Molly's Game [2017]

MPAA (R)  CNS/USCCB ()  RogerEbert.com (3 Stars)  AVClub (B)  Fr. Dennis (3 1/2 Stars)

IMDb listing
CNS/USCCB () review
Los Angeles Times (J. Chang) review
RogerEbert.com (C. Lemire) review
AVClub (M. D'Angelo) review


Molly's Game [2017] (directed and screen play by Aaron Sorkin based on the memoir [GR] [WCat] [Amzn] by Molly Bloom [wikip] [GR] [IMDb]) spins a certainly gripping if also somewhat "spoiled sport" sort of a tale of Molly Bloom [wikip] (played in the film by Jessica Chastain), a young adult, who grew up in Loveland, CO (on the Continental Divide, about 1 hour West of Denver), the daughter of a Colorado based psychologist (played in the film by Kevin Kostner) hence ever upper middle class, and whose life's direction took a radical turn as a result of a truly freak accident at the U.S. (freestyle) ski team trials for the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympic Games.  If not for a random pine branch shaving unsnapping the buckling of one of her boots to her skis on her second of three mogul runs, she probably would have made the Team, perhaps even won a Medal at the Games and would have then followed a quite different path than the one that she ended up taking.

Instead, in the aftermath of the (life's fortunes-changing) Accident, she "took a year off" between college (Colorado State) and law school (undetermined, but she had an LSAT score that could have gotten her into Harvard ...) and moved down to Los Angeles where she crashed (found a place) with some friends.

Young and quite attractive (in a town full of young and above-the-par attractive people) and certainly a product of her skiing days, _never a couch potato_, she scored a job as a cocktail waitress at a quite frequented club on the Sunset Strip.  There she got noticed by a patron of said club _for her smarts_ who hired her, nominally, to work as his administrative assistant at his quite random (front?) business by day, but more importantly as his assistant and de-facto book-keeper (she knew how to write and maintain a spread sheet ;-) at a weekly celebrity high-stakes poker game that he ran in the back of a somewhat seedier club but "down the street" from the one where she worked as a cocttail waitress.

Talkative, attractive and again _smart_, she proved a natural.  And when a couple of years later, her boss tried to cut her out of his business, she had already "learned the game," and made enough friends to WAVE HIM GOODBYE as she STEPPED-UP THE GAME moving it TO A SUITE IN A BEVERLY HILLS HOTEL, serving better food with better music, and appropriately enticing (but again _never stupid_ ... why waste your position for a one night stand, or worse, prostituting yourself when you can make easily as much, night after night, simply on tips for your smile/encouragement) serving help (from among her friends at the club where she had worked) and HONESTLY, MADE THIS GAME WORK for a LONG, LONG TIME.

Well, Vice (a nicer way to say Evil...) has a way of eventually catching-up to anyone, no matter how smart one is.  And so she eventually had to leave L.A. because of _one mistake_, but soon re-established herself in New York where for a while she ran an even BIGGER / BETTER / MORE EXCLUSIVE POKER GAME (now complete with smiling but as ever unreachable Playboy Models as her serving help) THAN IN L.A.

To borrow some, (freestyle) skiing terminology, she had "a good run."  Eventually, however, one could say _inevitably_ "the Game" came to attract, well ... the kind of folks, that "a game" like this, again, inevitably attracts.  Still, even if Molly had spent a good part of her twenties "dancing with" / "playing tag" with the Devil, she wasn't necessarily that.  Instead, she was just very, very smart, quite ambitious, and as a former freestyle (moguls) skier TRAINED TO TAKE (QUICK / CALCULATED) RISKS.

Eventually the Feds came crashing in (and honestly, she was so lucky ...).  She did manage to get a good Manhattan-based lawyer (played excellently by Idris Elba) to hack her out of her legal troubles and lived to write a book (and have a movie made) about ... her "please don't do this" life.

Still, the story is gripping and relateable to both the young and no longer so young alike (because _all_ of us were "young" at some point as well).  And as a cautionary tale it is not a bad one.

Here was a young person who had a very good life and came _really close_ to really messing it up (and even close to ending up dead ...).  The temptation of glamour, "outsmarting the world" entices / challenges us all ...


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Downsizing [2017]

MPAA (R)  CNS/USCCB (A-III)  RogerEbert.com (1 1/2 Stars)  AVClub (C)  Fr. Dennis (3 1/2 Stars)

IMDb listing
CNS/USCCB (J. Mulderig) review
Los Angeles Times (J. Chang) review
RogerEbert.com (S. O'Malley) review
AVClub (A.A. Dowd) review


Downsizing [2017] (directed and screenplay cowritten by Alexander Payne along with Jim Taylor) is a silly movie based on a goofy premise _played completely straight_ that ultimately helps Viewers (re)-discover the surprising beauty/richness of their seemingly boring day-to-day lives.  Wow?  How could a goofy / silly movie do that?

Well about thirty years ago, another silly movie with a goofy premise, the Tom Hanks / Meg Ryan vehicle Joe vs the Volcano [1990] did a similar thing: There "Joe" (played by Tom Hanks) introduced to Viewers as an almost immobilized / hysterical hypochondriac was finally told by his doctor the news that he had always dreaded -- that in a year's time he was gonna die of a truly awful disease, that was all the more awful because it was utterly symptomless and neither he nor really anybody else had ever heard of it -- a "brain cloud."  Knowing now, for certain, that "he's gonna die" Joe finally felt liberated to spend that last year of his life doing what he'd always wanted to do -- to go sailing around the world (or as much of it as he could before he, well, ... died).  And while he went about doing that, he kept running into the same woman, in different incarnations (all played by Meg Ryan) until ... well ;-).  A stupid movie, with a goofy premise, that turned out to be remarkably profound ;-).

The current movie begins with the announcement of a scientific breakthrough: A group of Norwegian scientists have come up with a way of shrinking people to 5 inches tall.  WT...?  Why?  Well, the Norweigian scientists, led by the solemn / appropriately grim and _utterly sincere_ in his solemn grimness Dr. Jorgen Asbjørnsen (played by Rolf Lassgård) and his wife Anne-Helene Asbjørnsen (played by Ingjerd Egeberg) tout this as a _definitive_ solution for the world to climate change and over-population:  Imagine that every person who shrunk him/herself to 5" in size (or about 2.3% of their present weight and volume) would correspondingly use only a tiny fraction of the resources that they currently consume.

This amusing premise is then even more amusingly played _completely straight_ through the rest of the story:

Some years after the solemn Asbjørnsens announced their breakthrough, real estate developers in the U.S. are selling to the struggling middle class the ECONOMIC POSSIBILITIES of "Living Big" by "Going Small."  Middle class families finding it hard to buy homes at all in our dimensions, could come to live in McMansion-style _Doll Houses_ in new gated, indeed, domed, "Leisure Land" communities for well ... a few hundred bucks ;-).

And so it is, that Paul and Audrey Safranek (played by Matt Damon and Kristen Wiig) a random, struggling, and certainly not gonna go particularly anywhere late-30 early-40 something couple from Omaha, NE, decide that "going small" may be for them.  Actually they're largely talked-into-it by couple of old-high school friends (played by Jason Sudeikis and Maribeth Monroe) who made a splash at their last High School reunion by coming there "smalled" (everybody else came to the reunion, basically how they've always been / for years ... so that couple, Dave and Carol Johnson, really _stood out_ ;-)

When their latest mortgage application gets rejected, they head out to the Nevada based "Leisureland Estates" and ... Paul certainly's sold, Audrey ... less so.  She goes along with it, but just at the moment when they are separated to undergo their "smalling procedure" ... she backs out.  As a result, since Paul's now 5" tall and Audrey 5'5" at least ... the two divorce, with Audrey taking most of their assets.

Paul's then _reduced_ to working now in a Leisureland phonebank (on the phone no one can tell that you're only 5" tall ...), and presumably paid smaller-sized wages as well.  So ... gone are dreams of living in a McMansion-style doll house.  He now lives in an apartment... with an annoying / quite noisy / ever partying neighbor above him ;-)

It's now that the the diminished / down-trodden Paul encounters the two most compelling characters in the story.

First there's Dušan Mirković (played brilliantly by Christoff Waltz) that noisy / ever partying upstairs neighbor who's this ever-smiling 'cause he's ever scheming Serbian mobster-like figure, who's figured out all sorts of silly, basically illegal, but arguably harmless (except to one's pride) ways to "make a buck off of this 'smalling scam'" -- among the things he sells are fake small "authentic cuban cigars" to the rich folks of leisureland: "So what, really, if they're made by tiny, smalled, Albanian refugees.  They make a living, and I sell an image.  Everybody wins."  The same he does with wine and perfume, selling them presumably literally "a drop at a time." ;-)

And then there's one of Dušan's cleaning ladies: Ngoc Lan Tran (played inspiringly by Hong Chau) who had made news some years back when, as a jailed Vietnamese Dissident, she was "smalled against her will" and then along with 15 other "undesireables" deported inside a flat-screen television box, and discovered only when she reached the U.S. with the other 15 having already died "during the journey."  Having lost a leg during her ordeal, she nonetheless, ran that cleaning service giving jobs to otherwise other "down on their luck" "small people" and ran all sorts of other charitable efforts for other "small people" in even greater need.  And in a nice bow to the at least potentially transforming power of Christianity, it becomes clear that Ngoc Lan Tran was motivated to do all of this because of her Christian faith.

Well poor always basically invisible Paul, finds himself, despite himself, in the company of these lovely if eccentric characters: "I love you Paul, you're always so boring," says at one point the ever smiling, ever scheming Dušan as he gives him a big bear hug and kissed him on the top of his head.

And surprisingly, by the end of the film one's able to leave with some very interesting questions to ponder:  Does "size" matter?  "Big" or "small," the characters' personalities / capacities remained basically the same.  Does "technological progress" matter?  The same pitches, the same problems continue despite changes in our technological capabilities.  So what does, in the end, _matter_?  The film's actually quite clear in its opinion on that ;-).

A wonderfully initially "stupid" yet thought-provoking film ;-)


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Ferdinand [2017]

MPAA (PG)  CNS/USCCB (A-I)  RogerEbert.com (3 Stars)  AVClub (C)  Fr. Dennis (4 Stars)

IMDb listing
CNS/USCCB (J. Mulderig) review
Los Angeles Times (J. Chang) review
RogerEbert.com (S. Wloszczyna) review
AVClub (V. Murthi) review

Ferdinand [2017] (directed by Carlos Saldanha, screenplay by Robert L. Baird, Tim Federle and Brad Copeland, screen story by Ron Burch, David Kidd and Don Rhymer, based on the beloved 1936 children's book [GR] [WCat] [Amzn] by Munro Leaf [GR] [WCat] [Amzn] [IMDb] and Robert Lawson [GR] [WCat] [Amzn] [IMDb]) tells the Ferdinand (voiced quite excellently by former WWE wrestler John Cena), a bull who'd much rather "smell the flowers" than "butt heads" with other bulls, much less end up in the ring with a bull fighter.

Needless to say a "pacifist bull" was not exactly respected by the other bulls, but he does make a lifelong friend with a little girl named Nina (voiced as a child by Julia Scarpa Saldanha and as a young adult by Lily Day).  Still a "pacifist bull" / "different kind of bull" or not, Ferdinand was still a bull and, well, that resulted in repeated misunderstandings with humans who generally saw him as a simply a _huge_ (and dangerous) beast.  And try as he might, he repeatedly found himself in difficulty -- there's a priceless scene in the movie where he finds himself, a bull, "in a china shop."

Yes, the book is rather short, and the movie, being a movie is 80+ minutes long.   Yet, scenes like Ferdinand finding himself in (and for that matter, getting himself into) said china shop, lend themselves to incredibly endearing sequences.  So ... my best guide here is just simply listening to the kids in the theater ... and at the showing that I saw, it was _clear_ that the kids _loved_ watching this ENORMOUS bull trying _so hard_ to be careful when, as a bull, he really could not.

Hence, I honestly found this to be a fun / endearing movie to watch.  And there's no messaging in the film that would be harmful to kids.  The whole story is an exercise in empathy putting oneself into the shoes (err... hooves) of a bull, who despite his ENORMOUS size, just wants to play / "smell the roses" 

Great story / film!

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Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi [2017]

MPAA (PG-13)  CNS/USCCB (A-II)  RogerEbert.com (4 Stars)  AVClub (B+)  Fr. Dennis (3 1/2 Stars)

IMDb listing
CNS/USCCB (J. Mulderig) review
Los Angeles Times (J. Chang) review
RogerEbert.com (M. Zoller Seitz) review
AVClub (A.A. Dowd) review


Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi [2017] (screenplay and directed by Rian Johnson based on the characters invented by George Lucas) continues a Hollywood "year of tactical retreat" (in this case a "Space Dunkirk" if you will ;-).  The Empire of the original Star Wars Trilogy, reincarnated as "The First Order" seems to be ascendant and the forces of all that is good / peaceful facing annihilation.  How did the Galaxy ever get into this mess (again)?

Well, it would seem, interestingly, PARTLY out of NOSTALGIA ... One of the key villainous characters in the current trilogy, Kylo Ren (played as always spot-on by Adam Driver), son of Han Solo (played in the original trilogy by Harrison Ford and who (the character) was killed by Kylo Ren in the the first episode of the current sequel trilogy) and Princess Leia (played in both the original trilogy and in the current sequel trilogy by the late Carrie Fisher -- who died soon after the release of the first episode of the current sequel trilogy but had already been filmed for most of her scenes in the current film) seems obsessed with becoming  "the new Darth Vader."  Why?  Partly certainly out of youthful rebellion (to piss off his parents) but also out of a genuine nostalgia for a man, albeit Evil..., but "had it together" / "knew what he wanted." 

Today a lot of people admire / support contemporary strongmen like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin because they too have built an aura around them of "knowing what they want" / "willing to do whatever it takes 'to get there'" and while much has been written here in the United States about Trump's admiration of Putin, perhaps less has been made of Putin's never denied admiration / nostalgia for Joseph Stalin and the "order" he had imposed on the then Soviet Union and later its Empire.

The other, more philosophical reason for the plot (re)turn would probably be George Lucas' friendship / admiration for comparative religions scholar Joseph Campbell, for whom the "Monomyth / Eternal Cycle of Return" was a major theme.  So it should not be surprising that a generation or two after a cataclysmic battle between Good and Evil, the conditions would present themselves to begin the conflict anew.

Still, I do believe there to be significant differences in tone between the original Star Wars Trilogy and current batch of Star Wars movies including Episode VII - The Force Awakens [2015], Rogue One: A Star Wars Story [2016] and the current film.  Notably, the current batch, perhaps influenced by 9/11, perhaps by the Hunger Games [2012-15], is _darker_.

So the current trilogy has a new (and arguably even more rag-tag) rebellion fighting a surprisingly powerful reincarnated "First Order" modeling itself on the Empire of old.  And the battle honestly seems more even more desperate than before.  A small and ever diminishing flotilla of rebel craft, flushed out of their base by a far superior First Order fleet, spends much of the movie trying to escape.

Yet even as the battle between these two space fleets continues, as throughout the whole Star Wars saga, it becomes increasingly clear that the key to the battle are several charismatic figures, each "gifted by the Force" (a mystical / supernatural power that in the Star Wars Universe permeates the Galaxy) sometimes by its good side, sometimes by its dark/evil side.  And it becomes clear that it'd be far easier to simply "turn" these charismatic leaders from one side to the other, rather than to pound away at each other militarily.

Okay, but here's the problem:  While the charismatic leaders feeding on the "Dark Side" of the Force, Kylo Ren (already mentioned above) and the apparent Emperor Snoke (played quite well with some CGI enhancement by Andy Serkis) seem to be "all in" / "gung-ho" about conquering the Universe, the charismatic leaders of the "Good Side" of the Force, except for the youthful orphaned / "Joan of Arc"-like Rey (played by Daisy Ridley) seem far less convinced that fighting Evil serves any Good.  Notably, an aging Luke Skywalker (played as in the original trilogy, so now here in the current one by Mark Hamill) has retreated to a far-off island on an ocean covered world, and really did not want to get involved in the new conflict at all.

What to do?  Well, this is what the film is about, and there are many reactions.  Almost always, the younger folks -- I've mentioned Rey, but also still somewhat cocky star-fighter pilot Poe (played by Oscar Isaac), as well as several defectors from the "1st Order" side notably Finn (played by John Boyega) and Rose (played wonderfully by Kelly Marie Tran) -- would like to fight, while the older folks, Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia and some of her other commanders, including, one, an Admiral Hulo (played by Laura Dern) would prefer to keep the fighting to a minimum (especially since they have been outnumbered and losing ...).

Much plays out ... often, honestly, with some twists / surprising ;-).

So who then is said "last Jedi"?  That too is answered, but I'm not going to tell you ;-).  And the answer is, clearly, quite interesting (and thus worthy of a movie title ;-).

Yup, I'm still quite fascinated with how the whole saga will end.  Some hints as to how it will do so are already indicated in this episode.  But it will be interesting how it will play out.

Overall ... a quite good / excellent "middle episode" in an at least three part saga ;-)


ADDENDUM:  Catholic viewers may be surprised by a fair number of _positive_ "Catholic flourishes" in the current film:

For instance, there are some rather cute / amusing "Jedi nuns" in this story.

Then the Star Wars' salutation / words of encouragement "The Force be with you" was used in this film at least one time in manner in which its usage almost exactly corresponded to the greeting: "The Lord be with you."

Then near the end of the film there was an extended shot in which light shining through holes on the remaining band of resisters, shined on them in the shape of illuminated crosses.  The shot extended much longer than would be necessary for the sake of the story, except to allow the Audience to recognize the symbolism -- light piercing the darkness "on the good guys" in the shape of a series of crosses.

The Star Wars series with its Jedi religion was never "anti-Christian" or "anti-Catholic."  Almost all of us of my generation saw similarities between the Jedi Knights and a Catholic religious order. What I'd just like to note here is that this episode seemed even more positive toward Catholicism / traditional religion than others.  Thanks!  (I think / hope ;-).


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