Category: Two Stars

Movie Review: The Midnight Sky

On By Norbert HauptIn Movies, Two StarsLeave a comment

The story starts in the year 2049, a few weeks after “The Event,” some apocalyptic global disaster that kills pretty much all life on earth. Augustine (George Clooney) is a space scientist stationed in the Arctic. When all his colleagues are flown out, he stays behind. Maybe he realizes that everyone else dies anyway, and the Arctic is one of the last safe places in the world.

He is lonely, and he is ill. As he goes about his daily routine, he discovers that a little girl was left behind. This complicates matters for him. A cantankerous old man is not a good caretaker for a little girl who (for some reason) does not speak.

Parallel to the catastrophe on earth, mankind’s first interplanetary space mission just visited a formerly not discovered moon of Jupiter, called K23. It is, due to internal heating, suitable for human habitation. The crew is now on its way back, approaching earth. Augustine knows that and tries to contact them to warn them about the disaster and encourage them not to come back.

The crew of the ship suffers severe damage from flying through a debris field and barely makes it back to earth. The situation is hopeless for the few people left on earth, and it’s just as hopeless for the space travelers who are weary and homesick after years in space and want nothing more than to go home. But that does not seem possible anymore.

The Midnight Sky is based on the novel Good Morning, Midnight, by Lily Brooks-Dalton. It apparently follows the book very closely (I have not read the book, but gathered this from reading some reviews). It’s an unlikely story, with an open end, or you might call it no end at all.

I enjoyed the depictions of the space ship, the way they generated artificial gravity, and how they moved about the vessel. There were some nice EVA (spacewalk) scenes, too. The damage to the ship by meteorites was done with pretty neat special effects, but the fact that the ship survived a hail of rocks and ice was very unlikely. Also, I understand that it’s not possible to show realistically what it would look like to get hit by pebbles in space traveling 20,000 to 30,000 miles per hour. Just putting that into perspective, a bullet shot from a rifle exits the barrel at 1,200 to 2,800 miles per hour, depending on the type of rifle. Can you see the bullet flying? You obviously could not see the rocks coming at you at more than 10 to 20 times the speed of a bullet. You would just be obliterated from one moment to the next. But that does not make for a good movie.

Overall, I found Midnight Sky to be a good story, but not one you absolutely have to go and see – unless you’re a space buff – then you have to.

Book Review: Agent of Time – by Nathan Van Coops

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Science Fiction, Time Travel, Two StarsLeave a comment

It’s 1985 in St. Petersburg, Florida. Rookie Special Agent Stella York is one of the first female FBI agents, and she does not have the support of her peers or her superiors. Yet, the case she is put on is completely baffling.

Two dead men are found in a van that crashed into a power pole, yet the power pole does not show any damage, while the van is totaled. The van is a GMC model nobody has ever heard of in 1985. Furthermore, the license plate expiration sticker shows “10.”

One of the dead men’s fingerprints are an exact match with those of a prison guard at a local prison – which is impossible. Then, during a chase on I-275 North, she witnesses the gory death of a suspect in a car accident, yet, she runs into him very much alive a day later. Nothing makes sense, until one of the witnesses opens up to her and tells her that she’s dealing with time travelers. From the chronological point of view, events seem to happen out of order.

Agent York is losing all her professional credibility when she approaches her superiors with her theory.

Agent of Time plays in Nathan Van Coops’ universe of the In Times Like These, a series of books I have read. See the reviews here:

In Times Like These

The Chronothon

The Day After Never

The Warp Clock

More specifically, Agent of Time plays within the In Times Like These story. I have read prequels to successful books before, and they are usually entertaining, because I know the world that comes after the prequel ends. But I have never read a book that plays “within the original story.”

If you have read the hugely famous Harry Potter series of books, you will understand what “Muggles” are. In Harry Potter, the action takes place among people who are involved in magic: wizards, sorcerers, and the like. Everyone knows that magic is real, and understands its rules. Muggles are the regular people, like you and I, who do not have magical talents and in almost all cases do not believe in magic and do not know it’s going on all around us – well – at least in the Harry Potter universe.

In Nathan Van Coops’ books, the action takes place among people who routinely travel in time. They take it for granted, and they use it creatively. But the rest of us, the time-Muggles, have no idea time travel is possible, it’s happening, and it’s routine for some people. Agent of Time plays parallel to the story of In Times Like These, but it is told from the point of view of time-Muggles like Stella York. What would it look like if there were time travelers amongst us, doing their things, and what would it be like if there were time traveling criminals?

You don’t need to have read In Times Like These to understand Agent of Time, but you will enjoy it MUCH more if you have. I would recommend that you read In Times Like These first, then read Agent of Time, and you’ll have the best experience.

Agent of Time is a short book of only 137 pages. It was free on Amazon. I literally read the whole thing in one day, yesterday. The author probably was in a rush to get it out, because it fell kind of short. The ending was somewhat abrupt, probably setting us up for the next Stella York story, the time-Muggle. But it’s a good addition to the series, and Van Coops is still, in my opinion, one of the strongest writers in the genre.

 

Book Review: The Evening and the Morning – by Ken Follett

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, History, Two StarsLeave a comment

It is the year 997 in England, the end of the Dark Ages. The people live in wooden houses and use primitive tools.

Edgar is an eighteen-year-old youth, the son of a boatbuilder. During a Viking raid, his village is destroyed, his father is killed, and his mother and brothers have to move to a new village and start from scratch, trying to survive.

Ragna is the daughter of a Norman nobleman who falls in love with Wilwulf, the ealdorman (you’ll have to look that up here) of Shiring. She moves to England to marry him, but she has no idea what the customs are in her new world. Quickly her life is all but destroyed.

Aldred is a young monk who wants to turn his monastery into a center of learning and culture. This is in the time when copies of books were written by hand, and when books where hugely expensive and impossible to own.

Wynston is the bishop of Shiring, a cunning, brutal man who will stop at nothing, including fratricide, to get what he wants, more power and more riches.

The lives of these four people are interlinked and connected as we watch them struggle for survival, for love and lust, for power and for enlightenment. But in the end, the story is too simple, the plot predictable, and the characters are one-dimensional and not believable.

I bought this book without bothering to first download the preview to see if I’d like it, based completely on the reputation and caliber of the author. I have read the “Kingsbridge Trilogy” starting with Pillars of the Earth, one of the best historical novel I have ever read. The Evening and the Morning is the fourth book of the Kingsbridge series, written as a prequel to Pillars. It plays about a hundred years before Pillars, when the little hamlet that will once become Kingsbridge consists of just a few hovels in the middle of nowhere.

I have no idea why the title of the book is The Evening and the Morning. Surely, Follett could have spent a little more time thinking of a better title. The book is over 900 pages long and it takes patience to read. I was hoping I’d get more history out of the experience, but I really didn’t. The story is a love story, a tale of utter evil and brutishness, power and abuse, sex (too much of it) and melodrama. Disney could have written the story, and it could have played anywhere and at any time. It just turns out it played in the decade between the years 997 and 1007, during the reign of King Ethelred II.

The Evening and the Morning is a nice attempt at a historical novel that describes life during the Dark Ages, or better, the end of the Dark Ages, but it misses a lot of opportunities. Edgar, one of the protagonists, could have been shown as an old man, jumping forward closer to the 1100 period, where Pillars starts. As it turns out, I learned more about the history of that period in England browsing wikipidia.org for Ethelred, the term “ealdorman,” the Viking raids, and court life during that period than I learned from reading The Evening and the Morning. 

Follett is a great writer, and this book leaves me with the feeling that he just wanted to write something quickly and without much imagination to make some money from his loyal followers. The book really doesn’t have anything to do with the Kingsbridge stories, other than it plays 100 years before John Builder first sets foot into the town of Kingsbridge is search of a job.

That’s when it gets exciting. You will not miss anything if you skip The Evening and the Morning.

Movie Review: 41

On By Norbert HauptIn Time Travel, Two StarsLeave a comment

41 is a pretty bad movie title for an amateur movie. You have to actually watch it to understand what it is.

Aidan is a college student to seems to go through the motions in his life without a lot of enthusiasm. One morning, after class, somebody that looks like himself, walks up to him and tells him not to go to the Heathscape Hotel.

Of course, that’s like somebody telling you not to think of a yellow elephant. So Aiden ends up going to the Heathscape Hotel and through a few strange events discovers that in room 41 (hence the title of the movie) in the bathroom, there is a time-portal. All he has to do is pull back the linoleum in the corner of the bathroom, climb into the hole for a moment, pull himself back out, and he arrives – yesterday.

Since it’s yesterday, he can now leave the room, if he makes it past any potential occupants in the hotel room itself, walk downstairs and find himself. After all, he should remember what he did yesterday, and then find himself. However, if there is somebody in the room and he can’t leave the bathroom – no problem – just climb back under the floor for a second, come back out yesterday again, which, of course, is now the day before yesterday of the original day.

By going back in time, he is trying to prevent the death of his girlfriend in a gruesome car accident while he was driving, but he does not seem to succeed.

41 is actually a pretty good time travel story, albeit with one plot problem: If you can only travel back, you create another copy of yourself every time you do it, and you really never come back to the present. This conundrum isn’t solved in this movie, but it has a pretty neat twist at the end that makes it a worthwhile story, so much so, that you’ll be tempted to want to watch it again to make sure what you saw was what actually happened.

The acting is poor, the production is skimpy, and the plot is full of major holes, but there is one hole in a bathroom in room 41 that makes it all worthwhile.

 

 

Movie Review: Limitless

On By Norbert HauptIn Movies, Two StarsLeave a comment

Eddie Morra (Bradley Cooper) is a struggling and unemployed writer. His girlfriend Lindy (Abby Cornish) breaks up with him over lunch. She has just been promoted to editor and does not want to be with a loser anymore. At rock-bottom, Eddie runs into an old friend who gives him an experimental drug called NZT which is supposed to unleash 100% of one’s brain capabilities and capacity.

Eddie takes the pill, and immediately realizes that it gives him virtual superpowers. He remembers everything he has ever seen, read, experienced, watched and observed, and he can put together conclusions from those memories with lightening speed. His laser focus quickly results in unleashing a financial genius. When he draws the attention of business tycoon Carl Van Loon (Robert De Niro), their collaboration gets them on the way to make billions.

But the drug has side effects, there is only a limited supply of it, and he quickly finds out that he is not the only one that has it. His life gets complicated very fast.

Limitless is an action thriller of a different kind. It explores the capacity of the human brain and its possibilities – which do appear limitless.

I enjoyed watching this movie. It was entertaining. But – end the end – forgettable.

Movie Review: The Lost Husband

On By Norbert HauptIn Movies, Two StarsLeave a comment

When her husband dies in a terrible car accident, Libby’s life falls apart. Her two young daughters give her the reason to continue. She packs up the minivan and moves out to the country in Central Texas, where her aunt runs a struggling goat farm.  She offers her room and board in exchange for help on the farm.

The kids adapt to life in the country quickly, but it’s harder for Libby. There are secrets in her family, and her overbearing mother and her aunt aren’t exactly helping her uncover her past. There is also a cantankerous farm manager who does the work around the farm, teaches the girls some very practical skills and slowly gets Libby’s attention as well.

The Lost Husband is a story of life’s hard knocks in contemporary rural Texas, where life on the farm is everything, and where city slickers are frowned upon.

The movie is an adaptation of the book The Lost Husband by Katherine Center. I have not read the book, but saw some reviews that state that the movie follows the book closely. It’s a feel-good family movie, with something for everyone, but it does not go too deep. A lot of reviewers on IMDb gave it 10 out of 10 stars, which seems strange to me. The Lost Husband has some of the feeling and sentiment of Fried Green Tomatoes, but it’s no Fried Green Tomatoes.

Movie Review: Come as You Are

On By Norbert HauptIn Movies, Two StarsLeave a comment

Three young men with disabilities need to get away from it all. Two are in wheelchairs, one of them completely disabled from the neck down. And the third is blind. All three of them are virgins. They make a pact to get away, and escorted by a nurse driver, they go on a road trip from somewhere in the Midwest to Montreal, where they heard there was brothel that “caters to people like them.”

At first, the nurse does not know what’s going on, but by the end of the first day, staying in a motel, she figures it out. Soon she joins their quest and helps them escape the tentacles of their parents who, thinking they are “in trouble” are trying to bring them back home.

On they go, and they each find what they are looking for, but not exactly where they thought they would find it.

I enjoyed watching this film, even though there are some unrealistic scenes and some plot holes. But it was meant to be a comedy and to put a spotlight on disability, something the able-bodied among us can easily ignore. It was good and heartwarming, and when I got up from the couch after watching I was grateful that I could do so without asking anyone to help me.

Come As You Are is a remake of the acclaimed Belgian film ‘Hasta La Vista’ which in turn is based on the real-life story of Asta Philpot, which was chronicled in the 2007 documentary ‘For One Night Only’.

Movie Review: Da 5 Bloods

On By Norbert HauptIn Atrocities, Movies, Two Stars, WarLeave a comment

Five decades after the Vietnam war we still have riveting movies about that war, or that conflict, as it was called back then. Spike Lee tells the story of Da 5 Bloods, the nickname for a group of all black Vietnam veterans, Paul (Delroy Lindo), Otis (Clarke Peters), Eddie (Norm Lewis), and Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr.), who go back to find and exhume their fallen leader, Stormin’ Norman (Chadwick Boseman), and bring him home, and to find the massive cache of gold bars they buried there in 1971. To help them, Paul has brought along his adult son, David (Jonathan Majors).

They find Norman, and they find the gold. The problem is, you can’t just carry out that much gold in backpacks without attracting the wrong kind of attention, and the ensuing conflicts during the retreat brings out the worst in each of them, all deeply damaged from post-traumatic stress and ruined lives. Today’s Vietnam is not the Vietnam of the 1960s, but it’s also not Kansas. There are still plenty of landmines that can kill, and demons that can drive you insane.

In today’s age, where black Americans are once again the targets of hate, injustice and suppression fueled by nascent resurgence of racism let loose in our society, a movie about the fates of black soldiers in a war that wasn’t theirs hits the mark. Beware that this movie has some very horrid imagery that once seen, will stay with you for a long time. Some pictures cannot be unseen. I have warned you.

Movie Review: Angel has Fallen

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It’s six years after Olympus has Fallen, when Allen Trumbull (Morgan Freeman) was the Speaker of the House and was Acting President during the terrorist crisis. Apparently, President Asher has served his two terms, and now Allan Trumbull is the President of the United States, and Mike Banning (Gerard Butler) is his most trusted Secret Service agent.

There is a high-tech assassination attempt on the president while on a fishing trip. His entire Secret Service detail is killed, and only Banning survives and manages to save the president. He is wrongfully accused of the attack and arrested. After he escapes against all odds, it becomes clear to him that he has been set up. Alone on the outside, the entire U.S. law enforcement machine after him, the president in a coma in the hospital, Mike Banning goes on the offensive, saving the legitimate government from a coup at the highest levels.

While the action in Angel has Fallen is as intense (and unlikely) as in Olympus has Fallen, this is a somewhat better movie – that is – if you like the intense action hero style movies, where everyone gets killed and the hero gets beat up and scratched and shot and poked, but it never seems to stop him.

Movie Review: El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie

On By Norbert HauptIn Movies, Two StarsLeave a comment

If you ever want to know what happened to Jesse of Breaking Bad after the end of the series, when Walter White was killed, El Camino is the movie to watch.

Through a series of scenes going forward after Walter’s death, and via many flashbacks, El Camino brings back the full cast of characters, Jesse, the hapless Todd, Skinny, Badger, and definitely Mike. There is also a flashback appearance of Mr. White and Jesse in a coffee shop, which is priceless.

I watched El Camino right after watching the second episode of Better Call Saul, and before watching the third, and the whole series, with El Camino in the middle, brings me back to 12 years ago when Breaking Bad was breaking really bad in this country.

El Camino is a “must watch” for anyone who followed the Breaking Bad craze. And while this review is not about Better Call Saul, I have to say: The current (and last) season of Better Call Saul, which is the immediate prequel to the Breaking Bad series, is the best of Better Call Saul ever. You must see that one too.

Book Review: Valley of Horses – by Jean M. Auel

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, History, Two StarsLeave a comment

At the end of The Clan of the Cave Bear, Ayla is expelled from the Clan, and she walks away into the unknown wilderness in search of “The Others,” her own people.

Eventually, she finds The Valley of Horses, with a suitable empty cave on a cliff in a protected canyon, a stream with a waterfall above it, and the steppe not far beyond the valley. The glacier, which shapes the local climate an the flora and fauna, is not far away toward the north.

Ayla makes her home there. The rescues a colt and raises it, and later she rescues a baby cave lion, and raises it too. She ends up spending three years alone in the valley with her animals.

Jondalar and Thonolan are two young brothers on a journey down the Danube to the “sea,” which of course is what we know as the Black Sea today. On their odyssey they get to know many different tribes. Eventually, they end up in Ayla’s valley under catastrophic conditions, with Jondalar severely injured.

Ayla nurses Jondalar to heath and eventually the two become a couple.

I read The Clan of the Cave Bear decades ago for the first time, and I remember reading The Valley of Horses, its sequel, also, but I remembered nothing about it. When I recently re-read Clan, I decided to also re-read Valley. They are the first two books of the Earth’s Children series of six books written by Auel. I enjoyed The Valley of Horses to a degree. It does a nice job portraying life in the stone age by the Cro Magnon man, our direct ancestors, and it contrasts that to the lives of the Neanderthals, of “the Clan” as they are called in this series. I have always been interested in pre-history, taking place in southern and eastern Europe during the current Ice Age but before the last glacial period – or about 30,000 years ago.

Jondalar’s home is where France is today, and Ayla’s home is originally in today’s Crimea. The Valley of Horses is about where today’s Kiev is in Ukraine. The Cro Magnon people were on the rise with their advances in hunting techniques, weapons and general social structure. The Neanderthals, who had reigned over Europe and Eastern Europe for more than 100,000 years, virtually with no changes in their lives, were on the decline. There was occasional interbreeding during that period, between the two sub-species of humans, and this overall backdrop sets the stage for The Valley of Horses.

The story is a bit boring at times, particularly when the author repetitively describes things that she has described before. There is also a surprising amount of explicit sex, with detailed, graphic sex scenes going on for pages. I can understand that it’s necessary to include sex to describe the lives of the people, but there is too much of it in this book. Sometimes I felt like I was reading a romance novel, and it should have had a Fabio-like dude with a fur loin cloth holding a blond vixen in a passionate kiss. I don’t know why the author found it necessary to include as much sex as she did. It got repetitive to me, and I found it unnecessary.

I got my fix of pre-history with these two books.

I now marvel about time-scales. This played 30,000 years ago. That’s 10 times as long as our modern timescale, if you think of the time of the ancient Greeks as the start of modern times. No innovations occurred in their lives for tens of thousands of years, thousands of generations. When I compare that to the pace of innovation we are experiencing now, I am awestruck at the length of human history, and how long we endured under very challenging conditions so I could be here today.

I will not read the next four books in the series, but it peeked my interest in anthropology. So today, at the bookstore, I picked up “Who we are and how we got here – Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past” by David Reich. It’s a science book. It won’t have sex scenes, but it’ll give me that feeling of awe when I face the unlikely history of humanity.

Movie Review: Casablanca

On By Norbert HauptIn Movies, Two Stars3 Comments

The movie Casablanca is 78 years old and is renowned to be one of the best movies of all time. It seems to show up in all lists within the top five, and everyone knows it as a classic. So it may come as a surprise when I tell you that I had never before watched Casablanca, and other than having a picture in my mind of an airplane in a fog and people in white suits surrounding it, I really knew nothing about it.

Yesterday I watched Casablanca with a group of about 15 other movie buffs, a number of whom had watched it many times before. I feel odd actually describing such a classic here, but I must at least make a cursory effort:

It’s early in World War II. The Germans have invaded France and occupied Paris, and they are making their first incursions into North Africa. Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) is a jaded former freedom fighter. He had had a love affair with Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman), a beautiful woman in Paris, just before the German invasion. When they were going to escape together, she unexpectedly abandoned him at the train station. Rick never got over losing the love of his life. A year later, in 1942, he runs a nightclub in Casablanca and his life is turned upside down when Ilsa suddenly walks in with a famed rebel leader, seeking to escape the Nazis and travel to America.

While I have a lot of respect for all the people who admire Casablanca and praise it one of the greatest movies of all time, frankly, it didn’t do much for me. Yes, it is a very well-crafted story, yes, the casting and acting are superb, and yes, it tells a story of what it was like in World War II in North Africa, where corruption and money made things happen and ordinary people were crushed. I could not quite connect or get into the story, and I found myself observing myself watching a classic. I certainly can’t imagine wanting to watch it again.

“So here’s looking at you, kid.”

Book Review: No Highway – by Nevil Shute

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Two StarsLeave a comment

After reading a few books that I did not enjoy very much for a variety of reasons, I picked up No Highway by Nevil Shute because I knew, having read the author before, that he is a good story teller and will present a solidly crafted novel. I read Trustee from the Toolroom in 2014 and A Town Like Alice in 2015. These books were all recommended by my Australian friend (and frequent commenter in this blog), Ray Cullen. Thanks Ray!

In No Highway, the narrator is Dr. Scott, a young manager in the government agency responsible for aircraft safety in the U.K. in the 1950s. But the hero is Mr. Honey, an awkward, introverted, but brilliant engineer who does advanced work in fatigue studies in metallurgy.  He discovers an esoteric problem with the tail structure of the Reindeer, the U.K.’s most modern passenger airplane of the time that was just put into cross-Atlantic service. But being somewhat goofy and off-mainstream, many people don’t believe Honey. Only through drastic action that jeopardizes his career does he get the attention of the aerospace establishment. All hinges on the results of his experiments and the recovery of crash data from a remote site in the Canadian Labrador forests.

I can’t figure out why the book is called No Highway, as it does, at least to me, not relate to the story at all. It is, however, a well-crafted novel just like I would have expected from Nevil Shute. He did not let me down. While I enjoyed reading it, I can see it may be somewhat dry to a person not interested in engineering, and with the engineering subject matter being now 70 years outdated, the book is a bit awkward today. For instance, much of the plot depends on the fact that when you crossed the Atlantic in 1950 and went into the Canadian hinterland, you were completely out of reach. The only intercontinental communications in those days was a “cable” which is basically a telegram. It was expensive, difficult to send and receive, and it took a lot of time. We now live in a world with instant communications all over the globe, and we can’t even conceive of a situation where a major scientist is doing field work in the Canadian north in the woods where he would be completely, utterly out of reach. Today, we’d send texts and emails through satellite phones charged by solar panels – no problem at all.

This is not Nevil Shute’s problem, but Amazon’s. This book is the worst Kindle book with the classic automatic conversion errors I have ever read. Here is an example:

So had Mr Honey been, but I would not tell him that I ad raid, Tm very sorry about the Reindeer, Mr Prendergast I’m afraid this is bound to mean that all those aircraft will be grounded now at seven hundred and twenty hours.1 He said genially, ‘Oh well, worse things happen at sea. I expect we shall get over it, one way or another.’
— Nevil Shute. No Highway (Kindle Locations 5118-5121). Kindle Edition.

I highlighted the offending sections in red for you. The problem is that the entire book has these errors. There are THOUSANDS of them. Pretty much every page is messed up. I “only” paid $0.99 for this book, which is not a lot, but why doesn’t Amazon have a process in place where readers can provide edits back that a human could then use to fix the books? I am a stickler with that – Amazon should require that at least one editor reads every book and fixes it before it is going to be sold!

Terrible!

The editing issues are Amazon’s problem, so I won’t hold that against the book in my rating. Overall, I give it a solid two stars.

Movie Review: Bombshell

On By Norbert HauptIn Movies, Political, Two Stars3 Comments

Bombshell is a dramatization of the time in 2016 when Megyn Kelly didn’t put up with the degrading behavior of candidate Trump, and when Roger Ailes, the creator of Fox News, fell after a massive scandal of sexual harassment.

It is not clear, of course, how much of the story is dramatized, and how much is real. But it gives a telling view of Fox News behind the scenes.

Megyn Kelly (Charlize Theron) and Gretchen Carlson (Nicole Kidman) are the main characters in the drama of the fall of Roger Ailes (John Lithgow). They know something is rotten in Fox News, and they struggle internally and openly between coming forward, telling the truth, and exposing what is going on, or staying quiet and continuing with their lucrative careers. We all know how it eventually ended. Roger Ailes was let go by Robert Murdoch, the owner of the network. Eventually, Bill O’Reilly also fell from grace.

I remember watching Fox News over the years, and I remember wondering why all the women in prominent roles, especially the anchors, looked like Barbie Dolls. Now I know. Management required it, all the way from the top down. All the women knew they’d have to buy into it if they wanted to be on television, it was as simple as that. And watching Fox News now, Roger Ailes long gone and meanwhile deceased, it’s still that way today. Fox News hasn’t changed.

Megyn Kelly doesn’t work there anymore, and many others have gone, too.

Bombshell is a revealing movie about a time in our history that is not over yet. Therefore it is quite relevant right now and watching it was insightful. It was a little odd to have all the characters played by actors. Charlize Theron does an amazing job with Megyn Kelly. She looks just like her, and acts just like her. The same holds true for John Lithgow playing Ailes, where it’s important to remember that Ailes was never on television on the front lines, so the viewers don’t know him that well and therefore cannot judge whether Lithgow got it right.

All the other main characters in Fox News make appearances in the form of actors, including Hannity, Pirro, O’Reilly and many others. Fortunately, when a new character is introduced there is always a caption with the name of the character. In some cases, there was a strong likeness, in others not so much. I didn’t recognize Hannity, for example. The playing of Fox News celebrities in Bombshell is somewhat reminiscent on how it is done of Saturday Night Live – a bit comical. But what else could they do?

Overall a movie worthwhile to watch, particularly if you are NOT a follower or fan of Fox News.

Know thy enemy!

Movie Review: Uncut Gems

On By Norbert HauptIn Movies, Two StarsLeave a comment

We went to see Uncut Gems on Christmas Day. It was the highest-rated movie available, and while we didn’t know much about it, we thought it would be a safe bet.

Uncut Gems kills your Christmas spirit with the speed and power of a baseball bat hit on the side of the head.

Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler) is a New York City jeweler and compulsive gambler. His life is filled with frenetic activity in all areas. He is cheating on his wife, he is neglecting his three children, he is not paying his debts to mafia-types, he is abusing his employees, he is using his friends, and he swindles everyone he comes in contact with. That does not come without a cost.

He succeeds in buying a rare opal from a dubious source at an Ethiopian gem mine. He estimates the raw (uncut) gem is worth over a million dollars, and he tries to sell it to a superstitious basketball player who thinks it gives him power. But it’s never that simple, because he has to use the leverage of the gem to hold off the many wolves he owes money to. As you might expect, things don’t always work out like he has been planning.

Uncut Gems starts out with frantic activity, total chaos all around, cussing, beating, cheating and subterfuge. Every scene is accentuated by a powerful sound track of custom music to further disorient the viewer. Within about ten minutes of watching I realized I didn’t have a clue about what was going on. I was severely disturbed and wondering why I was there. The couple who sat next to us left after about 30 minutes. I assume they couldn’t take it anymore. I was close, but we stuck with it in hopes of it getting better.

The plot was impossible to follow. But I assume that was by the design of the music and the camera work, accompanied by the constant yelling of the people. Confusion abounded.

The movie also holds a dubious record of being in place seven of all time for movies with the word fuck or fuck-derivatives. There are 408 in the movie, or about three a minute.

Fucks notwithstanding, this was a very hard movie to watch, and when it was done, I was dazed.

I found no moral, no redeeming value and no lessons.

Just stay away from gambling, and from the jewelry business in New York.

I felt like I needed a shower when it was all done.

And yes, Sandler will probably win some awards for that performance.