Month: September 2021

With the unique story of a teenage girl whose recently-divorced mother converts to Islam, I really wanted to like this film more than I did. The performances are strong, particularly that of Zoe Renee in the lead, but the narrative lets them down. The mother’s conversion feels like the desperate move of someone whose identity is still reeling from the end of their relationship. She is then almost abusive in forcing her new religion onto her daughter, who prior to conversion is a bubbly bisexual whose primary interests are dancing and eating pepperoni. The daughter becomes Muslim, except she seems to have forgotten to investigate at all what was now expected of her in her new religion. The ending tries to resolve all of this in a positive way, but by then I had no faith in the decision making abilities of these characters.

Toward the end of the Korean War, Robert Redford is a wide-eyed addition to a company of infantrymen; John Saxton is a long-time member, prone to going on solo night patrols to gain intel and to kill enemy soldiers. Between them is an orphaned Korean boy, the pull for the boy’s loyalty is the pull on the soldiers’ souls: to let war take them to their darkest selves or to maintain some semblance of innocence. Essentially marking Redford’s film debut, it is also the beginning for Sydney Pollack and Tom Skerritt as other members of the company.  

This story of a Korean War vet experiencing severe PTSD starts off incredibly strong and then meanders after he is sent to the criminally negligent Florida State Hospital. Gary Oldman offers his best as the veteran, as does Dennis Hopper as a fellow patient, but the presentation is just not strong enough, glossing over so much of the travesties and injustices that the patients experience. Even supporting roles by the wonderful Pamela Reed and Frances McDormand don’t break through. I really wish this true story would have been picked up by a larger studio as quality mental health treatment is an ongoing struggle in the United States.

Like The Defiant Ones, this film pairs an unrepentant racist with a Black man to accomplish a difficult task. Unlike that other movie, the white man, played by a dislikable Robert Ryan, has no interest in ever actually working with the other, a degenerate gambler and musician played by Harry Belafonte. Ed Begley brings these two together in an attempt to pull off a small town bank robbery to explosive results. The film doesn’t shy away from showing the parallels between the existences of the two men. Shelley Winters and Gloria Grahame are thankless as women in Ryan’s stratosphere, as Kim Hamilton is in Belafonte’s.

After seeing the gritty 70s realism Rocky and the cocaine fueled 80s Cold War Rocky IV, here we see what Rocky has to offer in the 90s. Just use nonsensical character actions (some idiot gave Paulie the ability to sign over a power of attorney) to steal plot points from previous films (Rocky is at the top of his game only to lose it all) then wrap it in sweat suits and lame hip hop music, taking it to the streets. Rocky, in an attempt to embody the ghost of Mickey, tries on the father figure role first with a new boxer, played by Tommy Morrison, and then with the preternaturally teenaged Rocky Jr., played by Stallone’s son Sage. Unfortunately both the roles and the actors in said roles aren’t up to snuff.  

After watching the original, I felt I needed to check out the more recent adaptation. It’s entirely possible I’d seen this before (for no good reason I confuse the title with Assault on Precinct 13, which I have seen). The ending here seemed very familiar, though not anywhere near as memorable as the one from 1974. John Travolta is nowhere near as good as Robert Shaw and the whole role seemed reworked, to the detriment of the film, to his star power, rendering the other hijackers almost obsolete. Denzel Washington is steady in his role as the subway dispatcher, but many other parts of the story were changed to make for a less compelling film. Instead of relying on the tension inherent in the hijacking situation, this version relies on loud music and flashy lights, playing like a video from MTV’s heyday.