Movie Reviews – March 2008

Here is what we saw:

Here are my reviews:

The Other Boleyn Girl

The Boleyns are presented as social climbers and they use their daughters to further their cause. At first they try to interest the king in Anne, but when he is injured in a riding accident it is Mary who nurses him and catches his eye. She is newly married but what the heck. The king orders her to court. Her husband is assigned to duties in distant parts and she becomes the king’s mistress. Eventually she gets pregnant and bears him a son. In the mean time Anne arrives at court and catches the king’s fancy. She doesn’t succumb to his advances and talks Henry into breaking with the Roman Church. When they do finally marry, she has Elizabeth, another female heir, but miscarries all her male children. The king has to get rid of this wife too so a situation where Anne is made to look like she has had an incestuous relationship with her brother is concocted. Both are executed and Henry is now set for his next wife. He will go on to have 6 all told. Very few records exist from this time so only the broadest strokes of the story are documented. All the details are fabricated. Anne really was tried for the relationship with her brother, but also 5 other men which the move doesn’t mention. Some current thinking is that all of that is untrue. That Henry was only house cleaning. Some historians believe that Anne was her daughter’s equal. If she had produced the appropriate sons, she would have continued as queen and that she was as intelligent and strong willed as Elizabeth was to become. She may well have changed England’s history even more than she did. It is unclear whether Anne or Mary is the Other Boleyn Girl.
Theater – 3 stars

Waitress

Jenna is stuck in a loveless marriage with a clueless brute of a husband. She must obey his every decree. She works in a pie restaurant where she is the star pie maker, inheriting many of her recipes from her mother, but creating many of her own. She unexpectedly and unhappily finds herself pregnant. When she goes to the doctor she is attracted to him and begins an affair. She starts squirreling money away around the house to be able to get away from her husband. When he finds it, there is hell to pay but she convinces him it was for the baby. The owner of the cafe is a crusty old guy and none of the other waitresses will wait on him so Jenna is always his server. He takes a shine to her because of their honest interactions. She tells him her woes and he says that one can always make a fresh start. She can’t see how with a job that pays nothing and a baby on the way. She is resigned to her fate. [SPOILER] When she goes in to the hospital to have the baby, the old guy goes in for surgery too. He dies and leaves her enough money to buy the cafe. She tells her husband she doesn’t love him and hasn’t for years. She breaks off the affair with the doctor and lives happily ever after.
Netflix – 3 stars

Arctic Tale

A baby polar bear and a baby walrus are born about the same time. The stories of their lives run parallel with each other, but eventually they meet. I figured the polar bear would eat the walrus but that doesn’t happen. Both species are stressed by the changing arctic climate however. When you find out that the movie was made by the same people that made An Inconvenient Truth, their heavy handed preaching jumps out at you. In fact, after thinking about the film for a while, you realize the whole purpose of the movie was the preaching and it is only thinly covered by the nature documentary. I’m as much against global warming as the next person but this struck me as being a little dishonest. I’ve often wondered about the storylines of nature documentaries. One thinks that the film crews either set out to capture certain behaviors or they follow a particular subject. But in this film I think they got a bunch of footage and prepared a fictionalized account out of what they got. You could tell what was going to happen to the main polar bear’s brother from the instant he was introduced. The mother bear had a name, the female cub had a name, all the walruses had names, but the male cub never got one. You knew that sucker was going to bite the dust (snow). If it weren’t for some wonderful shots, I might have given this one a 2.
Netflix – 3 stars

The Simpsons Movie

Homer dumps a silo full of pig manure into Lake Springfield and causes an environmental crisis. In response, the EPA puts a gigantic dome over Springfield and doesn’t let anyone in or out. The Simpsons escape through a sink hole and move to Alaska. Knowing someone escaped, let alone it being Homer, the EPA decides to remedy the situation by creating a new Grand Canyon by blowing the whole place up. The Simpsons return home to save the day. Hooray! I never was a big fan of the Simpsons but I always thought they were kinda funny. And there are some funny parts to this show. An unexpected turn of phrase, outrageous behavior, and some wonderful little gags going on in the background that have nothing to do with the foreground action. But they only amounted to about 2% of the movie and the rest of it was pretty boring. Sorry Simpson fans, this one didn’t cut it.
Netflix – 2 stars

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day

Set in the 1930’s, Miss Pettigrew is a down-on-her-luck nanny, the nanny of last resort. While in the employment agency getting the latest and final bad news, she palms a business card and applies for a job as a social secretary to a scatter brained young actress. When she arrives, all hell is breaking loose so she takes matters in hand and saves the day. The actress likes her immediately and they spend the rest of the day in various adventures. By midnight they have solved the problems and love has found a way. This was a sweet movie.
Theater – 3 stars

Poirot: Mystery of the Blue Train and Taken at the Flood

Poirot mysteries start to look pretty much the same after a while. There is not much point describing the plots of these two. They are intricate as all Christie plots are. All in all the production values of this series are great. Nothing is different with that here. What is different is that these two are from about season 10. David Suchet looks 10 years older and Hastings, Miss Lemon, and Japp are gone. I don’t know if they are written out in the books too or if there were just casting difficulties. One nice touch, in the Mystery of the Blue Train the sweet young thing asks Poirot if he has ever been on the Orient Express. He says he hasn’t but will have to do so soon.
Netflix – 3 stars

The Kingdom

Terrorists shoot up an American residential compound in Saudi Arabia, killing many, many innocent people. The FBI wants to go in and conduct the investigation but both our state department and the Saudis are against it. The team goes anyway but is hamstrung with red tape. The Saudi official assigned to the unit seems to be there more to keep them out of trouble than to help. His heart is in the right place however. As the investigation proceeds, the team itself becomes the target of the terrorists and there is a knock-down, shoot-em-up ending.
Netflix – 3 stars

Vantage Point

We saw this movie when we were in Milwaukee. Karen’s sister Sue picked it out. We had never heard of it before we went. In the movie, the President is in Salamanca, Spain, attending an international counter terrorist conference. There is an assassination attempt. The event unfolds through the lens of the television coverage and the backstage news production. The basic elements of the story are defined. A few minutes later the story is rewound and we see it from the point of view of one of the participants. He is aware of things the news coverage isn’t so a little more clarity is added. This approach goes on till we have seen the story from about 8 different points of view. Each time, the situation becomes clearer and clearer. Lots of action and excitement. I found myself sitting in my chair twisting my hands into knots.
Theater – 3 stars

The Brave One

This is the Jody Foster vengeance movie and does she do it. She and her fiance are mugged in Central Park. She is raped and seriously injurred and the man is killed. The bad guys even steal her dog. She is fearful and buys a gun, illegally because the waiting period is too long to get one properly and she thinks she will be killed in the mean time. While in a quick shop, a man comes in and kills the clerk, his exwife. When Foster’s cell phone rings he starts searching the aisles looking for her, intent on killing her. In self defense she shoots him through the liquor bottles then takes the surveillance tape as she is leaving. Next, she is on the subway and two young toughs threaten her with a nasty looking knife. She never hesitates and shoots them where they stand. Ballistics match the bullets in the two killings and the police think they have a vigilante on their hands. The detective begins to suspect the Foster character. When a clue to her muggers comes along, she follows it up and locates them. Going to where they live we have the final show down. There is a little surprise at the end.
Netflix – 3 stars

Gone Baby Gone

A little girl is abducted. The mother is a coke head and ne’er-do-well. The aunt hires our heroes to assist the police in their investigations, thinking their local, personal contacts might lead to information the police might not be able to get otherwise. And such is the case. When the cause of the abduction is figured out, they make arrangements for a pay off, but the deal goes wrong and they lose the little girl. There are consequences for those involved. The movie goes on. One of the original leads pays off several months later and some suspects of interest in the little girl’s case surface. They have taken a 7 year old boy. They have been raping and torturing him and by the time our heroes come to have a look, he has died in an “accident”. All through this, our heroes and the official police investigators have been getting along pretty well and even start to bond a little. But something isn’t right. Comments are made that don’t add up. Lies are told. Our hero figures out the answer but pays a price for what he thinks is right. Casey Affleck plays the PI and he as so many marbles in his mouth he doesn’t utter one intelligable line. We had to turn on the subtitles to understand what he is saying. That aside, the movie still is pretty good.
Netflix – 3 stars

Eastern Promises

We seem to be having a string of violent movies lately. This one opens with a pregnant young woman collapsing in a drug store. She dies in the hospital giving birth. The hospital midwife finds the girl’s diary in her belongings and takes it hoping to locate the next of kin. The girl was Russian so the midwife can’t read the diary. Her late father was Russian so she asks her uncle to translate it. He is shocked by the contents and refuses to translate it. She takes it to someone else who turns out to be the very villain named in the diary (of course). They want to get the diary back because it incriminates them. The girl wants to see justice done. Between her and them is the driver for the Russian gangster who likes the girl but must perform his “duties”. He walks a dangerous line and has an agenda of his own. There is a clever twist at the end.
Netflix – 3 stars

The President’s Analyst

So many times when you get an old movie like this, that you fondly remember, it turns out to be really bad. Not the case here though. James Coburn plays an analyst that the President asks for specifically. The more he meets with the President, the more paranoid the analylist becomes. And rightly so. Everyone wants to kidnap him to find out the presidential secrets. All except the FBR and its director, Mr Lux. They want to flat out murder him. When the analyst makes a run for it, they are all after him. One of the great scenes is when he is out to eat with a suburban Washington DC couple who are unwittingly helping him in his escape. The agents try to grab him and are mistaken for muggers. The ultimate villain in the movie is not who you would expect and when you discover who it is, it’s pretty funny.
Netflix – 3 stars

Sicko

This is Michael Moore’s latest documentary. It’s about the medical/insurance industry in this country and how bad it is. He features various people who have nightmare stories about their dealings with the industry. 911 workers who can’t get care despite all the hard work they put in at ground zero. After rolling out a number of tales, Moore visits Canada, France, and England, all countries with national health care. When he finds out that the prisoners at the Guantanamo Prison have free four-star health care, he takes the 911 workers there. They are run off but he stops in Cuba and they are all treated for free and they are all treated as heros.
Netflix – 3 stars