Month: May 2022

When her dead husband’s life insurance check is a hundred times larger than she expected, Shirley MacLaine and her best friend Jessica Lange hightail it to the Canary Islands with insurance investigators, scam artists, and adult children all on their tail. The chemistry between MacLaine and Lange is sweet and them re-learning how to live their best lives is fun and inspirational. Unfortunately the rest of the film is too silly and drags on too long which weighs down a lot of the good feelings. It’s funny for me to see Howard Hesseman and Billy Connolly in a film together since I forever associate both of them with their teacher roles in Head of the Class.

When she is warned that her next asthma attack may be her last, Whoopi Goldberg tries to heal the rifts in her extended family, which includes estranged husband Ving Rhames and adult children Mekhi Phifer, Kimberly Elise, Tichina Arnold, and Anika Noni Rose. What could be an excessive melodrama (this family goes through EVERY dramatic adult situation possible) is highly elevated by the cast. Led by Whoopi, they give strong performances across the board and create realistic behaviors and reactions to the over-the-top storytelling. It results in a heartfelt tale of family.

Set during the 1999 WTO protest in Seattle, this film follows the experiences of several fictional characters who participate in the events and are affected directly by the escalating violence. Not being long experienced in large scale protests, this had been the first one I was personally aware of that incorporated large planning and police countermeasures, so I was curious as to how the film would present them. Unfortunately the large number of characters really overwhelms the true story and the reasons behind the protest and the escalation. The mostly uninteresting personal lives of the characters takes precedence over the actual timeline of events and the decisions that were made at the time.