FunBlog

The Blind Side is a mostly-true biopic. It tells the story of Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron), a homeless, functionally-illiterate teenager who ended up winning a football scholarship to the University of Mississippi; made the honor roll in college; and recently signed a $13.8 million contract with the Baltimore Ravens.

The movie is so sweet and upbeat that my cynical side wishes I had a good excuse to trash it. However the truth is that I had a good time. It avoids the trap of excessive sentimentality; in fact most of the time it manages to be quite funny. It’s a good approach. The director is smart enough to realize that the story inherently has enough emotional punch that there is no need to indulge in mawkish tricks.

Sandra Bullock, who plays Oher’s adoptive mother, is the heart of the movie. Her warm-hearted but tough-minded character dominates every scene she is in (which is most of them) and as often as not has the audience rolling on the floor.

Twilight, the original movie, was cheesy fun. The sequel New Moon is not as much fun, in fact much of it is rather tedious.

The sequel picks up where the original left off (and does nothing to bring you up to speed, so forget it if you didn’t see the first movie.) To begin with Edward decides to leave Bella (for her own good of course.) Bella gets depressed and mopes around for a loooooong time. She takes up risky activities and hangs out with Jake, the nice hunky Native American boy, whom she leads on and treats rather badly in my opinion.

It’s not until half-way through the movie that the werewolves finally appear. This is a great relief since the werewolves are good hokey fun, but we don’t see enough of them. The part of the movie that isn’t about Bella moping is perhaps one-third about werewolves and the rest about the emo vampires.

This is too bad since I like the werewolves better. I’m sick of hearing the vampires whine about what a dreadful curse it is to be eternally young and beautiful and rich. The werewolves are working-class monsters. They have a less-privileged life, but they are proud and good with their hands and generally don’t complain as much. Bella prefers the vampires, but that just shows her poor taste.

In 1966, a time when British performers were revolutionizing popular music, the British public had surprisingly few ways to listen to them. The BBC had little interest in broadcasting rock n’ roll, so British fans tuned their radios to “pirate” stations broadcasting from ships anchored in international waters.

(There was a somewhat similar phenomenon in America at about that time. The government did not own the radio stations, but it limited their number and regulated their content. Fans of cutting-edge music tuned to powerful stations broadcasting from Mexico, where the government was inclined to let broadcasters do as they pleased.)

Pirate Radio is a good-natured nostalgic comedy that takes place mostly on “Radio Rock”, a fictitious pirate radio ship. (Claims that the move is “based on a true story” are overblown, though some of the characters are very loosely based on real people.)
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“Robert X Cringely” (Mark Stephens) offers his own design for a “space garbage scow” to clean up all the space junk. It sounds a bit more practical than the approach used in Planetes.

Ewan McGregor

“More of this is true than you would believe.”

The Men Who Stare at Goats is an offbeat comedy that gains a certain edginess by making us wonder how much of it is based on fact. I doubt that there is much truth in it, but it is still hilarious.

Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor), a down-and-out reporter, is waiting in Kuwait in 2002, hoping to get an “embedded” position with a U.S. military unit. He meets Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), a hard-bitten ex-soldier who claims to be a “Jedi Warrior”, trained in paranormal fighting techniques in a top-secret U.S. Army project. Ignoring the telltale signs that Cassady may be totally nuts, Wilton agrees to accompany him on a secret mission into Iraq.

During the trip we gradually learn the story of how back in the late 1970s and early 80s, the Pentagon, worried about Soviet psychic research programs, allowed the charismatic Lt. Colonel Bill Django (Jeff Bridges) to form a top-secret unit called the “New Earth Army”, in which soldiers were trained to be “warrior monks” using an eclectic mix of New Age techniques. However the experiment had tragic results due to machinations of a malicious recruit named Larry Hooper (Kevin Spacey).

The movie claims to be a work of fiction based on a non-fiction book. The book is apparently totally serious but the movie takes a whimsical approach to the question of whether the program ever existed, let alone whether the soldier ever developed deadly psychic powers.

Amelia, a biography of aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart (Hilary Swank) is interesting but curiously unengaging. It is reasonably historically accurate (at least by biopic standards) and may be worth watching if you want to learn about the life of this remarkable woman. However as entertainment, as story-telling, it isn’t very successful.

Surprisingly little time is devoted to the dramatic flights that made Earhart famous. The move seems more interested in her personal life, particularly her relationship with her husband and manager, publisher George Putnam (Richard Gere). Yet it doesn’t really succeed as a love story either. Much of the time it just seems to be checking off the significant events in her life.

The only part of the move that achieves much dramatic tension is the final sequence depicting her doomed last flight.

Before that we are treated to a long conversation between Earhart (in New Guinea) and Putnam (in California). Even though they are speaking over short-wave radio, they somehow manage to get a perfect fiber-optic-quality connection, allowing them to whisper endearments to each other instead of shouting over the static. This is probably a good indication of the movie’s commitment to technical accuracy.

Wow! Ethan and Joel Coen must have been in a really dark mood when the made A Serious Man. It is a very, very dark comedy, essentially a retelling of the Book of Job, with no sugar-coating.

Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is the Job character, a physics professor at a small Midwestern college in the late 1960s. He’s an ineffectual nebbish who tries earnestly to do the right thing, though he isn’t sure what that is. The people around him tend to push him around and take advantage of him, while Fate deals him one nasty blow after another. (I use the term “nebbish” advisedly. The story is set in a mostly-Jewish community and has a strong Jewish sensibility.)

The move is painfully funny. I found myself laughing quite a lot, and when I wasn’t laughing I was wincing. You can choose to see this as a bitterly comic commentary on the human condition. If you can’t see it that way, it will probably be like watching a kitten being tortured. Not for every taste, in other words, and you need to be in the right mood to enjoy it.