Mike_Yike

Locke's entire focus is on a man, Locke, played by Tom Hardy, speaking to various people on his car's hands-free device as he drives down the road. There is a woman who he barely knows, about to give birth to his child. She has his primary attention and is the destination of his drive. Among those Locke converses with during his trek, there is his wife, who he now tells of this other woman and the baby. And there is his place of employment, where he has a very important task assigned to him, a task that he will be unable to perform due to his absence.

The gimmick, if that's what it is, is the camera never leaves Locke and his many conversations. Through the entire movie, there are several voices but just one character, one actor shown on screen. There are no special effects, no exotic locations. There's nothing much in the way of scenery at all. The movie couldn't have been expensive to make.

Anyway, I actually would have liked to have some scenes showing the individuals involved in the phone calls. That would have sacrificed the theatrical device of only the one character shown, but it would have made the movie a notch better in that it would have put faces onto voices. As it was, I gave it a 6. Not bad, not great.

First, Lee is not a "date flick". It certainly is not a chick flick, either. As best I can tell, it is a fairly honest telling of the wartime account of Lee Miller, a woman photographer during WWII. The film shows the ugliness of war without fully going into the horrific aspects. Probably a good thing, actually. Kate Winslet does a good job as Lee Miller. Her military guide was played by Andy Samberg. To be honest, at first I did not recognize him. He was not much like his character on Brooklyn 99.

Not that it too much matters, but the movie parted from an accurate depiction when a black man played an American officer, giving orders in France to white Americans soldiers. The American Armed Forces were not desegregated for another four years.

Anyway, I gave Lee a 7-star. That was perhaps a bit generous. But it was closer to 7 than it was to 6.

According to the documentary, pretty much all of Jim Thorpe's miscues were not his fault. During the 1912 Olympic Games, he lost his track shoes. They were stolen, according the the documentary though there was no evidence of that. If they were stolen, who was to blame for their security? His Olympic Gold medals were retracted due to Thorpe's time playing professional baseball. He signed an Olympic declaration stating he was a fully amateur athlete. When this turned out to be untrue, the documentary blamed his past coach, Pop Warner. Jim Thorpe was a 25 year-old adult at the time. He was not 12. In his final years, Thorpe had problems with alcoholism. This was not mentioned in the documentary.

I would have preferred Jim Thorpe: Lit By Lightning portrayed Thorpe as a great athlete but like all of us, a flawed human being who despite fame, had trouble navigating a difficult era for racial minorities.