virek213's reviews

Apparently, despite going extinct some sixty-five million years ago on this planet, dinosaurs have staying power in the movie theaters. Thanks to what the late novelist Michael Crichton had first wrought in book form in 1990, and then legendary filmmaker Steven Spielberg in cinematic form in 1993, what we know as the JURASSIC PARK/JURASSIC WORLD franchise has proven to be a box office bonanza of staggering proportions, with a cumulative total of $8 billion being made. One would have thought there would have been nothing more that could be done with genetically-modified dinosaurs after the 2022 entry JURASSIC WORLD: DOMINION; but such wasn't quite the case, as JURASSIC WORDL: REBIRTH has shown us.

With JURASSIC WORLD: REBIRTH, the original cast pairings have been replaced by a whole new set of characters, and a plot devised by Koepp, who was responsible for the first two films in the franchise. Here, Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali are the ones leading an expedition to a truly remote island near the equator to extract DNA from three different species of dinosaurs that have been left in splendid isolation for the purpose of treating heart disease. To get this DNA, however, they need to shoot darts at the dinosaurs at very close range (ten meters, to be precise), thus exposing themselves to the utmost danger imaginable. The three species in question are Mosasaurrus (which lives underwater); Titanosaurus (a very large terrestrial creature); and Quetzalcoatlus, an avian species. And before they are even able to reach the island, though after they have extracted the Mosasaurus DNA, they are forced to do the selfless thing by rescuing a father (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), his two daughters (Luna Blaise; Audra Miranda), and a boyfriend (David Iacono) whose boat was destroyed by the Mosasaurus. Three members of Johansson's team (Rupert Friend; Ed Skrein; Philippine Velge) are killed by the dinosaurs as the rest of the party seek to extract themselves in some of the most frightening sequences yet seen in the Jurassic World franchise

Although it can be accurately be categorized (and, unsurprisingly, criticized as well) as a typical summer blockbuster, the fact that Spielberg still keeps his name attached to JURASSIC WORLD: REBIRTH in the role of executive producer, along with Koepp's intrinsic knowledge of both Spielberg's and Crichton's original vision shows it not to be as merely another summer blockbuster. Stepping into the director's chair is Edwards, a British-born filmmaker with a track record for having directed two huge blockbuster films, 2014's GODZILLA, and 2016's ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY. Inevitably, this means that the emphasis in JURASSIC WORLD: REBIRTH is the enormous mayhem that our principal characters must endure, not to mention tons of tyrannosaur terror as well. The wrinkle that is added in is the notion that dinosaur DNA, especially of three particular types, getting extracted for the purposes of finding treatments to diseases. It is, to say the least, a highly intriguing wrinkle, even if it is a highly speculative one as well. And while it can be argued that its inclusion is also something of a convenient plot device (a "McGuffin", to use a classic Alfred Hitchcock term) to put the characters in prehistoric harm's way, it does work as precisely that, and arguably even more, thanks to Koepp's careful explanatory plot structure.

As anyone who remembers the original 1993 Spielberg classic knows, even the best dinosaur effects and the filmmaking really wouldn't matter a whole lot without at least a couple of the main characters being sympathetic, heroic, and smart enough to know how much trouble they are in and have to get out off. In this, both Edwards and Koepp have found their characters in Johansson (whose credits include 2006's THE BLACK DAHLIA, 2012's THE AVENGERS, and 2017's GHOST IN THE SHELL), and Ali (who won two Best Supporting Actor Oscars, in 2019 for THE GREEN BOOK, and in 2016 for MOONLIGHT). While not the most subtle film of its kind by any means, JURASSIC WORLD: REBIRTH, with all these things in it, plus a solid score by Alexandre Desplait that revisits some of John Williams' own JURASSIC PARK themes, still delivers what it promises in terms of excitement, suspense, terror, and good science fiction speculation. Not many Hollywood blockbusters can boast that anymore nowadays.

I will be giving this REBIRTH an '8' rating.

Television is often thought of as an instant medium, especially when it comes to reporting on world events, be it the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, the Apollo 11 moon landing, or, in more recent decades, 9/11. But even the most experienced people can get caught up short in a news event that they're not necessarily fully qualified to report on but find themselves in the middle of. This is what happened on September 5, 1972, when ABC Sports' coverage of the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany went suddenly into hard news mode at the moment gunfire was heard in the Olympic Village early that morning. Before long, ABC Sports president Roone Arledge and his broadcast team, including the legendary Jim McKay, found themselves broadcasting live for the first time ever an actual terrorist attack, namely the ultra-violent Black September terrorist splinter group of the Palestinian Liberation Organization holding eleven Israeli athletes hostage. The film SEPTEMBER 5 is a vivid dramatization, though done in a quasi-documentary style, or how ABC's coverage of this horror unfolded.

Peter Sarsgard portrays Arledge, who finds himself in the unenviable position of broadcasting the world's most important sporting event, the Games of the 20th Olympiad, and then being forced to improvise, along with his entire broadcast crew, in covering a story where two Israeli athletes have already been killed, nine other Israeli lives are being threatened, and nothing can be nailed down definitively. And they also must walk a fine line as they cover it, being careful to get the story out while at the same time not looking like they are giving the Black September militants too much of an opportunity to show off. Fighting off the limitations of the kind of satellite coverage available in the early 1970's. John Magaro and Ben Chaplin are, respectively, Arledge's two top assistants Geoffrey Mason and Marvin Bader; and with the help of a good German female translator (Leonie Benesch), they are able to interpret what the German officials are doing about a situation that, because of laws written into the German constitution following the Nazis' defeat in World War II, they are not exactly qualified to handle. Sarsgard and his staff, however, realize the bind they themselves are in when it is learned that every athletes' room in the Olympic Village has a television, and that the terrorists are watching everything going on just mere yards from the Israelis' apartment. There's a whole air of tragic inevitability to the story, given how it turned out; but as with so many great films based on true stories, it's the depiction and the process of events and characters that keeps the viewer glued.

Aspects of the Munich tragedy have been filmed before: the 1976 made-for-TV film 21 HOURS AT MUNICH; the highly acclaimed 1999 documentary film ONE DAY IN SEPTEMBER; and the masterful 2005 Steven Spielberg film MUNICH (which told of how an elite Israeli hit squad sought out those who planned the Munich horror). SEPTEMBER 5 joins that distinguished trio of films, thanks in no small part to the cast assembled by director Tim Fehlbaum, whose previous credits included 2011's HELL and 2021's THE COLONY. The control room that was recreated for the film based on what existed in televised sports and news coverage is exceptionally realistic, and shows the audience what it meant to be dealing with what by 21st century standards is considered antique technology. That a lot of the footage used comes from the actual ABC News coverage of the event is not terribly surprising, but not only do the seams not show, it only adds to the chilling realism being displayed.

Fehlbaum and his cast and crew knew better than to turn SEPTEMBER 5 into am early 1970's version of a high-tech, virtual reality video game; and by shooting it in a documentary fashion, they give it a realism that only exists in the best Hollywood dramatizations of historical events of our time. The dialogue in the control room comes in hot and heavy, which is right for the story itself; and the cast more than ably delivers the emotional tenor required without lapsing into overt melodrama. The whole Munich saga itself had the world in its grip for twenty-one straight hours, with as many as nine hundred million people tuned into the horror that had exploded in a place of peaceful competition. SEPTEMBER 5 is a testament to the professionalism of the ABC crew, and a fitting tribute to the athletes whose horrific demise they had to cover; and it is one of the best movies released in 2024.

I'm giving SEPTEMBER 5 a '10' rating.

Created by veteran television writers Richard Levinson and William Link, and spawned off by two TV pilot films made in 1968 and 1971, "Columbo" was part of NBC's "Mystery Movie" TV cycle during the glory years of television in the 1970's. In it, Peter Falk portrayed the frequently rumpled title role, a lieutenant in the L. A. P. D. out to solve murders, and not let the perpetrators know that he in fact is onto them...until the end, of course. The series ran for six glorious seasons, from 1971 to 1977; and even to this day, it remains one of the highpoints of television.

The first episode of "Columbo" that aired (on September 15, 1971), though it was actually the third one to actually be filmed, "Murder By The Book" involves a jealous but supremely under-talented writer, portrayed with sinister relish by Jack Cassidy, who murders his writing partner (Martin Milner), the more talented one, and tries to make it look like the whole thing happened in Milner's 8th floor office on Sunset Boulevard, except that the murder takes place in a cabin in isolated mountain lakeside town in San Diego County. It all seems quite devious and unsolvable. But then, of course, Lieutenant Columbo shows up.

Apart from Cassidy's seedy performance, done with a touch of oily smugness, and of course Falk with his famous "There's one more thing" line, the film also features a good turn from Rosemary Forsyth as Milner's wife, who hears her husband on the phone at the moment of his getting bumped off. So much of this can sometimes seem like an imitation of Hitchcock classics like DIAL M FOR MURDER done for the small screen-not to mention kind of formulaic to boot. But evidently nobody had counted on the young kid known derisively on the Universal lot as (Sid) Sheinberg's Folly, a then 24 year-old named Steven Spielberg, being given this plum assignment of directing the whole thing; and neither did they count on this episode being written by a not-much-older Steven Bochco, who would later go on to create landmark TV series like "L. A. Law", "Hill Street Blues", and "N. Y. P. D. Blue", in a way that involves a certain amount of craft and craftiness, the kind of which was perhaps more plentiful in the 1970's than it is these days.

Although Spielberg had already gotten episodes of "The Psychiatrist", "Owen Marshall", and "The Name Of The Game" (the famous sci-fi themed episode "L. A. 2017", plus his involvement with "Night Gallery", and although all of those showed he was already a director to be reckoned with, he still didn't exactly have a lavish budget to work with ($100,000) or a long-enough schedule (no more than a week). And he was still working with crew people who were a hell of a lot older than he was, notably the crusty veteran cinematographer Russell Metty, who had won an Oscar in 1960 for SPARTACUS. But even so, he put those limitations to good use, making the most of a very fine Bochco script without allowing either Falk and Cassidy to ham it up too much. And there is also the matter of the ingenious underscoring by Billy Goldenberg, including synathesized typewriter sounds, sitars, and flowing orchestrations.

All of this adds up to one of the all-time great examples of episodic TV from am era that had so many, thanks to a pair of young guys who would thoroughly turn the way movies and television were done on their collective heads.

"Murder By The Book" gets a definite rating of "10"...by the book.

With an iconic image that encompassed the "Man With No Name" persona in the spaghetti western he did for Sergio Leone in the 1960's, and his steely performances as Dirty Harry Callahan in five movies, it is sometimes a bit too easy to overlook how complex a figure Clint Eastwood has shown himself to be over time, both in front of and behind the camera. The tough guy persona has made him a hero of the political Right in America, even though he himself is a more commonsense conservative; and subsequently it has tended to obscure equally valid and more humanistic roles such as the one he essayed in the 1976 western classic THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES. But throughout his career, he has done roles that a lot of actors would not touch with a ten-foot pole. One such role could be found in the highly underrated 1984 suspense thriller TIGHTROPE, his first venture into this Hitchcock-inspired territory since his own 1971 directorial debut PLAY MISTY FOR ME.

Set in New Orleans, TIGHTROPE puts Eastwood into another cop role, but this one is the more complex role of Wes Block, a New Orleans cop investigating a series of killings involving call girls in the seediest parts of the city's famous French Quarter. As it happens, he has an unavoidable predilection for such women of the night, even though he is also a family man for his two children. The methods the killer uses against these women are roughly the same, and pretty brutal; and what makes things even more disturbing, as time goes on, is the fact that, as more cal girls fall victim, they all share a link with him in that Eastwood is always the last one to have seen them alive. While continuing his investigation of the crimes, he becomes "chummy" with a steely rape counselor (Genevieve Bujold), and they discus the sexual proclivities of this serial killer. It isn't too long, however, before the killer gets awfully close to Eastwood, and suspicion falls on him (he himself even believes at times that its him that's doing all these things). When his own daughter (Alison Eastwood) is almost raped and killed during a break-in at Eastwood's house, it is just a short step before his investigation becomes a quasi-revenge manhunt.

Having just come off doing his fourth turn as Dirty Harry in 1983's SUDDEN IMPACT (which he also directed), Eastwood teamed up with first-time director Richard Tuggle, who had also scripted the 1979 prison drama ESCAPE FROM ALCATRAZ, which he starred in under his mentor Don Siegel's direction. Much like PLAY MISTY FOR ME, and, perhaps on an even greater level, HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER and THE BEGUILED, the character of Wes Block in TIGHTROPE allowed Eastwood to explore his darker and more vulnerable side, this while also venturing into the seedier areas of sex and violence that used to be starkly defined by those on the Right, both in Hollywood and in America in general during the age of Reagan. The seedy aspects of the story contrast starkly with Eastwood's character's family life, making TIGHTROPE every bit as intriguing and similarly steamy 1980's film like BODY DOUBLE and BODY HEAT. There are also, of course, the unavoidable parallels to Hitchcock's classic films, notably PSYCHO, ROPE, and FRENZY, but Tuggle isn't so brash as to think of himself as another Hitchcock (or even Brian DePalma). The dark and seedy nature of the New Orleans French Quarter is well-conceived by both Tuggle and veteran Eastwood cinematographer Surtees, with Lennie Niehaus, who had helped orchestrate previous film scores for the likes of Lalo Schifrin and Jerry Fielding, making a solid scoring debut here with New Orleans jazz and blues motifs.

Given the notorious anti-feminist stance that long put him in good stead with the Right, Eastwood manages to mix it up well with Bujold, whose realistic character in TIGHTROPE has close parallels with her role in Michael Crichton's 1978 medical thriller COMA. The film's very title, contained in a remark made by Bujold that we often "walk a tightrope" between good and evil, is letter perfect for the plot on hand; and while the subject matter may be distasteful at times, and perhaps a disappointment for Eastwood's more macho male fan base fringe, the end result in TIGHTROPE is one of his best and most underrated films, hugely atmospheric, suspenseful and downright frightening in ways that so many ultra-violent slasher horror films, full as they are of sex and blood and guts, never were and never could be.

TIGHTROPE gets a '10'.

The 1996 sci-fi/disaster film TWISTER, produced under the aegis of Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment, provided us with a somewhat hyperkinetic but nevertheless still realistic vision of what it would be like to study the inside of a tornado, arguably the most destructive singular storm there is. It was an especially scary film for anyone living in the Midwest and the Great Plains of the United States, a large region commonly known as Tornado Alley. It also pitted one group of tornado chasers (portrayed by Helen Hunt and the late Bill Paxton) in it for the science, and another group of tornado chasers (led by Cary Elwes) who were in it seemingly more for the thrill of "being first". The end result was one of the biggest box office hits of 1996. Over the ensuing years, there was always talk about filming a sequel to TWISTER, but it remained talk, as original co-scenarist Michael Crichton and Paxton himself passed away in the interim. And then in the summer of 2024, we got TWISTERS, which seems like both a sequel to, and a more-or-less remake of, the 1996 original.

In TWISTERS, Daisy Edgar-Jones portrays a veteran storm chaser not unlike Hunt's character in the original, only this time, having survived one all-too-close encounter with an EF-5 twister in Oklahoma, has moved on to being a meteorological analyzer at the National Weather Service's New York City office. But then she is brought back to her former home state by one of the other survivors of that EF-5, portrayed by Anthony Ramos, who has a plan to map via radar the inside of a tornado and its inner workings. She agrees to go back into the heart of Tornado Alley with Ramos during what is shaping up to be an historic outbreak of massively destructive EF-5 cyclones. But she has to tangle with a team of renegade Marlboro men (and women), led by Glen Powell, who like to portray themselves as "tornado wranglers". Powell's crew come off as a bunch of ridiculous Central Casting rednecks to Edgar-Jones, until she finds out that Ramos has gotten a grant from an unscrupulous Oklahoma businessman ((David Born) who is basically a Vulture Capitalist profiting off of the misery of people whose homes and lives have been uprooted by this most violent weather phenomena. She nevertheless has perfected a theory of how it might be possible to suck the moisture content out of a twister before it can become super-destructive.

But in order to try that theory out with her equipment, she has to get into uncomfortably close range to a twister; and after Ramos agrees to drop his ties to Born, she, Ramos, and Powell team up to put her process into action. This comes down to a violent showdown with a three mile-wide twister about to level the town of El Reno in central Oklahoma.

In place of original TWISTER director Jan DeBont (who also directed the 1994 action classic SPEED) is Lee Isaac-Chung, who really didn't have anything anywhere near as big in his filmography as this (instead, he had smaller films like 2020's MINARI). It is not over-the-top to suggest that the visual effects, which are every bit as good for this film as the effects for the original were in 1996 (the scenes of the supercells and the twisters they spawn are exceptionally realistic), are far more credible than the often over-the-top redneck accents that have to be put on by Powell and his team; one must blame Smith and Kosinski for that. And we could have done without the truly awful clichéd country music "songs", even by veterans like Chris Stapleton and Miranda Lambert, and made do with the dramatic, minor-key underscore by Benjamin Wallfisch, which is every bit the equal of what Mark Mancina brought to the original.

Still, one has to give credit where it's due to what TWISTERS does well; and much of that credit goes to Edgar-Jones, who gives a lot of credibility and sanity to her character of a tornado chaser in this to "make a difference", as she often likes to say, and reduce the breakage in both property and lives that tornadoes cause every spring and summer in America's middle section. Obviously, this is not necessarily the most scientifically plausible film ever made; there is probably no way in hell that anyone is ever going to "stop" a tornado from forming, especially not in Tornado Alley itself. TWISTERS is obviously a thrill ride, and an often-frightening one, but its scientific credibility has some holes to it. But taken just on the basis of it being a thrill ride, one can do a hell of a lot worse.

Despite some reservations, I'm giving TWISTERS a '7' rating.

At a time in America, the second decade of the 20th century, where women were not merely deemed second-class citizens but arguably also third-rate people. Trudy Ederle stood out. Despite her unfortunate encounter with the measles as a young girl in 1914, which led to partial hearing loss, she wanted to show how great a swimmer she could be. Against all odds, and against the brick wall that was male chauvinism, Trudy proved herself by being able to traverse the Hudson River from New York across to New Jersey in just a little under three hours. Then in 1926 she made a most incredible decision, one that even her German-born parents, let alone most of the public, thought was suicidal to say the very least: she wanted to swim the treacherous English Channel, from the Normandy Coast of France to Dover, England. A lot of male swimmers had tried the feat, but had failed, having battled against the nightmarish currents, the fog, sharks, and swarms of jellyfish. But on August 20, 1926, having failed once, Ederle vowed to try again. Her story has now been told in the Disney film YOUNG WOMAN AND THE SEA, based on the book of the same name by Glenn Stout

Daisy Ridley, who played Rey in the Star Wars franchise films THE FORCE AWAKENS, THE LAST JEDI, and THE RISE OF SKYWALKER, portrays Ederle as a determined and an exceptionally feisty young woman growing up in New York City with all odds completely stacked against her gender. But with the help of her sister (Tilda Cobham-Hervey) and a disciplinarian of a swimming coach (Sian Clifford), she perseveres through a lot of physical and psychological pain, and the disdain of her parents. Ridley also, of course, must overcome the rampant sexism that ran through competitive sports in general, and American sports in particular, at that point in American history. Even more than that, the press in America, France, and England are exceptionally doubting Thomas's as to just how far she is willing to go, even after having only won a bronze medal at the 1924 Paris Olympics. The first attempt across, in July 926, goes absolutely haywire due to apparent sabotage on the part of former Channel swimmer Bill Burgess (Stephen Graham). Ridley gets only six miles across before fatigue sets in. Her determination, however, mixed in with a lot of understandable fear, propels her to do it again.

What could have been a fairly stereotypical Hollywood "feel good" and "against all the odds" film a la ROCKY, is clearly given a lot of weight due to the brilliant, heartwarming, portrayal that Ridley gives as Trudy. She is even seen fit to throw even her parents, and the rest of a doubting New York City public, into a tizzy with her goofing-off version of the song "Ain't W e Got Fun". Since this is based on a true story that the public really didn't know that well, it is easier for YOUNG WOMAN AND THE SEA to sustain its suspense. Even so, however, like more than a few history-based films, like APOLLO 13, ALL THE PRESIDENT"S MEN, and THE POST, the eventual outcome is gratifying for how it progresses towards its finish. Ridley's biggest danger, after all the chauvinism, the doubters, and the rest on land, is having to swim right through a horrible swarm of jellyfish at the halfway point of her swim, which is fairly harrowing in and of itself. Even if the depiction of Ridley being almost at the end of her physical rope as the English coastline comes within sight can be seen as a bit of a cliché, it nevertheless remains true to the story through and through.

Joachim Ronning, a Norwegian known for films like 2017's PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES and 2018's MALEFICENT: MISTRESS OF EVIL, directs YOUNG WOMAN AND THE SEA with a great amount of panache, aided and abetted by the script from Jeff Nathanson, who worked with Steven Spielberg on CATCH ME IF YOU CAN and THE TERMINAL. Trudy's harrowing journey is also depicted with a good feel for the inherent human drama of the story. It is, however, Ridley, whose performance as Trudy is truly one of the greatest for any actress of recent times, matching Sandra Bullock's in GRAVITY and Rachel Zegler's in Spielberg's 2021 re-imagining of WEST SIDE STORY. For that reason alone (but also for many more), YOUNG WOMAN AND THE SEA must rank as one of the best films of 2024.

This film gets a '10' from me.

Journalists being "embedded", as it were, with combat troops in war is now very much a product of 21st century media, much as Hollywood filmmakers like John Ford and George Stevens had been in the frontlines of World War II. But what if journalists found themselves on the frontlines of a war being waged on their own soil? And what if the country in question were the United States of America? If such a premise seems utterly far-fetched, and Dystopian in ways that even George Orwell or Aldous Huxley hadn't counted upon in their time, simply because it hadn't been done before, then it was only a matter of time before somebody threw just such a premise was into our faces. This is what happens in CIVIL WAR, a very graphic and explicit look at the plausibility of a second Civil War happening on American soil, and how journalists, particularly photojournalists, would cover it without getting emotionally involved or taking sides. And the irony of it all is that it is a British writer/director, Alex Garland, who puts that premise to good use, perhaps as a comment on where America is careening towards in the third decade of the 21st century, and dangerously so.

Set in some unknown future, CIVIL WAR stars Kirsten Dunst as a hardened photojournalist covering the climax of a particularly brutal war of various forces out to overthrow a neo-fascistic dictatorial American president (Nick Offerman, of the HBO post-apocalypse series "The Last Of Us"). It is the intent, however suicidal it may seem, for her crew to get into Washington D. C. first before elements of either the Western Forces or the extremely odd pairing of militias from decidedly "progressive" California and very Right-leaning Texas have a chance to "finish the job", as it were, which means assassinating Offerman. But while preparing to leave New York City, which itself has come under siege, Dunst picks up, however unintentionally and unwanted (at first), a much younger photojournalist (Cailee Spaeny) who is an admirer of hers. Despite Spaeny's intrusion into their little "caravan", Dunst comes to admire the prodigy's stamina. She does, however, advise her not to ask too many questions about what she is about to witness, saying it is the job of the public to ask those questions. And because they can't do a straight 200-mile shot from New York to D. C., they take a long way around through the war-torn states of Pennsylvania and West Virginia, encountering what an actual civil war inside a 21st century America does to the people, whether they are involved directly or get sucked into the horror of it all, as Dunst, Spaeny, and company do. Garland doesn't give a "rooting" interest, as extremists on either side of the political divide might have wanted; and, despite the graphic language and extreme war violence, the film is all the better for it. So too is the eventual climax inside the White House, an ending that can best be described as chillingly and disturbingly ambiguous.

Garland, known for such films as 2015's EX MACHINA, and 2018's ANNIHILATION, takes a decidedly dispassionate look at war. He does not, however, stint on the horrors of war, even one as fictional as this one is, and, however upsetting such ultra-bloody scenes are, closely mirroring what we saw in FULL METAL JACKET and SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, he forces us to confront the often senseless nature of war, and the senseless barbarity that often arises from it. And much like the characters in his film, Garland utterly refuses to take a side, which will certainly upset a few on the Left, and a whole hell of a lot more on the Right, who often like their viewpoints pandered to and thrown right into out faces. There are no scenes of the American flag being flown mindlessly about, no "God Bless America", only a very dark and extremely violent sense of what America may one day come to in Garland's vision.

CIVIL WAR gets an '8' rating.

By the standards set by recent similar TV series as "Grey's Anatomy" and "Bones", "Marcus Welby M. D.", which ran originally on ABC from 1969 to 1976, must seem painfully antiquated. But it came from a time when television was really starting to come into its own, being forced to move out of the formalism it had been locked in for so long. A lot of this had to do with the presence of the legendary Robert Young, who had already been the star of one TV series ("Father Knows Best") and had a number of great movie roles, notably as a cop in the landmark 1947 film-noir classic CROSSFIRE. It also succeeded for as long as it did because it focused on a lot of topics that were rarely ever discussed, either in the popular culture or out in the real world.

The episode "The Daredevil Gesture", the twenty-first episode of the series' first season (1969-70), which aired on March 17, 1970, features Frank Webb as a young high school student who wants to enjoy the activities of normal school kids his age, and is encouraged (if not outright forced) by his mother (Marsha Hunt) to do. The problem? Webb is afflicted with hemophilia; and his desires to have a normal school life conflict with the need to keep his classmates from getting what he has. It becomes a situation that Webb has to navigate with the help of Young, as well as his assistant doctor Steven Kiley (James Brolin) and his nurse Consuelo Lopez (Elena Verdugo).

What is very notable about this particular story, given that it could otherwise have been just another routine TV episode, is the fact that it really zeroes in on the human and social elements in a way that television had only started doing around that time. Some of the credit should go to the episode's writer Jerome Ross; but the main center of attention is the highly attentive director of one Steven Spielberg, here doing only his second professional assignment overall (following the "Eyes" segment of the TV pilot film NIGHT GALLERY in late 1969), and first full-length television episode. Even at the age of 23, Spielberg already knew a fair amount about the humanity contained in the situation, especially given the way he effectively directs Webb, who had been a student with Spielberg at Arcadia High School in Phoenix, Arizona several years earlier. Young, Brolin, and Verdugo give really good performances under Spielberg's innovative direction of what could otherwise have been a painfully formulaic 45-minute TV episode. For those who only ever thought of lost arks, dinosaurs, and the like when they thought of Spielberg, this is a very good, not to mention very early, example of the kind of director he'd be with a lot of other films to come in succeeding decades, including SCHINDLER'S LIST, SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, THE POST, WEST SIDE STORY, and THE FABELMANS.

Thus, "The Daredevil Gesture" gets a well-earned rating of '9' from me.

What is known as the International Space Station was put up in space following the end of the Cold War to signify that space explorers and scientists from multiple countries will have a place to work together to make important scientific breakthroughs and monitor Earth from some three hundred miles above the ground. But what if, by some ghastly accident or deliberate intent, a war between the two superpowers on the ground actually did occur, and those on the station were forced to do something they never thought would be necessary? This is the premise of the 2024 sci-fi drama I. S. S.

Ariana DeBose, who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 2021 for the role of Anita in director Steven Spielberg's re-imagining of WEST SIDE STORY, Chris Messina and John Gallagher Jr. Portray a three-person American team of astronauts who have taken over for their predecessors aboard the International Space Station. After a slightly shaky start, they become very familiar with their Russian counterparts (Masha Mashkova; Costa Ronin; Pilou Asbaek) and enjoy some friendly bantering. But then everything takes a turn towards the sinister, when DeBose, looking out a window of I. S. S. And down at Earth, sees flashes on the ground that don't look like lightning, but something far worse. As it turns out, though it is never explained what caused it, both superpowers are in a state of war, and that war appears to be spiraling towards the nuclear. And while it is bad enough that both crews effectively find themselves marooned in a confined place, with the only way to get home being a Soyuz emergency rescue craft, and the very real possibility that there won't be a world to return to, the dangers get magnified when both crews are informed separately by their individual governments that their job is to no longer be scientists, but to capture and take possession of I. S. S. By any means necessary.

In many ways, I. S. S. Is a combination of films like GRAVITY and MAROONED, with elements that are germane to the psychological thriller and Cold War genres. Director Gabriela Cowperthwaite, whose credits include 2013's BLACKFISH and 2017's MEGAN LEAVEY, does a very good job of showing that, as big as the International Space Station is from the vacuum of space, the actual living and working quarters of the station are quite cramped and claustrophobic. The scenario laid out by Nick Shafir in his screenplay does have its plausibility holes (given that it's unlikely either the U. S. or Russia would have the time of day to even care what is happening some three hundred miles above them in low Earth orbit if they are on the verge of irradiating one another), and some of the dialogue between the two crews, jumping back between English and Russian, is a bit confusing at times (unlike what was seen with the U. S./Russian cooperation scenario in 1984's "2010"). Even so, however, the visuals of I. S. S. And the depiction of an Earth about to tip over into nuclear war are done rather well, especially given that, with a $20 million budget, Cowperthwaite only had a quarter of the budget that director Alfonso Cuaron had for GRAVITY.

There isn't too much question that DeBose is the most prominent member of the cast, given what she had managed to achieve with Spielberg two years before. She also has roughly the same unenviable task that Sandra Bullock had in GRAVITY, carrying much of the film's weight on her shoulders, even with five other actors involved; and while she is able to convey the fear of being stuck in confined quarters while the world below is in the process of being atomized, she is equally able to remain stoic throughout the ordeal. Some of the scenes of violence that happen are a bit more than what people might want, but they aren't quite grisly; and the film's final moments, full as they are of ambiguity and uncertainty, have the feel inherent in Hitchcock's THE BIRDS and Spielberg's 1971 suspense classic DUEL.

Thus, while I do have issues with the story's plausibility factor, I am nevertheless willing to give this an '8' rating.

William Shakespeare is the ultimate playwright in human history, so it is not surprising that so many of his plays find their way onto stages, whether they are playhouses, high-school stages, or cinematic soundstages. When it comes to the latter, just ask Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, and Franco Zeffirelli, who made a lot of their reputations on the works of "Willie".

But some of them are not nearly as easy to pull off as one might think, especially since The Bard had a tendency to delve into dark subject matter. This is the case with "Macbeth", perhaps the spookiest and most disturbing of any of his plays. Welles made a very film-noir adaptation of it in 1948; and the great Japanese director Akira Kursoawa did his own take of it (in 1957's THRONE OF BLOOD); and Joel Coen made THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH in 2021.

And then we come to what may he the most controversial of all cinematic Shakespeare adaptations, the version of "Macbeth" made in England in 1970-71 by director Roman Polanski.

Jon Finch stars as the tragic and murderous 11th century titular character who seizes the throne by murdering the king with the help of his wife (Francesca Amis) and the help of a trio of witches. What ensues is without question an ultra-disturbing, but exceptionally faithful, adaptation of this cautionary tale of madness, tyrannical behavior, and supernatural occurrences of various stripes, all supported by a cast of veteran English actors who, perhaps to this day (with the possible exceptions of Finch and Amis), remain unknown to most American audiences, but who are supremely right in their roles.

Much has been made over the half-century-plus since MACBETH came out of the motivations behind its making. This was, for one thing, the first true effort into cinema by Hugh Hefner and his Playboy organization, so one could not help but expect a fair amount of nudity (though the play itself has an equal amount of that to begin with). But no one could possibly miss that this was the first film Polanski had directed in the wake of his wife Sharon Tate having been slaughtered, along with six others, in August 1969 by the Manson "family" in Los Angeles, and that it seemed to show up in how enormously violent his MACBETH was for 1971, even as it got released simultaneously with films like A CLOCKWORK ORANGE and STRAW DOGS, two films which were notorious for their own disturbing uses of violence.

Even by 21st century standards, where so much CGI can simulate the most gruesome stuff, the Polanski MACBETH is still an extremely (though not excessively) violent film, regardless of how much stock one puts in any connections between the inherent bloodiness of the original and how the director felt about what Manson's cult had done. And make no mistake, this is a hugely 'politically incorrect" film not only in terms of its violence, but also its nudity. But it is still a film worth seeing, worthy of an '8' rating.

After the great adaptations of The Bard by the Legends Laurence Olivier and Orson Welles, Italian director Franco Zeffirelli's 1968 cinematic interpretation of ROMEO AND JULIET must be considered the best one of any of Shakespeare's plays. The reason is fairly obvious to anyone who even has the faintest idea of the play itself, let alone read it or performed in any stage performance. It is quite simply the most beautiful and heart-rending love story of all time, one that remains timeless after four centuries and perhaps hundreds of thousands of interpretations, stage and screen alike (and this doesn't even include the two equally brilliant and heartbreaking cinematic versions of the great Broadway play WEST SIDE STORY, which is essentially this play slightly revised and set in the New York City of 1957).

The timeless tale involves a lot of dangerous shenanigans between two warring families, the Capulets and the Montagues, in the Italian city of Verona; because the cause of the enmity is never fully explained in the play itself, it is explicitly meant to be meaningless, hence enhancing what is to follow. Romeo Montague (played expertly by Leonard Whiting, who was a neophyte at the time) crashes what is supposed to be a masked ball staged by the rival Capulets...and then it happens: he somehow falls in love with Juliet (Olivia Hussey). As much as they may be opposite sides of a feud that has no explanation, they are nevertheless attracted in a way that is so poignant because it is imperiled from the second it starts.

Zeffirelli had already scored a huge commercial, critical, and artistic success with another Shakespeare adaptation, 1967's THE TAMING OF THE SHREW; and somehow he topped himself with this masterpiece. Both Whiting and Hussey were acting "rookies" by any standards when this film was made; but given the fact that so many versions of this play had the titular characters played by actors who were much older than those characters, these two teen/young adult actors do convey, with the utmost conviction, the romance and the love for one another that should have transcended and ended the pointless, petty, and violent bickering of the two warring families.

Surrounding Hussey and Whiting are some exceptionally great actors, including Michael York as the impetuous, ready-for-a-fight Tybalt; Milo O'Shea as Friar Laurence; Pat Heywood as Juliet's nurse; John McEnery as Mercutio; Bruce Robinson as Benvolio; and Robert Stephens as the Prince, who delivers the final verdict of the two warring families after the two young lovers seal their fate. And it is Lord Olivier himself who narrates this poignant story, with the final line, "For never was a story of more woe, than this of Juliet and her Romeo".

ROMEO AND JULIET, besides being a massive critical, commercial, and artistic hit, one of the biggest of 1968, not surprisingly, and justifiably, won Academy Awards for its gorgeous cinematography and costume designs. It is a film that, like its source material, will always be timely and timeless.

A '10' rating is absolutely in order for this heartrending masterpiece.

A lot of the television films made in the 1970's with sizeable all-star casts, with a handful of exceptions, are fairly cheesy by today's standards (and almost certainly were in their own time as well). The 1978 entry SUPERDOME is a case in point.

With a fairly robust line-up of all-stars, both actors and athletes-as-actors, SUPERDOME involves the intrigues behind the lead-up to the Super Bowl, being played at the Superdome in New Orleans (as it indeed was around the time this film aired on January 9, 1978 [Super Bowl XII). The intrigues involve a player (Ken Howard) who is less occupied with his bum knee and his worries about how he will hold up in the Big Game than he is with his wife (Susan Howard); a quarterback (Tom Selleck) who is being courted by a management firm; and a few other minor things. But when a couple of employees of one of the teams turn up dead in somewhat violent ways, that team's manager (David Janssen, one of the most underrated actors in history) has to find out who the assailant is before the Big Game starts. As he remarks to someone: "We've got seventy five thousand people in The Dome, and a psycho on the loose". It turns out that the assailant's bosses don't want Janssen's team to win, and it's up to him to find out who it is.

As cheesy as SUPERDOME looks, and as so obvious as it is a made-for-TV clone of two previous big-screen films, TWO-MINUTE WARNING and BLACK SUNDAY, which mix the violence of football with actual violence, it is, if no better than most TV fare of its kind, at least not any worse. In large part, it is because, even if he felt the part he played was kind of beneath the abilities of someone who has portrayed Dr. Richard Kimble in "The Fugitive" ion TV in the 1960's, Janssen does exude a goodly amount of credibility and professionalism in that part. The cast includes a lot of luminaries, including Edie Adams, Ed Nelson, Van Johnson, Donna Mills, and Jane Wyatt, and cameo roles by NFL legends Bubba Smith and Dick Butkus, plus the fact that it was filmed entirely on location in New Orleans and even inside the Superdome itself.

Jerry Jameson, who directed SUPERDOME, is no stranger to this all-star "multi-jeopardy" format, having helmed similar made-for-TV films like 1974's HURRICANE, TERROR ON THE 40TH FLOOR, and HEAT WAVE, among others, as well as the very good 1975 TV film THE DEADLY TOWER (about Charles Whitman's infamous 1966 sniper spree in Texas), and the 1977 big-screen disaster film AIRPORT '77, does a competent job here. He doesn't get too terribly bogged down in the melodramatics, though one can understandably be disappointed by the idea that the film itself ends right as the Super Bowl itself is about to start.

I'll be willing to give this a '6' rating for effort, being aware that it had the potential to be as scary as the films it attempts to be a clone of.

Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games series of books, set in an extremely Dystopian place called Panem in which participants from various districts in varying states of poverty are forced to fight to the death, are likely second only to J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series in terms of popularity among teens and young adults. The first three books, "The Hunger Games", "Catching Fire", and "Mockingjay", were published in consecutive years, 2008. 2009, and 2010, and were subsequently made into massive box office hit movies, the first in 2012; "Catching Fire" in 2013"; and "Mockingjay" made into two films, Part 1 in 2014, and Part 2 in 2015. Each of those films starred Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen, a girl from District 12 (located in the Appalachian region). In 2020, Collins released a prequel, "The Ballad Of Songbirds And Snakes", that was set some six and a half decades before the events of the first three novels. And in 2023, that book too got made into a massive opus of a movie.

Although Lawrence's character of Katniss Everdeen is absent here, THE BALLAD OF SONGBIRDS AND SNAKES does get into the meat and bones of how one character, Coriolanus Snow (played in the three films before this one by Donald Sutherland) came to be what he became in the main trilogy. As played by Tom Blyth, Snow is assigned to be a mentor to a District 12 contestant named Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler), an itinerant mountain girl and folk music singer, to help her win the tenth edition of the Hunger Games. This sets him up to be closely monitored by the Games' prime mastermind, Dr. Volumnia Gaul (played with rather vicious relish by Viola Davis), and the games' creator Dean Casca Hightbottom (Peter Dinklage). Zegler manages to win the Hunger Games, but many complications between her and Blyth ensue afterwards, as do his relationships with, among others, rival Sejanus Plith (Josh Andres Rivera).

As directed by Francis Lawrence, who helmed CATCHING FIRE and both MOCKINGJAY films, THE BALLAD OF SONGBIRDS AND SNAKES, aside from being Dystopian in ways that I think would have been hard for even Aldous Huxley or George Orwell to imagine, is quite hair-raising in terms of its action sequences, occasionally imperiling the credibility of its PG-13 rating. It is also quite a long movie at almost two hours and forty minutes, though that length is offset by the action sequences, and the breaks into Appalachian folk music that Zegler's character indulges in, and which earns her the support of the Hunger Games viewing audience. Zegler, whose role as Maria in director Steven Spielberg's beautiful 2021 reworking of WEST SIDE STORY is one for the ages, does a very good turn as Lucy Gray Baird, with her folk-singing voice being very much reminiscent of Mother Maybelle Carter, Joan Baez, and Linda Ronstadt; and although this role isn't quite on the level of what she did for Spielberg, it is nowhere near the hot mess that her detractors (of which there seem to be far too many), and she really gets into the role in the District 12 "bar" sequences.

THE BALLAD OF SONGBIRDS AND SNAKES, even with its weird complications, twists, and turns, earns a rating of 8 from me.

Where to begin?

If anyone had told you at the start of 2023 that the highest-grossing film of the year was going to be a film based on a female doll that first appeared in 1959, you'd probably have them trucked off to the funny farm. And yet that is what has happened with BARBIE. Somehow, perhaps through osmosis, Gerta Gerwig, one of Hollywood's great female directors of this age, known for films like 2017's LADY BIRD and 2019's LITTLE WOMEN (a great adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's literary masterpiece), has made the world's most famous doll become a huge deal, through a mix of goofiness, gaudiness, a certain amount of camp, satire, and pointed jabs at society.

Mrs. Gerwig has also managed to do so with a few references to films of the distant and not so distant past. Take the very opening scene, in which little girls of a previous "era" used to play with baby dolls, giving them the idea that the only ideal for a woman to be when she grew up was to be merely a mother. But then Barbie comes along, and inspires them to destroy the past to create a better future. Gerwig does this in clear but witty homage to the "Dawn Of Man" sequence that opens up director Stanley Kubrick's 1968 sci-fi masterpiece 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, with Barbie standing in for the monolith, and the awestruck little girls standing in for the man-apes. Gerwig even went to the trouble to use both the portentous opening of Richard Strauss' "Also Sprach Zarathustra" and the Kyrie from Gyorgy Ligeti's "Requiem" from Kubrick's film (getting the hearty approval of Kubrick's family in the process).

After that, BARBIE goes into the adventures, and misadventures, of the world's most famous doll, in the personage of Margot Robbie (as the so-called "stereotypical" Barbie), and Ryan Gosling (LA LA LAND; FIRST MAN) as the original Ken. Robbie's existence with the other Barbies throughout time in Barbieland (which looks like a crazy amalgam of Hollywood, Venice, LAX, and Palm Springs rolled into one), finds her making her way into the Real World of today, and finding out, much to her shock, that being the ideal of perfection not only isn't all that it's cracked up to be, but that male patriarchy is the essence of everything in that world. In the meantime, Gosling's Ken, through reading about male patriarchy in high school books, leads a revolt with the "other" Kens to turn Barbieworld into "Ken's World", a symbol of male testosterone excess. The end result is crazy chaos, involving not only Mattel's CEO (Will Farrell), but also a mother (America Ferrera) and her daughter (Sascha Greenblatt), and Ruth Handler (Rhea Perlman), the actual woman responsible for having created the original Barbie.

With all these crazy things happening in the span of just under two hours, it is not surprising that some of the acting is rather overripe, and the jokes and sight gags don't always work. But given all this, and the fact that it sometimes seems on the verge of falling totally apart, the film stays on track due to Mrs. Gerwig's imaginative direction, and, most especially, Robbie's performance as Barbie, where she evolves from a stereotypical figure to a genuinely human one If some of the shots Mrs. Gerwig and her co-screenwriter Noah Bumbach take on the clichés of the status of men and women in the real world can sometimes border on blatant point-making, many of the others are so spot-on that one cannot help laughing at them once we get them.

Gerwig's film references, besides the aforementioned "2001" homage, include two more Kubrick classics (DOCTOR STRANGELOVE; THE SHINING), plus THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG, THE WIZARD OF OZ, GREASE, and SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER, to name just a few. In the end, however, BARBIE is a totally original and insane piece of both old and new Hollywood at its best. For this, Gerwig, Robbie, and Gosling, along with the droll narration of Dame Helen Mirren, deserve tons of credit, as they managed to make what could easily have been an unmitigated disaster into a memorable and wholly unexpected smash spectacle.

BARBIE gets a '9' rating from me.

He was deemed "The Father of the Atomic Bomb"-a man whose core studies on the nature of the universe and the atom itself led to the development of the ultimate Weapon of Mass Destruction; and in his life, he was accused of being a Communist, particularly after his invention (or two of them) atomized Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was J. Robert Oppenheimer (or "Oppie" to his "fans" in the world), But while his story is fairly well known to anyone who has studied the history of America from World War II through to the Cold War, it took British director Christopher Nolan to truly bring his epic story to the big screen, which he has done so with OPPENHEIMER.

Adapted to the screen by Nolan from the book "American Prometheus" by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, OPPENHEIMER stars Cilia Murphy as the legendary and (frequently) legendarily controversial scientist whose studies in quantum physics unlock the great secret of the creation of the universe, but which, in the 1930's, were put to use for a much more disturbing purpose. In order to keep this disturbing purpose totally under wraps, Oppenheimer devised the entire building of a small town in New Mexico called Los Alamos. But both his advocacy for unions inside the professions of professors, teachers, and scientists and his loose associations with people who may have (suspected) ties to the Communist Party make him the subject of scrutiny by the U. S. government, particularly the FBI (very much under the control of J. Edgar Hoover). He nevertheless gets support in the development of The Bomb from legendary General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), Albert Einstein (Tom Conti), and fellow nuclear physicist Edward Teller (Benny Sadie) and the great Danish scientist Niels Bohr (Sir Kenneth Branagh). Overall, this makes OPPENHEIMER very much a political drama and an historical drama all in one, with Murphy's performance giving us insight into the psychology and psyche of this great and, in many ways, troubled American genius, and also a look at how America, from the 1940's onward, seemed hell bent on containing the evils of Communism with a nuclear weapons program that, if ever used for real, would wipe out every living thing on Earth.

Nolan, known for such great films as 2009's INCEPTION, 2014's INTERSTELLAR, and 2017's DUNKIRK, may have made an incredibly long film out of his subject, with a running time of three hours, but he certainly makes the most of it, particularly in the intense and frightening countdown to the device's test detonation in the New Mexico desert in July 1945. Emily Blunt is quite good as Oppenheimer's wife Kitty; and the supporting turns from Damon, Conti, and Branagh are top-notch all the way. And finally, Murphy's portrayal of Oppenheimer is a portrayal clearly worthy of being awarded, particularly a very likely nomination for Best Actor at the Oscars.

Clearly, this is a masterpiece, and worthy of a '10' rating.

The character of the intrepid archaeologist Indiana Jones, as personified by Harrison Ford onscreen, and conceived by George Lucas, is clearly an ultimate Hollywood icon. Whether it was going after lost arks, the Holy Grail, or ancient alien crystal skulls, Indy and his trusty bullwhip were always on the case. And with INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY, Ford and Indy can finally hang it up, both having cemented their places in cinematic lore. But they do so with an extreme bang.

Pre-occupied as he was with both WEST SIDE STORY and THE FABELMANS, director Steven Spielberg, who helmed the first four, only stays on as co-executive producer with Lucas for THE DIAL OF DESTINY; and in his place in the director's chair is James Mangold, whose filmography includes such decidedly "non-cliffhanger: films as 1999's GIRL, INTERREPUTED; 2005's WALK THE LINE; and 2019's FORD VS. FERRARI. Beginning with a battle between Ford and the Nazis onboard a train in the Swiss Alps near the end of World War II involving an extremely valuable ancient dial from two millennia ago that could change history and even the existence of the human race, the film then moves forward to 1969, where, in the weeks following the Apollo 11 moon landing, that mysterious dial (or part of it anyway) enters Indy's life again, despite him being retired from "active" archaeology, via his long-lost goddaughter Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge). What ensues, of course, is not only transcontinental mayhem of the kind that one expects from the Indiana Jones series (given that it's always been essentially a high-tech version of the old 1930's and 1940's short adventure serials that Lucas and Spielberg watched as kids), but also, given that the artifact can alter time and history, and not in a good way if it's in the wrong hands, trans-temporal mayhem, as Ford and Bridge leap from one place to another.

Given that Ford has crossed his own real life eight-decade threshold, we might as well consider DIAL OF DESTINY the final Indiana Jones film we are likely to get; and however weird, bizarre, or credibility-stretching the series has been, even under Spielberg's direction, it has been a great thrill ride. Much of the credit for this should go to Ford, who has always been a hugely credible and at the same time recognizable human action hero as such. In terms of THE DIAL OF DESTINY itself, it is not a mark against Mangold to say that he is not Steven Spielberg (because let's face it, who else is?). As director and co-writer, he is still able to get a lot of mileage out of this entry. John Rhys Davies returns as Indy's long-time friend Sallah, and also gives us Antonio Banderas as Ford's Spanish deep-sea diving friend Renaldo. There is also a nefarious CIA agent working for Ford'a Nazi foe, played by Shaunette Renee Wilson, who is almost a dead-ringer for the legendary and real-life radical African-American activist Angela Davis (a richly ironic twist if ever there was one). We also can't forget Karen Allen returning at the end; nor should we forget that John Williams provides yet another astonishingly great music score, as his seemingly endless ability to do with film after film.

As crazy as this fifth and final Indiana Jones film entry is, I am more than willing to dial up an '8' rating for THE DIAL OF DESTINY.

Back in 1966, Paul Newman enjoyed one of his biggest critical and commercial successes by getting into the private-eye genre in HARPER, as Lew Harper (Lew Archer, actually, in the Ross McDonald novel "The Moving Target" upon which that film was based). With his caginess and oftentimes-sardonic wit, Newman's Harper solved a complex Southern California kidnapping case revolving around a missing millionaire that virtually nobody liked. And then in 1975, he ventured down to New Orleans on another case, and a trip to THE DROWNING POOL.

In this one, Newman's Harper is called down to The Big Easy by an old flame of his, Iris Devereaux (Joanne Woodward, alias Newman's missus) to investigate the ex-chauffeur ((Andy Robinson) who has, according to her, been sending her threatening notes of the blackmail variety. Naturally, the more he digs into the Devereaux family, the more complex this case gets. The family is involved in a fierce war with an unctuous oil baron, one J. Hugh Kilbourne (Murray Hamilton) over land the family owns but that Hamilton wants because of a big petroleum reserve underfoot. Then there's the issue of Woodward's Lolita-ish kid Schuyler (Melanie Griffith, in an early role); the local police chief (Tony Franciosa) who has taken a strong interest in the welfare of the family; Franciosa's ambitious and duplicitous lieutenant (Richard Jaeckel); and the seedier side of life as represented by Hamilton's wife (Gail Strickland), who claims that her husband may, how shall we say, not be altogether upstairs. All of this leads Newman into some fairly dark corners, and into the Drowning Pool of the film's title, a hydrotherapy room at a sanitarium where Hamilton once went for The Treatment, but which Hamilton had purchased. Hamilton and his crony (Paul Koslo) subject both Newman and Strickland to The Treatment to force Newman to reveal the whereabouts of an account book with seedy financial disclosures involving Hamilton. All of this is wrapped into a very complex screenplay co-written by Walter Hill (48 HRS.).

As is with quite a lot of what Newman did throughout his career, THE DROWING POOL sees the great actor as being top-notch. His director here is Stuart Rosenberg, who worked with him on his Oscar-nominated role in the title character of COOL HAND LUKE in 1967, as well as 1970's WUSA and 1972's POCKET MONEY. And while Rosenberg may not necessarily be a standout director, or Lew Harper another Sam Spade or Phillip Marlowe, he is quite a character as Newman essays him. The supporting cast, particularly Hamilton in a role infinitely more uncouth than the greedy venal mayor he was in JAWS, and Franciosa's no-nonsense cop ("Mister, you don't belch without my knowin' about it"), is also quite good, as is Michael Small's New Orleans-centric music score (interpolating the Charles Fox/Norman Gimbel song "Killing Me Softly"). Finally, it's a great thing to see the husband-and-wife team of Newman and Woodward onscreen; their characters try to rekindle a romance six years in the past, though Newman doesn't know how it'll end badly for both of them.

This is a very good revisiting of Newman to the P. I. genre, a return that he'd make only one more time in his career (under a different character) in the 1998 Robert Benton-directed film TWILIGHT. THE DROWNING POOL gets a rating of '8' from me.

When four U. S. airliners were skyjacked over the northeastern United States and sent into the Twin Towers in New York City, the Pentagon in Washington, and a deserted field in Pennsylvania, and nearly three thousand innocent people lost their lives in the span of 102 minutes, on September 11, 2001, it seemed like, even in the midst of such unmitigated horror, death, and destruction, that the world in general was embracing America in a whole new fashion, and that Americans had found a true purpose in the 21st century.

That, sadly, did not turn out to be the case. In fact, it wasn't even close. Instead, a lot of the things that we as a nation thought we had buried, including ethnic and racial animosity, and political and generational warfare amongst ourselves, came gushing through the surface and infecting virtually everything about us. We actually came within a hair's breadth of losing our democracy on January 6th, 2021.

The PBS "Frontline" documentary AMERICA AFTER 9/11, which aired on September 7, 2021, four days before the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and just shortly after our withdrawal from Afghanistan, gives us a gripping, and oftentimes stomach-turning, look back at the things that erupted out of the ashes of 9/11, including the first egregious act, an invasion of Iraq whose pretext was a cooked-up lie conceived by then-President George W. Bush and vice-president Dick Cheney that Iraq and its loathsome leader Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction in its possession and was in league with Osama Bin-Laden and Al-Qaeda, the rogue terrorist leader and group that had actually carried out 9/11. The fact that the corporate news media bought and sold this lie hook, line, and sinker, plus a great deal of prevarications, over the succeeding decade and a half made it, if not inevitable then certainly possible, for a would-be dictator to become president of the United States-which is sadly what happened, in the personage of one Donald Trump. All the while, the cause of the mistrust, the ill-conceived Iraq and Afghanistan misadventures that consumed not only Bush, but also Barack Obama, and which led to Trump, still haunted America.

The documentary, which is both alternately fascinating and outraging in equal measures, culminates with the horror of the storming of the U. S. Capitol on January 6th in an attempt to install Trump as virtually dictator-for-life after he had legitimately lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden. And all the while, we as a nation not only had to deal with foreign interventions, but the explosions of racial violence stemming from the May 25, 2020 of George Floyd, and the single worst pandemic the world had seen since 1918.

What AMERICA AFTER 9/11 tells us is that the worse enemy we have to face in the 21st century is no longer some vague threat from overseas; it is within our own borders, and fueled by twenty years of mistrust in our core institutions, a mistrust far worse than anything we even saw during the Vietnam era. We need to seriously come to grips with such a reality and fix things, or the United States may not survive as the beacon of democracy for much longer.

One of the great tragedies in the history of U. S. military operations outside of an actual war itself was the attempt in April 1980 by the U. S. Special Forces unit known as the Delta Force to effect a rescue of the personnel being held at our besieged embassy in Teheran, Iran. The operation, known as Eagle Claw, owing to a lack of foresight at the highest levels, was both well-intentioned and, sadly, misconceived; and owing to two of the eight helicopters involved in that operation malfunctioning, plus a blinding sandstorm in the Iranian desert, resulted in the deaths of eight U. S. servicemen on April 24, 1980, and prolonged the Iranian hostage crisis until January 20, 1981.

DESERT ONE, a 2019 documentary directed by Barbara Kopple, the legendary documentary filmmaker responsible for, among many classic docs, 1976's HARLAN COUNTY U. S. A., and 2006's DIXIE CHICKS: SHUT UP AND SING, takes a look at the lead-up to this event, including America's turbulent relationship with Iran, one which went rocky in 1953 when Iran's then-leader, and democratically elected prime minister, Mohammed Mosadegh was overthrown and killed in a violent CIA-sponsored coup. This resulted in the ascension of Reza Pahlavi, the "Shah", to power in Iran, where he was for all intents and purposes a "toady" for the United States. But in 1979, the Shah was overthrown by the Ayatollah Khomeni; and on November 4th of that year, radical students inspired by Khomeni seized the American embassy, holding fifty-two American diplomats hostage. This prompted then-President Jimmy Carter to instigate Operation Eagle Claw. The intent was to hatch a raid seemingly similar to Israel's 1976 Entebbe rescue mission. Its failure, and the deaths of the eight servicemen, dealt a blow to American prestige and morale, prolonged the hostage crisis, doomed Carter's re-election chances in 1980, and led to Ronald Reagan's ascension to the presidency.

In DESERT ONE, we get interviews with both Carter and his vice-president Walter Mondale, as well as interviews with former CIA director Robert Gates; legendary ABC newsman Ted Koppel (whose "Nightline" followed the Tehran hostage crisis from start to finish, and would become a fixture on ABC's late night programming for decades to come); and many of the embassy hostages and surviving members of Operation Eagle Claw (Michael Metrinko; James Q. Roberts; Ed Seiffert), as well as recorded telephone conversations between President Carter and Charles Beckwith, the legendary special forces commander responsible for the creation of Delta Force, of what was happening with the mission as it was unfolding and, unfortunately, fatally unraveling. Much of what emerges from DESERT ONE is the realization that dealing with what we call Middle East radicalism (especially when, in the case of Iran, it's something that our own government foments) and, eventually, terrorism is not nearly as cut-and-dried as we may have wanted to think it was.

But what also emerges is the fact that a group of good men at least had the guts to try and rescue our personnel from the hellhole they found themselves put in by the takeover of the embassy; and they deserve all the credit, the praise, and the commendations from We The People that they can get.

Practically everything that Steven Spielberg has directed, from his 1971 made-for-TV psychological thriller DUEL to his 2021 re-imagining of WEST SIDE STORY, has had a personal resonance for him in some way or another. But his new film THE FABELMANS is quite a different animal altogether. This one is Personal in the most naked definition of that term, as he turns his camera more or less on his own peripatetic upbringing, starting with his first movie-going experience as a five year-old in Camden, New Jersey in 1952, going through his formative years as the family moves first to Arizona and then to Northern California, and finishing up with his first up-close encounter with Hollywood directing royalty in 1965. It is a story that is arguably quite cinema-centric, but one that alludes to things that too many kids went through during the conformist years of the 1950's and early 1960's, and things that too many kids of Jewish ancestry like Spielberg had to put up with.

As portrayed by Mateo Zayan in his very early years, Sammy Fabelman becomes excited (though also fairly terrified) with his first encounter with the art of movies via the 1952 Cecil B. DeMille opus THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH, which his parents Mitzi (Michelle Williams) and Burt (Paul Dano) take him to see at a cinema house in Camden, New Jersey. In those years, he borrows a motion picture camera to stage a mini version of that film's famous train wreck with his own train set. Then as the family moves out to Arizona, due to his father's expertise in the burgeoning technological explosion of the times, Sammy, henceforth played by Gabrielle LaBelle, gets downright serious. But through his little cinematic films of his family's Arizona adventures, he uncovers a very troubling secret that his mom has been keeping from the kids, one that involves close family friend Bennie Loewey (Seth Rogen). And once the family makes one more final move, this time to what would become known as Silicon Valley, not only do Williams and Dano start to split up, leaving LaBelle and his sisters to pick up the pieces, as a high school student in a largely WASP-ish community LaBelle encounters for the first time virulent anti-Semitism being aimed straight at him. Movie-making is his only real respite; and even then, he's not exactly sure whether he really wants to do it anymore--until that aforementioned first brush with a Hollywood directing legend of, how shall we say, some renown.

Co-written by Spielberg and his frequent collaborator Tony Kushner, THE FABELMANS is a moving film that's more than just about movies and the power to inspire one kid to take up this art form. It is about how he has to deal as a kid and then as a teenager morphing into an adult much sooner than he had ever expected with things that he had no way of controlling (let alone directing). It's one thing to go through those stages in what we used to call a "nuclear family" that is silently imploding, which far too many kids from the 1950's to this very day have had to do; but it is quite another matter when you're a kid trying to fit in a society that not only has no use for Jews but has this unfortunate tendency want to denigrate and destroy them. There are also quite a few amusing moments, as in the scenes in high school where LaBelle befriends a girl who tries to convert him from Judaism to Christianity (needless to say, that doesn't take), and his filming of his high school's hi-jinks on "Ditch Day" on the beach at Santa Cruz. LaBelle so accurately captures the triumphs and trauma of Spielberg's upbringing; and Williams, Dano, and Rogen are also incredibly good. Judd Hirsch has a ten-minute cameo role as Uncle Boris, who gives LaBelle some pointers about how art and love can tear a person in two, as it almost does to LaBelle.

So often in the past, Spielberg has been accused of being overtly sentimental and manipulative in some of his films, while being much too serious in others. But these charges are not very credible when it comes to those films; and they don't ring true when it comes to THE FABELMANS either. This is not only a personal film for Spielberg, it is eminently relatable to anyone who has had to go through the trauma of a family break-up and then to be bullied in school for the most petty and stupid reasons possible. Spielberg is a director of extraordinary ability, but he also believes in common people with common concerns and common dreams. In the end, THE FABELMANS hits very close to home when one thinks about it hard enough, and that's the kind of Hollywood art that Spielberg has engaged in for a half century-plus, to our everlasting benefit.

What happens when you love the country you just migrated to...but it doesn't love you back? And suppose you are an aspiring musician in a style of music that historically has defined the values of that very country? That is the conundrum faced by a teenage girl of Filipina ancestry in YELLOW ROSE.

Eva Noblezada stars as the titular character, Rose Garcia being her actual name, living in a small Texas town not far from Austin, the state capital and capital of the kind of honky-tonk country-and-western music she aspires to sing and play, using her father's beat-up guitar as her method of expression. But what she doesn't know (and has never known) is that her mother (Princess Puzalan) got both of them into this country illegally; and when her mother is taken from her by officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, her life goes into absolute turmoil, especially when it's obvious that Puzalan is going to be deported back to Manila, if not also Noblezada.herself.

Fortunately for her, even though her aunt (Lea Salonga) is only marginally sympathetic (and maybe not necessarily even that, in Noblezada's eyes), Noblezada has been writing her own original songs for quite a while, looking for a way to make demo records to show off her abilities, and at least three people help her out: Jolene (Libby Vilari), the owner of the dance hall known as the Broken Spoke; Elliot (Liam Booth); and real-life Texas music legend Dale Watson. With this help behind her, and despite the odds stacked against her by an intolerable immigration situation, Noblezada finds the strength to persevere.

YELLOW ROSE, as directed by long-time documentary filmmaker Diane Paragas, here making her feature film debut (she also co-wrote the screenplay), does tread into the very hot political waters that are the American immigration system, but for the most part it focuses in on Noblezada's pursuit of her version of the American Dream, which is ironically rooted with the same forces trying to throw those of her kind out of this country. Noblezada's acting performance here is one that is equal amounts vulnerability, fierceness, determination, and resilience; and her singing is very authentic sounding as well. Watson's presence here also gives the film the right amount of Texas honky-tonk authenticity.

YELLOW ROSE is definitely a film worth seeing, whether one is a country music fan or just as casual filmgoer, and it gets a '9' from me.

The saga of Diana Prince, a.k.a. Wonder Woman, the leading female character in the DC Comics universe, was bought to the screen for the first time in 2017 under the striking direction of Patty Jenkins, and with Gal Gadot giving everything she had in the titular role of the Amazon warrior princess with a heart and a conscience. That particular film was set in the mechanized horrors of World War I. And in the mysterious way that is only plausible in a comic book, her saga moves sixty-seven years into the future in the follow-up, 2020's WONDER WOMAN 1984.

A longer film (by ten minutes) than its predecessor, WONDER WOMAN 1984 now finds Gadot's Diana Prince working at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington D. C. in 1984, five years before (at least in terms of actual history) the end of the Cold War, as an archaeologist (not necessarily a female version of Indiana Jones, though) who soon becomes intrigued by a special gemstone with immense but (ultimately) very destructive powers. A very insecure colleague of hers, Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig), and a power-hungry businessman (sound familiar?) named Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal) come into contact with this gem; and very soon, Gadot has a situation on her hands that even her immense powers may not be enough to solve in a good way. Incredibly enough, even though he was lost in the first film, her former love Steve Trevor (Chris Pine), somehow comes back into her life; and therein lies the possibility to stop World War III. But both Minerva and Pascal have become so megalomaniacal that it takes all Gadot has, and then some, to get things back into order.

Jenkins not only returned to the director's chair for WONDER WOMAN 2020 (it made more than enough sense to have her for the original in the first place), but she also co-wrote the screenplay as well; and to add to the back story of a younger Diana (Lilly Aspell), she has both Connie Nielsen and Robin Wright returns in their roles of, respectively, Hippolyta and Antiope. Like many a hyper-budget comic book movie, especially those made during this century, some of the performances here are larger-than-life (this was true, though in a more deadpan way, of Gene Hackman's Lex Luthor in the 1978 classic SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE), and that case can be made for both Wiig's and Pascal's arguably over-the-top performances, which most of these films obvious have to have, as it is what fans of the genre have come to expect. But ultimately, it is Gadot's humanistic performance that drives this film, as it did its predecessor. While she may be a, for lack of a better term, a kick-ass super hero, it's only when she needs to be; otherwise, she eschews violence for love and truth. Meanwhile, the tag in the closing credits introduces a new character...played by someone with a very familiar name and face (you can't miss it).

As with the original, I am giving this a 9-star rating.

I have to confess, I am not a fan of big-screen comic book/superhero films, especially of the last twenty-plus years. In fact, the only one of these I sat through in my life was the original SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE, arguably the best film of its kind ever made-and this was back in 1978. But while I probably can't change my mind about the genre after seeing it, the 2017 film WONDER WOMAN has more than enough to distinguish it from the others of either the DC Comics lineup (which it is a part of) or Marvel.

The character of Diana, the Amazon warrior princess who became Wonder Woman, originated in comic books the late 1930's, but the most famous iteration of this character was on television during the late 1970's, when the role was portrayed (and legendarily so) by Lynda Carter. Fortunately, in the midst of Hollywood's (and the film going public's) obsession with comics, the character finally made a stand-alone big-screen bow in 2017-and with no less than a woman in the director's chair, Patty Jenkins, here making her first film as a director since 2003's MONSTER.

Israeli actress Gal Gadot steps into the role of the Amazon warrior princess, whose background of growing up among fellow goddesses on the mythical island of Themyscira is brilliantly depicted by Jenkins and her crew on location in Italy, and is mentored by the best of them (portrayed by Connie Nielsen and Robin Wright). But everything changes for her when an American pilot (Chris Pine) working as a spy for the British crashes his plane close to the island. Pine tells of a war to end all wars happening in the world outside of Themyscira, which is shielded by an invisible force field; and Gadot, having realized her abilities, makes every effort to try and stop it all. She and Pine take a boat into the worst of the fighting on the Western Front in France near the end of this war, World War I, and try to stop a ruthless German general (Danny Huston) from manufacturing a lethal gas sure to make an already atrocious body count in this first example of genuine mechanized warfare even higher than it is. The adventures that Gadot and Pine go on force Gadot to not only understand her own powers, but the weaknesses of the human race in general, and men in particular, and the penchant they have for killing each other through hatred. In her relationship with Pine, she realizes that love is the one thing that can save the world.

Unlike so many other superhero comic book movies, Wonder Woman, besides having immense powers of her own, is also able to show empathy and understanding, only using her powers when nothing else will do. And even though her Israeli accent is very obvious in her line renderings, Gadot makes a completely credible Wonder Woman all the same-likely, she was the only actress capable of creating a Wonder Woman for this era (even though this film is set more than a century in the past) and still paving a certain amount of homage to Carter, whom Jenkins gives very special thanks to in the final credits. The visual effects and the costumes are all first-rate, of course; but the reason they, and the film in general, work as well as they do is because of Jenkins' fine direction and Gadot's portrayal. This is not just a slam-bang, hypersonic Hollywood spectacle. This is a spectacle with a heart and a conscience; and that's why it gets a '9' rating from me.

One group of people who have never had it easy in the United States are the immigrants who come here to seek a better life, whether they are of Latino or Asian descent, only to be met with racism, xenophobia, prejudice, and racism-all unfortunate facts of life. Assimilation of "The Other" has always produced uneasy acceptance even in the best of times; and in recent tines, that ugly side of America was practically put on steroids. But America's immigration laws were broken and made antiquated long ago, and they have not been updated for decades. This is where writer/director Justin Chon's 2021 drama BLUE BAYOU comes in.

Chon, who co-produced the movie and, prior to this, was known also as an actor (in 2008's TWILIGHT and 2010's TWILIGHT SAGA: ECLIPSE), stars as Antonio LeBlanc, a Korean immigrant with a Spanish first name and a French-Canadian surname living in a small town on the outskirts of New Orleans, working as a local tattoo artist and a noted rider of motorcycles. He has what seems on the surface a very "charmed" life, with a wife (Alicia Virkander), a young daughter (Sydney Kowalske) whom he inherited from Virkander's previous husband, and another one on the way. But a run-in with members of New Orleans' finest at a local market results in him getting arrested; and, before he knows it, because of a previous run-in with the law and having been brought in under different immigration laws in 1988, now faces deportation from the United States. He is put into detention by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, before being released; but in the meantime, deportation still hangs over his head, as does the forced abandonment of Virkander and Kowalske to Virkander's ex (Mark O'Brien), one of the cops he had the run-in with in the market. Chon and Virkander consult with a local New Orleans immigration lawyer (Vondie Curtis-Hall) who advises him to get folks in his immediate circle who can vouch for his being worthy. But in his desperation, he not only has to confront the ghosts of his past, but the realities of having had a criminal record; so having good familial references may not be enough to have him.

In the meantime, he and Virkander try very hard to associate with other Asian members of the New Orleans community, many of them refugees not only from Korea but also from Vietnam, two nations basically torn apart by American between 1950 and 1975. This includes a gathering in which Virkander is invited onto a stage to perform a rendition of the classic 1963 Roy Orbison song "Blue Bayou", a song made into an even bigger hit in 1977 by Linda Ronstadt. But the strain between Chon and Virkander is extremely palpable because of Chon's failure to be honest with Virkander about his past and his unfortunate criminal present.

Chon, who was actually born in America to Korean parents, wrote the screenplay after having heard of similar horror stories of Korean émigrés who got caught up in the often-confused and definitively broken American immigration system. And although he may not have gotten everything exactly right about the particulars of those immigration laws, he did get at least a couple of unfortunate things correct, such as the prejudice people like him who were born overseas, taken into America, and then adapted, tend to face, particularly in the South, even in a highly cosmopolitan polyglot of a city like New Orleans. He also gives us vivid depictions of how Korean and Vietnamese émigrés display their cultures living out in the swampy bayous that occupy much of the Louisiana landscape. Virkander, who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 2015 for her role in THE DANISH GIRL, and had appeared in the weird 2014 psychosexual sci-fi film EX MACHINA, is also riveting as his sympathetic life; and Kowalske also impresses in her debut as Chon's and Virkander's daughter, who is horrified at the reality of her adapted father being expelled from America because of a whole series of unfortunate circumstances.

Despite the often graphic language, much of it racially charged (though appropriately so), and the violence (though not gratuitous in any way), BLUE BAYOU, thanks to Chon's efforts on both sides of the camera and Virkander's performance (especially when she sings the classic song the film is named after), is an often moving and touching story about the immigrant experience in late 20th/early 21st century America. It is also, sadly enough, an all-too-American story as well, one that far too many of us who were actually born here still don't acknowledge exists in our post-9/11 world.

Perhaps no other figure defined popular music during the 20th century like Elvis Presley did. From being born a boy growing up in abject poverty in Jim Crow-era Mississippi and listening to plenty of "race" music, to adapting this music to his rural White roots and totally reshaping the American musical landscape of the 1950's, to his extremely sudden death in August 1977, Elvis was an incredible force of nature. But behind the scenes, virtually his every move from 1955 onward was controlled by one Colonel Tom Parker; and many would argue it was Parker's overworking his one and only client that contributed to his addiction to prescription drugs that led to his premature demise at the age of 42. Coming in to tell the story of The King, a story that still lingers on even though two full generations have passed since his death, is Australian director Baz Luhrmann, whose credits included a 1996 rendering of ROMEO AND JULIET, 1992's MOULIN ROUGE, and 2008's AUSTRALIA, with a film whose title needs no explanation: ELVIS.

Filled with cascading montages and split-screen footage that perfectly match The King's rise, Luhrmann's bio-pic stars Austin Butler as the young white Mississippi kid whose love of African-American music and his honest use of it make him a sensation in the South in 1954 and '55. Into this breach steps the mysterious "Colonel" Tom Parker (Tom Hanks), a carnival barker who, at that time, was managing country music legend Hank Snow, but who sees this not-yet-20 year-old truck driver as his meal ticket. Very soon, both Butler and Hanks are joined at the hip as artist and manager, and Butler becomes the biggest music sensation in the South, and eventually the nation, while of course attracting a lot of negative press from white segregationist Southerners and even big-city media for his "lewd" onstage gyrations. Butler absolutely doesn't get what the big deal is about his moves, but Hanks forces him to do a number of rather demeaning things, like going on The Steve Allen Show to sing his big 1956 hit "Hound Dog" to a real-life basset hound dog(!). His two-year stint in the Army, which is interrupted by the tragic death of his mother Gladys (Helen Thomson), results in his coming home to become a cinematic matinee idol-but where virtually all of the films are formulaic, as are the songs. Only in marrying his Army-era girlfriend Priscilla (Olivia DeJonge) and becoming a father with the birth of Lisa Marie does Butler know how far he has fallen

By the time the film reaches 1968, Butler's career is all but in the toilet; but with the help of noted TV producer Steve Binder (Dacre Montgomery), and virtually none from Hanks (who wants it to be strictly a Christmas program), he comes up with the revelatory NBC-TV special that leads to big things beginning in 1969 and his stint in Las Vegas. But the treadmill of one concert after another, plus twice-a-year six-week engagements in Sin City, engineered by Hanks' penchant for gambling his client's money to hell, begin to wear on him, wreck his marriage to DeJonge, and accelerate an addiction to prescription drugs that had begun slowly as far back as 1956. The end of this saga for Butler, of course, comes on August 16, 1977; but Hanks doesn't exactly escape so quietly into the night.

More than a few Elvis-sanctioned documentaries, plus John Carpenter's 1979 made-for-TV film ELVIS (starring Kurt Russell as The King), have been made about him; but there is just something about seeing every possible way of filming put to incredibly energetic (if hypersonic) use by Luhrmann. Butler more than accurately captures Elvis' persona, his vulnerability, his insecurity, and his rage at knowing not only how Hanks is spending his money, but also Hanks' dark past (including his questionable citizenship, which was found to be non-existent several years after Elvis died). DeJonge (as Priscilla) and Thomson (as Gladys) do incredibly good turns in their roles. And Hanks, normally as much a paragon of the Everyman as Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda had been in their day, has an equally tough job of portraying The Colonel as anything other than a villain. In truth, "Colonel" Tom Parker was quite the shyster, who worked his client practically to death all because of his addiction to gambling. But in the eyes of Elvis' fans, that one fact alone indeed made Parker into a villain.

However one views Luhrmann's take on The King or The Colonel, ELVIS is a reminder of just how big a deal Elvis Presley was in helping reshape American popular music and popular culture in an era of conformity, and how, even after The Beatles, Michael Jackson, and many others, he still manages to have an impact even into the 21st century. That alone makes ELVIS a big and important film in the year 2022.