A Movie Friday

Spent some time watching movies this past Friday.

First up was "Sully", the Tom Hanks starring and Clint Eastwood directed movie about the forced landing of a disabled US Airways passenger airplane in the Hudson River in January 2009.  Hanks, who is always good in anything he does, stars as Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, the pilot of the craft.  The events depicted in the movie are recent enough that most people will remember them, and Eastwood does a great job in turning an event that last 208 seconds into a full length movie.

Much of the movie focuses on the NTSB investigation of the event that followed.  Did Sully do the right thing in making the forced water landing? (All 155 people aboard survived, so I'd say, yeah, he did.)  Should he have tried to return to one of two airports available to land?  These are the issues facing the NTSB, who it must be said were doing what they needed to do, but Eastwood makes them the "bad guys" in this one in such a broad fashion that I am surprised he didn't have then wearing black hats during the board hearings.

I give this one three stars, and I am looking forward to discussing this one with my buddy Tim Baker at some point in the future.

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Next up was from 1965, Blake Edwards' "A Shot in the Dark", perhaps the best of Peter Sellers Inspector Clouseau movies.  To be honest, some of the gags in this one go on too long and become almost annoying to watch, but there are enough honest-to-God laughs in this one to make it worth watching.  Watching Sellers trying to return a pool cue to the rack of cues in the billiard room is hilarious.

It also stars the beautiful Elke Sommer, the single most beautiful woman I have ever seen in person (I've told the story before), and she is gorgeous in this one.

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On Friday night I tuned into TCM to watch Woody Allen's 1988 drama, "Another Woman" that starred Gena Rowlands and Mia Farrow.  Rowlands plays a college professor who accidentally overhears another woman, Farrow, while she is visiting a psychiatrist.  Hearing they stranger's story makes Rowlands take another look at her own life, both past and present.  I had never seen this one, but I am always anxious to "discover" an Allen movie.  As I said, this one is no comedy, but rather an adult drama, one that makes you really think.  Maybe it's not for everyone, but I thought it was quite good.

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The final Friday movie, also on TCM, was "I Never Sang For My Father" from 1970 starring Melvyn Douglas and Gene Hackman.

Hackman plays Douglas' adult son who returns home after the death of his mother, and is faced with dealing with an aging father.  Lots of unresolved father-son issues come to light.  Again, not always an easy movie to watch, but excellently done - both Douglas and Hackman received Oscar nominations for this one - and a movie that probably everyone, to one degree or another, can relate.

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Still have one more movie on the DVR that I want to watch soon, another Blake Edwards/Peter Sellers comedy called "The Party" from 1968.  Maybe after the Steelers game tonight.  More on that one later, after I watch it again.

A Little Known Fact About "Trouble With the Curve"

WARNING: Post contains a possible spoiler.

I got around to watching one of my Christmas gifts last night - the DVD of the Clint Eastwood baseball movie, "Trouble With the Curve."  Despite the fact that you could see the ending to this one coming like a Kevin Correia hanging curve ball, this was a pretty good movie, one that certainly deserves being a part of your baseball movie library, if you have one.  Eastwood was Eastwood, which is always pretty good, unless he's talking to an empty chair, and there were good performances from the charming Amy Adams and Justin Timberlake (who, by the way, has proven himself to be more than just some cute kid from a Boy Band).

Anyway, Pirates fans should be interested to know this little know fact about the movie that was somehow left on the cutting room floor when the final editing of the film was done.  Had Timberlake convinced the Red Sox to make Bo Gentry their number one pick, then the next name on the Braves list, a kid who was highly coveted by the team's stats obsessed, computer geek scout, the one who wanted John Goodman's job, was none other than Stetson Allie.  Loved his 100 MPH fastball and his "upside."  

True story.

And I would have loved to have seen Clint Eastwood's reaction to THAT choice.

Movie Review: "J. Edgar"

The new Clint Eastwood directed and Leonardo DiCaprio starring movie, "J. Edgar", was heavily advertised during the baseball playoffs, and those ubiquitous commercials had me convinced that this was a movie to see. It had so much going for it....a great director in Eastwood, perhaps the best actor of his generation in DiCaprio, and a subject, J. Edgar Hoover, that was ripe for controversy and, perhaps, some rousing action.

Sorry to say, the whole was not as good as the sum of its parts.

While Hoover certainly deserves credit for building the FBI into the elite crime fighting organization it is today, a case could also be made that Hoover was also one of the more evil figures in our history. Personally, I was interested to see how Eastwood, whose personal politics are somewhat right of center, might portray Hoover. Would he emphasize the crime-busting anti-Communist passion of Hoover? Would he gloss over the Hoover who wiretapped seemingly everybody and use those findings to blackmail several Presidents and Attorneys General into keeping him at his post as FBI director until the day he died?

Well, the movie does show Hoover, warts and all, and it also plays up Hoover's long term relationship with his #2 man at the Bureau, Clyde Tolson. Unfortunately, the movie, which is told in flashbacks as Hoover dictates his memoirs to a present day Agent, is somewhat disjointed, which makes it somewhat hard to follow. The colors in the movie also are washed out through much of the movie. Sometimes that works well, but I don't think it did here. As a fellow viewer said to me as we exited the theater, "I expected more."

One thing that did not disappoint was DiCaprio's performance. He is really a great actor. I haven't seen everything he's done, but I've never seen him be anything less than excellent in anything that I have seen him in. I also like Armie Hammer, despite some ridiculous make-up, as Tolson. Very good performance there.

One of the historical figures portrayed in this movie was Robert Kennedy, and this leads me to a pet peeve. Whenever the Kennedys are portrayed in movies or on TV, why must the actors speak with such obviously phony New England accents? Is it really necessary to use accents when portraying historical figures? Would it make the movie any less valid if Jack or Bobby Kennedy just, you know, spoke their lines without making you think you are watching a bad version of Rich Little on the screen? Don't know who the actor was who played RFK in this movie, but the "pahk-the-cah" affectations were distracting in the extreme. Maybe they should have had him wearing a Red Sox hat, too.