend.

Thank goodness.

This was difficult to watch.

 

 

Al Hart (Chevy Chase) is a retired talent manager who doesn’t know what to do with his life. His granddaughter talks him into moving into a retirement home. There he meets his old friend and very first client from 50 years ago, Buddy Green (Richard Dreyfuss). The two are not happy, and they convince each other to “go on tour.” Al books comedy gigs for Buddy on a road trip from Los Angeles to New York, where Buddy wants to perform at the Ed Sullivan Theater. Along the way in Kansas, at a poetry reading, they pick up Doris Lovejoy (Andy MacDowell), an artist and ex hippie who joins them along the way.

Being a San Diegan, I couldn’t help but notice that on their way from Los Angeles to Tijuana, Mexico, they showed a freeway sign for San Diego via I-5 North. Obviously, they would be going on I-5 South to Tijuana. Also, the scenery on the way to Tucson, Arizona was very much reminiscent of the red rocks of Sedona, which would be many hours out of the way when going to Tucson on I-8. Not that these minor goofs matter, I just know my Southwestern geography and can’t help but notice.

The Last Laugh is a predictable movie of the bucket list theme, of which we have seen too many. It’s reminiscent of the classic Grumpy Old Men with Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon, cute enough, but sufficiently uninspired to get us to laugh here and there. It deals with illness, aging and the realities of life in a typical Hollywood fashion – superficially with stale humor.

Europeans generally do a better job with this kind of movie, and watching The Last Laugh, I realized I haven’t seen enough of those in a while.

Spenser (Mark Wahlberg) is a former Boston policeman with a dubious reputation who just got out of prison. He wants to get out of town and start a new life. But his friend Henry (Alan Arkin), who runs a gym and fighting school, talks him into coaching Hawk (Winston Duke), a young and huge black amateur, whom he has taken under his wings. Spenser, pretty much half of Hawk’s size, is able to teach him a thing or two.

When his former girlfriend Cissy (Iliza Shlesinger) get back into the picture, Henry sees trouble. And then two of Spenser’s former cop buddies end up killed, he decides he has to get to the bottom of what has happened. In vigilante style, with the help of his friends, he takes on the Boston police department and finds ever deeper layers of corruption.

Spenser Confidential is a simple who-dunnit movie, with a comedic twist, a good story, but overall not very inspiring. Mark Wahlberg is a good actor, and I have never seen a movie with Alan Arkin I didn’t like. He is such a convincing actor, and he always seems to get the dirty-old-grandpa roles that fit him so well.

I would not recommend you go to the movies and pay for this, but hey, it’s 2020, it’s on Netflix, and if you have nothing better to do at 11:00pm and want to get a couple of hours of entertainment – don’t let me stop you.

Seb is a regular dude who finds a new girlfriend. One day, without warning, he just disappears. Or at least that’s what it looks like for us in the normal world. From his point of view, he simply wakes up a year later, skipping forward in time. From his girlfriend’s point of view, he was gone, and then, without explanation a year later, he comes back. It takes several of these jumps before the two of them figure this out. How do you have a relationship with a man who is only “with you” one day every year?

This movie is surprisingly well done for such a weird central concept. It’s a movie looking for a reason to exist, but, hey, it came out in 2020, what do we expect?