Last week was the Top 10 Show’s list of Female Directed Movies.  This movie was number one on their compiled list.

When I saw it in the theaters, I found it boring.  While I did not hate the film, I did fall asleep several times, only being awaken by the on-screen explosions.

However, the nearly universal praise of the movie, including multiple Oscar nominations and one win, made me wonder if I needed to revisit the film.  There have been several films that, over time, I found more interesting the second time around than I did on original viewing.

This morning I did that rewatch and I found Zero Dark Thirty considerably more compelling this time than I did in the movie theater.

Zero Dark Thirty is the true story of the hunt for and eventual killing of al-Qaeda terrorist leader Osama bin Laden.  We meet Maya (Jessica Chastain), a CIA operative who has arrived in Pakistan and becomes involved with a group using torture to discover details of al-Qaeda plots.  The head agent Dan (Jason Clarke) led the “enhanced interrogation” as Maya was showing signs of being uncomfortable with the techniques.

Eventually, with a change in political administrations on the horizon, Dan began to be beaten down by what he had to do and returned to Washington for a change.  Maya continued her search for information.

In 2011, after breakthroughs, Maya tracked her target to a compound in Pakistan but she could not confirm to a certainty that bin Laden was here.  Despite the doubt in the government, Maya was confident that she was right and he was there.

There is not a ton of action in this movie.  It does drag along at times, especially if you had been expecting this to be an action movie.  It is much more of a character study, if not a psychological thriller than an action movie.  The action here is very realistic and anxious.  The action in Zero Dark Thirty builds the tone of the movie more than it does satisfy the action itch.

The scenes at the beginning of the movie involving torture are the most controversial scenes by far.  They make you feel uncomfortable and show the brutality that went along with the use of them.  However, it did not glorify torture.  In fact, it showed the effects of torture not only on the victims, but also those who were engaging in it.  The first twenty to thirty minutes of this movie weer extremely difficult to watch.

The performances were very strong to fantastic.  Jessica Chastain, very deservingly, received award recognition for her role as Maya.  Jason Clarke was great, taking what many would have written as a one sided character and showed both sides to a complex man.  Kyle Chandler, Harold Perrineau, Chris Pratt, Joel Edgerton, Mark Strong, Edgar Ramirez and James Gandolfini all had roles of significance and provided real moments despite the lack of screen time.

I am glad that I took the time to revisit this movie.  When I approached this with the proper mindset, I found it much more engaging than I did the first time around.  Kathryn Bigelow does a tremendous job as the director of the film.

Of the three films in the Back to the Future trilogy, Back to the Future Part II has always been considered the worst of them.  While I can understand that opinion, I disagree with the justification.

In Back to the Future Part II, Marty (Michael J. Fox) and Doc (Christopher Lloyd)  head into future, as we saw at the end of the original, to do something about Marty’s kids.  However, once in the future, old man Biff (Thomas F. Wilson) gets his hands on the DeLorean and, with the Gray’s Sports Almanac, visits his young self so 1955 Biff can make millions betting on sports.

This led to a dark, dystopian 1985, where Doc and Marty return to, shocked by what they find.  They realize that they have to head back to the past once again to retrieve the Sports Almanac  and fix the future.

I actually like Back to the Future Part II quite a bit.  I liked it more than I did the Part III in the old West.

I think that this would be an even better movie if they had changed up one thing.  I really liked the 2015 hover board chase, which echoed the chase with the skateboard in the original movie.  I loved the dark 2015 world with rich Biff.  I enjoyed the trip back to 1955 with the way they mixed the new scenes in with the original film’s third act.  The end twist is epic and funny.

The one place that is not great is the trip to Marty’s 2015 house, seeing his family and meeting his kids.  This whole section with injured hand Marty getting fired and Jennifer (Elisabeth Shue) seeing her future self is simply terrible.  This entire segment really taints the trip to the future, setting up a waste of a storyline just so the film can add the whole “Don’t call me a chicken” bit that had not appeared in the first movie at all.  The removal of this section would improve the film dramatically and would not change the story of this movie at all.  And we would not have to see Michael J. Fox dressed up like his daughter.

Otherwise, I thought the trip to 1955 was very clever and well written.  There were twists and turns making you unclear how Marty was going to get out of the situation.

I have heard people complain that this film’s third act was too familiar, but I really thought that was the purpose.  Several of the jokes and the scenes depended on reacting and adjusting to what was happening from the original movie.

This was also one of my favorite uses of time travel and the explanation of it.

Back to the Future Part II is much better than what it gets credit for, despite having definitive flaws in the first main act of the movie.  Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd are their normal awesome selves and the writing is extremely clever.

Recently, the Top 10 Show Re-List had a list of Coming-of-Age movies as its topic.  I compiled my list, but one of the films that appeared on the list of the shows turned out to be The Perks of Being a Wallflower.  I had never seen this movie and Matt Knost specifically raved about it. He said that he did not expect to like it as much as he did and that it was a film that people should watch.

This was a film that I had never seen and had not had any interest in seeing.  I saw it on the streaming platforms around the web but just had not interest.  When Matt gave it such a glowing rave, I added it to my summer to watch list.  It was on Netflix and it was going to be easy to see.  Now I just had to find the mindset to watch it.

It wasn’t about time.  I have the time.  It just felt like a film that I had to get into the right head space to watch it.  I was still afraid that I would be bored and that I would not like the film.  I had always liked Emma Watson from the Harry Potter franchise and Logan Lerman had been a young actor I liked.  Even still, I was not sure if I wanted to watch it.

I am so glad that I did watch this today because I just found it to be so brilliantly done and totally compelling.  The film was filled with amazing young characters, brought to life by some talented young actors and it tugged on the heart strings.

It also was able to catch me off-guard in ways of story, which I did not expect.  I do not usually get shocked by movie scripts so when it happened here, it made me all the more impressed by what they had done.

Logan Lerman was amazing as Charlie, the freshman boy who is befriended by a group of seniors.  Charlie had his own troubles but I had not expected them to be more than what I expected.  Charlie did not fit in at high school and finding this group of people who also was outside the norm of the school was a blessing for him.

Each of them had major issues.  Ezra Miller’s Patrick is quirky and bold, but his own secret has emotional stakes for him and another.  Emma Watson’s Sam was a sweet girl with a bad reputation for making bad choices.  These two helped Charlie find his way through high school even though they did not have a real clue about the depth of the pain he was in.

The film had fantastic music and did a memorable job of interweaving the music into the plot.  Set in 1994, there are some great moments from the Come on Eileen dance scene to the David Bowie Heroes driving scene.  The music made every scene better.

This movie truly does show the gamut of emotions that young people go through during these uncertain times of their lives.  One only hopes that they can find people who are as important to themselves as these friends turned out to be.

It would have certainly made my own Coming-of-Age top 10 list had I seen it before.  It was a wonderful movie.

Ah, what could have been.

A film shrouded in tragedy, The Crow is one of the greatest revenge films ever made and one of the earliest films that was based on a comic book to be quality and well-done.

Eric Draven (Brandon Lee), a rock musician, and his fiance Sarah (Rochelle Davis) were murdered on the eve of their wedding by a band of dirtbag criminals. Eric thrown out of the sixth floor window and Sarah, raped and beaten, dies later at the hospital.

A year later, a black crow arrives on Eric’s grave, tapping on the tombstone.  This causes Eric to pull himself out of the grave.  Discovering that he had returned from the dead, Eric, with his face covered in white makeup, started his path of revenge.

Of course, The Crow was marred by the tragic death of its lead star Brandon Lee, son of the legendary Bruce Lee.  With eight days of shooting remaining, Brandon was accidentally injured by a malfunctioning round of blank ammunition.  He died later during surgery.  Producers rearranged certain scenes and used tricks to finish the scenes they still needed to make sure that the film was released.

The Crow was a great film.  Lee was spectacular here.  This could have easily been a massive breakthrough for the young actor.  His charisma, his presence, his aura stood out on each image.  The character was compelling and easy to root for.

Ernie Hudson played police officer Albrecht and worked very well as the supportive cop, the man who is the audience’s eyes, his wonder for what was happening was the same as what we felt.  Hudson brought a true gravitas to the role and his very appearance gave a credibility to the film.

The story is very simple, but the key to the film is the imagery in each scene.  There are beautiful shots in the film, a visual cornucopia of violence and style.  The images tell the story and help set the tone of this film better than most of the words.  It is like a comic come to life.  There were several moments where I was watching the film where I thought, “That looked like a splash page from a comic.” It was bathed in darkness as well, with color used sparingly.  It created something wonderfully dark.

Yes, the film is very violent, but I do not think that it is gratuitous.  It has cinematic element to it and it works so well.

The only issue I had while watching The Crow was that I kept thinking about professional wrestler Sting.  Sting took a “Crow-like” gimmick after the film came out and he looked quite a bit like Brandon Lee.  It was distracting for me, but that was not the film’s issue.  It was mine.

The Crow was a great film.

I have been a fan of Taika Waititi and his work over the last few years.  What We Do in the Shadows, Thor: Ragnarok, and Jojo Rabbit are three of the great films that I found remarkably entertaining and touching.  However, there was always one film missing from the movies I have watched.  Today, I filled that gap by watching Taika Waititi’s Hunt for the Wilderpeople.

In New Zealand, troublesome foster kid Ricky (Julian Dennison), who had been pulled out of several foster home, is dropped off with Bella (Rima Te Wiata) and Hec (Sam Neill), an older couple who live just outside of the bush.  Ricky was withdrawn and protective of himself and did not want to get too close.  However, Bella won the boy over with her kindness.  Sadly, she dies suddenly.

When it sounded like the child service agent Paula (Rachel House), who was over the top, was coming back to take Ricky away, he ran away into the bush.  Hec went to find him but hurt his ankle.  The two of them stayed in the bush as Hec’s ankle imporved.

The social services arrive and start a nationwide search for the pair of them.

This movie is great.  It is funny, beautifully emotional, and poignant as can be.  You can see how Waititi will create a film like Jojo Rabbit.

Hunt for the Wilderpeople has so much ridiculousness going on around it, but the whole thing is anchored by the relationship between Ricky and Hec, and it is not a relationship that is typical.  It is shaky as both individuals have lived lives that prevented them from truly connection with others.  They were brought together by Bella, and, when she was gone, left them floundering.  The social services, led by Paula, the police, the hunters who kept being involved, were so unrealistic, but you buy it immediately because of the strength at the core of the pairing of Ricky and Hec.

You can see the beginning of Taika Waititi’s own little band of actors that he will be dipping into as his movies continue.  Rachel House appears in Thor: Ragnarok.  Taika himself is here, as he is in his other films.  Rhys Darby was Anton in What We Do In The Shadows.  Mike Minogue had a cameo in that film too.  It is starting to feel like Wes Anderson, who has a group of regular actors to appear in his roles in his films.

Julian Dennison would go from here to be Firefist in Deadpool 2.  He was a great find here as he and Sam Neill have amazing chemistry and make for the heart of this movie.

I am very happy that I took the time to watch this film.  It only makes me even more of a fan of Taika Waititi’s work.  Knowing he is working on the next Thor movie and a future Star Wars film really provides me with a lot of hope and excitement.

One of the online movie pundits I like made a comparison of The Social Network to Citizen Kane, format-wise.  I made that decision that I wanted to watch them together to see how I felt about that idea.

I had seen The Social Network before, but I had never seen Citizen Kane.  Touching on the idea of the comparison, I do see some connection between the way the story is told with the non-linear storytelling format (though honestly, the flashbacks feel more like the main story than flashbacks), the main protagonist having negative qualities, and Rooney Mara (who played Erica Albright in Social Network) is comparative to Rosebud in Citizen Kane.  There are other connections, but it would take me diving deeper into both movies to really do that analysis justice.

The Social Network is the story of Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) and the founding of Facebook.  We meet Mark as he is breaking up with the aforementioned Erica (Rooney Mara).  Actually, it was Erica who did the breaking up and it sent Mark on this path toward Facebook.  He went back to his room and started blogging negative things about her, showing his true troll side.  This led to an idea to compare other female students at Harvard.

The comparison website had a huge response and that drew the attention of Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (both played by Armie Hammer), rowers and legacy students at Harvard.  The brothers approached Zuckerberg with an idea about a social network and they wanted him to write code.  Zuckerberg agreed, taking the idea to another level.

With the monetary investment of his best friend Eduardo (Andrew Garfield), Marc went to town.

Directed by David Fincher, The Social Network just pops with the writing of Aaron Sorkin.  The combination of these talented individuals really provided an amazing product that gave these great actors some fantastic material.  Performances here were just astounding as well.  Jesse Eisenberg, Armie Hammer, Andrew Garfield were all great and it is most likely the best performance in the career of Justin Timberlake.

The film does a great job of showing the character of Mark Zuckerberg and how he was desperate for a connection, yet unable to connect.  The irony of having a person who has so much trouble with the relationships in his life being the driving force behind a platform that is meant to connect to other people is unbelievable.

I did not think originally that this would be a great movie.  I felt that this would be dull, but it is anything but.  I liked it the first time I saw it and this time was even more as I appreciated the technical aspects of the film this time more.  The Social Network is an exceptional film.

Universally recognized as one of the greatest movies ever made, Citizen Kane is, as movie pundit Scott Mantz might say, the Citizen Kane of movies.

Citizen Kane is one of those experience movies that anybody who considers themselves a cinephile must experience.  Starring the director Orson Welles, Citizen Kane is a movie that has an amazing relevance to today’s world, almost 80 years later.

Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles) was a newspaper magnet and one of the country’s richest men.  Upon his death, he became even bigger news, and journalists searched for a hook for their audiences, in their attempt to discover something new about the millionaire.  A group of reporters focused in on a riddle… the last word spoken by Kane was “Rosebud” and no one knew why.  This mystery sent the reporters on a journey into the past of Charles Foster Kane searching for a clue to the true meaning of that allusion.

I had never watched Citizen Kane before, but I knew the answer to the riddle of :What was Rosebud.”  It is one of the most iconic movie images ever put to screen.  I knew about that allusion for decades.  Heck, the first place I ever heard of it was from the Dr. Demento Show and the song “The Homecoming Queen’s Got a Gun” by Julie Brown.  It was a pop culture symbol that everyone knew.  That speaks to the successful nature of the film.

This movie was filmed in ways that would inspire directors and creators for years.  In fact, many of the styles used to film here may not seem special when viewed today, but were, in actuality, influential to the film industry when Orson Welles did it.  Techniques such as “deep focus” which is a technique that allows the filmmaker to keep objects in the foreground and in the distant background in focus at the same time.  Images in the film are utter masterpieces of composition and imagination. They literally teach classes on the imagery found in Citizen Kane.

The story telling of the film was ahead of its time as well.  The film starts off with the death of the main protagonist in Charles Foster Kane, setting up the film’s main mystery with the “Rosebud” utterance.  Then the film is told in flashbacks to the different stages of Kane’s life, and it was not even chronological at this point.  Yet the story is so well constructed that you are never confused about where in the story you are and what place in Kane’s life you are watching.  The use of the news reel right after Kane’s death provides us with exposition in a manner that is both effective and entertaining.

I also found a disturbing comparison between Charles Foster Kane and another of our major public figures in today’s world.  Another multi-millionaire narcissist with delusions of grandeur.

I avoided Citizen Kane for the longest time because I thought I might be bored by it.  Au contraire… I found it completely compelling and fascinating.  The tale of the life of this man and his hopes and his desires, along with a longing for what was and what could have been.  Devastating.  This is an amazing debut from Orson Welles and it had to be difficult for him to manage expectations after the first film you make is one of the most revered films in movie history.

A true masterpiece.

Beetlejuice

Beetlejuice

Beetle….

Wait.  I should be more careful.

One of the most original and fun movies of the 1980’s was the Michael Keaton starring vehicle, Beetlejuice.

A young couple Adam (Alec Baldwin) and Barbara (Geena Davis) purchased a new house and moved in.  Unfortunately, soon after, they were killed in a car wreck only to discover that they were now stuck in the house as ghosts.  They could not leave and could not be seen.  Then, the house was sold to a pretentious couple Charles (Jeffrey Jones) and Delia (Catherine O’Hara), who, along with their depressed daughter Lydia (Winona Ryder), arrived in the house, ready to renovate everything.

Adam and Barbara decide that they would use their ghostly powers to scare them out of the house, but Adam and Barbara discovered quickly that they were not the scary types.  Desperate, they found help from a spirit who they could only summon by saying his name three times:  Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton).

This film is one of the greats form the 1980’s as it blends some exceptional humor with some dark monstrous images.  The entire “Day-O” sequence of the film is just one of the most memorable musical moments in movies.

Michael Keaton is just tremendous as the troublesome Beetlejuice, funny, witty and rotten to the core.  You could tell immediately that Beetlejuice was not going to be helpful in the long run.

There are some great cast members here.  Moving past the main actors, Catherine O’Hara and Jeffrey Jones are fantastic as the snooty new owners of the house.  We get Glenn Shadix as Otho, Robert Goulet, Dick Cavett, Susan Kellerman, and Annie McEnroe playing smaller, but entertaining characters.

The special effects are a little dated, but for 1988, they were not terrible.  This could be updated in this area.  There have been rumors of a Beetlejuice 2 which would feature Michael Keaton returning.  Keaton is masterful in this role and I would love to see what he had to add to the story.

Beetlejuice is a classic movie that is a load of fun.