Reviews

At first I didn't think I was going to like this since time travel is a rather overdone plot device for sci-fi. But the acting and characters are so well done that the series won me over.

I love learning history this way, but the part where the British officers make fun of the Scottish accent I found particularly interesting. In reality, the English accent of the 18th Century was very different from a 20th Century accent and the officers would have found Claire's accent very strange.

One more thing, this may be nitpicking but the English language has changed in other ways. Words are used anachronistically in this series, for example, the first use of the word "civilisation" in the sense that we use it today was in 1772. In the 1740s civilisation meant "law which makes a criminal process civil". In other words it was a very uncommon word that most people had never heard of.

I particularly love hearing the Gaelic language, especially the singing. I wish Netflix could have provided subtitles for what they were saying.

Whenever I see a historical movie I always ask myself, "Did that really happen?" I know a lot of people couldn't care less about that but I can't help it. So I researched King Henry V and discovered that a lot of stuff in this movie was just made up. The relationship between Hal and Thomas as depicted in the movie is complete fiction. Henry IV never named Thomas as heir to the king. Thomas did not die before Hal became king. Hal disagreed with Henry IV's policies but they never hated each other. That was invented. There was no connived French plot to assassinate Henry V.

Henry V wanted to invade France to regain English held lands that were lost under Richard II. That was his motivation. The real English siege at Harfleur in 1415 was notable because it was an early example of the use of cannons and handguns in warfare. None are shown in the movie which is disappointing. The French Dauphin was not at Agincourt and that entire plot line with him is invented.

Agincourt was an almost miraculous victory since the English were outnumbered and suffering from sickness. They were trying to retreat to Calais where they could get supplies. The French cut off their escape. But the rain turned the ground into a bog and that meant that the French cavalry was ineffective. The horses got stuck and that made them easy targets for the English archers. There was an infantry melee but the French were surrounded and cut down. King Henry V did fight with his infantry as shown in the movie but the Dauphin was not there. Henry did order his troops to kill French prisoners.

The ending is particularly disappointing. Henry was not angry about being tricked into going to war. That part was totally made up in order to make him appear more sympathetic to a modern audience. Henry V was a medieval warrior and winning a war was his highest ambition. The behavior of Princess Catherine is totally anachronistic. She would never have spoken like a modern 21st Century woman. She says in the movie that she couldn't see why Henry would want to marry somebody that he didn't know. Arranged marriages were the norm in the 15th Century, especially for royalty. It is a major faux pas for the writers to have her say that. And to have her speak so disrespectfully to the man who just defeated her country makes no sense. The military men in these times would kill you for insulting them, and they absolutely did not believe in equal rights for women.

In parts the story was dramatized, but it was mostly realistic. The acting was uniformly excellent, especially that of Even Peters. It did not go into the full depth of Dahmer's depravity, but it did show the cannibalism. If it had depicted what Dahmer actually did with his victims the show would have been unwatchable. The central theme was is Dahmer insane or evil? It is possible that he was both but the story tried to show sympathy for Dahmer and for his victims. The father, played by Richard Jenkins, was especially well done. The police and the judicial system were treated as either incompetent, racist or homophobic. Dahmer was arrested for an early crime of molestation, but the court did not authorize any kind of psychological help for him. It probably would not have cured him but it was obvious to one psychologist who examined Dahmer that he was a high risk for recidivism.

Many criticize this series for not emphasizing the stories of the victims and their families. One episode was almost entirely devoted to one of the victims. Several victims escaped from Dahmer but the police either did not believe them, or the judge did not take Dahmer seriously as a threat to the community. In one scene Dahmer was drunk driving and he had a cut up body in the back seat in plastic bags. He gets pulled over by the police for erratic driving but the police listen to Dahmer's excuses and let him go. Time after time authority figures want to give Dahmer a second chance. There is no police task force to hunt down Dahmer. He is caught almost accidentally. Repeatedly, Dahmers non-white surviving victims or his neighbors are treated with skepticism by the police.

Dahmer has amazing skills as a conman. He cons everyone into thinking he is a nice guy, except for one neighbor, Glenda Cleveland, who protests after the police return a 14 year old victim to Dahmer to be murdered. The police never follow up on the boy's condition. When another victim escapes he finally convinces the police to investigate. They find photos that Dahmer took of his victims and that is how he is finally caught. In the trial, his lawyers want to get Dahmer declared to be legally insane, but in doesn't work and he is sentenced to consecutive life sentences. The families impact statements are very powerful emotionally. Dahmer's lawyer wants to keep him isolated in prison to protect him but Dahmer can't stand the loneliness. So he decides to go into the general population. So Dahmers' decision was a kind of self-imposed death penalty. Society gets the revenge it wanted.

This movie was actually painful to watch but I watched it to the end out of morbid curiosity. I came to the conclusion that the director/writer sympathized with the vile main character played by Rosamund Pike, Marla. Marla comes across as a super hero, except that her superpower is selfishness, self-absorption and inflicting suffering on completely innocent people.

This movie is listed as a comedy, but where the humor is completely escapes me. Marla's enemy is Peter Dinklage, named Roman, and his acting skills almost succeed in making him human, but there just isn't enough of a real person written into his character. Nice try though. Marla and Roman team up together at the end which looks and feels extremely phony. Real criminals are not so forgiving.

Marla has a lover who shares her ethics, and a vile philosophy which basically states that humanity is divided up between predators and prey and that is the justification for her being a predator. She is killed by one of her victims at the end, but that looks like an artificial ending tacked on to make the movie more acceptable to a mainstream audience. It doesn't work. Marla is the intended hero of the movie, not her victims.

I feel sorry for anyone who has such a sick, warped, violent, sadistic view of the human race. I am really surprised that this movie got such a high rating on IMDb. One more thing, if you hate elderly people you will like this movie better. That may be one of the reasons for the high rating.

I felt good when I left the theatre which was helpful. Thankfully it was a fantasy. A realistic film would have been intolerable. It is remarkable that such a traumatic event was made into an entertaining comedy. But we must never forget that this story is just as ridiculous as a Batman movie. It is a little weird when you take a real historical event and turn it into a Batman movie except that you use real names and real events with some of the actual participants still living today.

I don't know. Maybe being entertaining isn't enough. This is the first time I gave a negative review to a movie that I enjoyed. It is a paradox but something bothered me about this movie the more I thought about it.

The CIA are the heroes in this film and the "Russian" beauty falls in love with the CIA agent and betrays her country. The Russians are masters of torture, murder, and sexual degradation. The CIA hero is stalwart and noble. And to top it off, the main Russian villain bears an uncanny resemblance to Putin. It is a CIA agent's wet dream. The Russian hackers and trolls will be apoplectic in rage over this film but of course they will never admit it. They will do everything they can to smear the film by saying things like the accents are bad, the story is dumb, the acting is terrible, etc... They will smear the individual actors, the director, the studio etc...

I know that most of you don't care about that but you should keep it in mind as you read the bad reviews. The movie definitely is not boring. The tension is nonstop and JLaw has never looked more beautiful, that is if you care about that (a lot of people don't). It isn't a romance. It's a thriller so some people will say there isn't any sex appeal because of the lack of romance. The sex and violence is raw and pretty graphic (for an R rating) so be warned. I thought the acting was great but a lot depends on whether you buy the plot line and a lot of people won't buy the Russians as villains schtick. I know of one American politician that thinks the Russians are great.

This film made sense up to about 3/4 of the way through. We had a suspense crime drama with exciting plot twists and a Scrooge-like protagonist getting his comeuppance, so far so good. But at the end the writers decide to throw a plot curve ball that misses the strike zone by a mile. It turns out that all the machine guns, explosions, attempted murder, and psychological terror was just a joke and it was all just good clean fun. Huh? Who would pay an organization to drive their client to the point of attempting suicide??? Why the client's brother of course! He did it because his brother was becoming "such an asshole" and he wanted to help him.

This was a reworking of the Christmas Carol plot except in this version Scrooge isn't taught anything about goodness or love for his fellow man. He is just terrorized to the point of madness and the audience is supposed to accept this as a good thing to do. In the end he accepts that it was all for the best and even thanks the brother and offers to pay for half of the cost of the plot to terrorize him. I gave the movie a five because it was really well done up till the ending but these filmmakers have their moral values frapped in a blender.

The plot is disjointed and the characters are ill-defined. Very little about the Snoke character is explained. Why does Rey have such great powers? Exactly why is Kylo Ren so mentally disturbed. Why did Luke become a hermit for forty years? It is almost as if the writers didn't care about character motivation and assumed that the audience didn't either. It is all just an excuse for sword fights and explosions. The actors do the best they can but the material is very weak. The writers and director borrow heavily from the previous episodes. Even the music is reused. Luke's character is supposed to be similar to Obi-Wan Kenobi. Snoke is a reworking of the Emperor and of course there is a heavy reliance on nostalgia for the old characters, Luke and Leia. Besides the sci-fi stuff, what made the original episodes so successful were the characters, Darth Vader, Princess Leia, Hans Solo, and Luke Skywaker. Kylo Ren could be a great character except we don't really know much about why he chose the dark side. We know almost nothing about the Snoke character. Princess Leia and Luke seem to be just going through the motions without much feeling. The new characters, Rey, Finn, Poe, etc... are not given much motivation beyond the standard good guys save the galaxy from bad guys line.

The whole movie is trite, stilted, and loaded with cliches. So why is it that so many normally intelligent critics are lavishing such praise on this turkey? Are they afraid of panning a major blockbuster or are their heads being turned by all of the attention that they are being given by Disney? What retaliation could Disney inflict if a critic panned a major production? What critic would want to be on the receiving end of that?

One must give credit to the director for style points. It is very well done cinematically. But the minimal dialogue does not allow the audience to get to know the characters well enough to care about them. Nolan uses the well worn multiple plot lines device but in this case it doesn't work. Hitchcock is Nolan's role model but Hitch would never have used this device in one of his thrillers. Hitchcock always had straightforward plots with compelling main characters. But here, the characters are almost unimportant. Nolan is more interested in the danger that they are facing. But that doesn't work dramatically if the audience doesn't identify with the character.

Nolan seems to be uninterested in the battle as a great historical event. Little effort is spent on giving the audience the necessary background to understand the battle's significance. The director wants to treat the battle as a series of human survival dramas. That is only partially successful. The episode of the soldiers getting into the beached ship was just too obviously a suspense inducing gimmick. Why would anyone that was not completely stupid think that would be a safe refuge?

The enemy is almost faceless. This is another device meant to create a feeling of dread. All of these devices work in some movies but here it doesn't come together. For the British this battle was very emotional because they believed at the time that they were facing a German invasion of Britain. That was why it was so important to save the British Army. It wasn't just national honor. Nolan doesn't seem to care about any of this. I think that Nolan should stay away from historical subjects. It just isn't his forte.

This story was panned by some IMDb readers and most notably by the critic Vincent Canby. I, personally, found the story riveting. Faulkner likes to refer to himself as a humanist and emphasizes the "eternal verities" of the human spirit that endure beyond what common sense would deem rational. Love is Faulkner's theme in "Tomorrow". Jackson Fentry's seemingly irrational behavior towards the pregnant woman and his behavior in the jury room twenty years later are good examples of Faulkner's "eternal verities". Robert Duvall does his best at a thick southern drawl and it isn't entirely authentic but it is certainly better than Vivian Leigh's southern accent. The minimalist dialogue and music score emphasize the simplicity of the lives of these rural poor. The story is glum and that will turn off many people but the characters' very miserableness creates a contrast between their sorry condition and the most noble of human emotions, namely love. What makes this story uplifting, in the end, is the strength of Jackson Fentry's love in the face of his world's bleakness. That is Faulkner's main point.

One other thing that has to be said is that IMDb made an error in the trivia section for this movie. IMDb claims that the character of the pregnant woman was Black in the original story. This is not correct. She was White in the original story. The mistake is likely due to the woman being described as "black complected" in the story. That phrase means dark haired, not dark skinned. In the South of the early 20th Century, it was against the law for a White man to marry a Black Woman and no local preacher would have married them.

I liked this movie for its minimalism and its characters. Its protagonist is a weak individual whose main source of emotional support is her dog. In the end she can't even protect the dog and leaves her with a better provider, thus leaving herself completely alone. This story is a kind of minor tragedy that emphasizes the downside of American individualism and what happens to a person when his or her support group collapses and they have nothing left. At the start of the picture Wendy's car breaks down and she meets the security guard that helps her push her car off of the parking lot. The guard represents the sole example of human kindness that Wendy experiences the movie. Wendy foolishly attempts to shop lift food for her dog and gets caught and sent to jail. She has to pay a large fine and her dog is gone when she is released. The rest of the movie is Wendy's search for her dog which she finds at the end. Her decision to leave her dog with the new owner is a personal tragedy for her because, as we see in the final scene, she is totally alone in a freight car facing a dangerous and uncertain future.

I see this movie in political terms. Republicans that despise the poor and weak will hate this movie for the sympathy that it shows for Wendy. Most American movies emphasize strength or defiance in the face of injustice or adversity. The most that Wendy can do is cry in despair and cling to an improbable hope for the future. This is the core of the film's realism. Without a support group we are all like Wendy. The American myth of the rugged individual is a stupid lie.

I gave this film the highest rating because it goes beyond entertainment to attempt to explain how the system could be so fatally flawed. I think I will watch it again so I can thoroughly understand the details. The movie is not partisan. But if you get your economic views from Fox or Drudge you will hate this movie. Both sides were guilty of the asinine deregulation of the banks that created casino capitalism. As late as 2008 one presidential candidate was saying that "the fundamentals of the economy are strong". The movie shows how the rating agencies that gives the bonds their letter grades are both incompetent and corrupt. The ending is remarkable because it lays out in stark terms how the bad guys not only won but got the US taxpayer to subsidize the bank CEOs' and managers' multi-million dollar bonuses that they are still getting. Only one low level banker got a prison term for this evil act of raw greed and corruption.

The American people still don't understand what happened (because a lot of people at the top don't want them to know). This movie is a long overdue first step in explaining it.

Above all, this is a movie for young teens. If you want to see a budding romance between 7th graders, I recommend it. Otherwise let it pass. The suspense scenes are professionally done but nothing different from what you have seen a hundred times before. Alien was suspenseful, this movie is very weak tea compared to that movie. It's all very Hollywood formula friendly. There are emotional conflicts between the parents and kids and there is a nice reconciliation at the end. The train crash is well done and the child actors did a good job. The late 70s setting is interesting because the whole movie has the feeling of an early Spielberg movie. The plot revelations reminded me of LOST.

If you have kids, you will not want them using the bad language that the kids in this film use. Overall I'd say save your money. I wish I did.

Most people liked this film. But, as with all character driven films, if you don't like the characters you won't like the film. Rooster Cogburn is very a flawed character. He is a drunkard, and not a very lovable drunkard. But he has what Mattie Ross wants, namely, true grit.

Mattie knows what she wants and how to get it. She has a sharp tongue and insists on having her own way at all times. Not surprisingly, she ends up as an old maid. Men may admire her but romance is not in her future. LaBouef is a self-important Texas Ranger that Mattie verbally cuts to pieces at their first meeting. He squabbles in a childish manner with Mattie and Cogburn but redeems himself by saving both of them at the end of the movie.

The theme of this film is not just retribution, it is redemption. Cogburn redeems himself through his courage and his loyalty to Mattie. Mattie's stubborn determination and bravery redeems her. Considering how pompous, silly, sodden, and stubborn the characters' behaviors are, this film is emotionally uplifting due to courage that the characters show in the end.

The cinematography is beautiful. It is stark and cold as befits a story about revenge. The acting is solid all around with Mattie at the center of the action. I don't see how she can be considered a supporting actress by the Academy Awards. She is obviously playing the lead role.

Although most liked this movie, some people were very disappointed. Many said it was boring or they didn't like the characters. Some went to the movie thinking there would be a lot more action. I thought the action scenes were great. Some even tried to make political criticisms which I find extremely inappropriate. Some criticisms were based on the preference for the original True Grit. I, recently saw the original. Although I liked it I think the new one has better acting and direction. The original is weak in cinematography and in the musical score. I just don't see revenge in Glen Campbell's ballad!

I highly recommend True Grit with the caveat that some people will definitely not like it.