ivorybigsis

I avoided viewing this well-known film for many years as I thought that it was merely another "solitary man" flick...Needless to say I was all too wrong...Suze Orman would like Jeremiah Johnson. He carved out a lifestyle of "Standing in your truth". To dismiss Jeremiah as merely anti-social is an injustice. He wanted to embrace his vision of happiness; this realization was inextricably tied to the wilderness and the beauty he longed to carve out of it....Will Geer is a revelation in his role as Johnson's impromptu wilderness teacher and guide. He is a complex, unflinching man who himself is a study in swimming against the tide...There are moments of sheer beauty in this story. You'll need them to steady yourself later in the story...Most of us in our lifetime have at one time or another, been compelled to embrace an agenda that is really not our own. We may have been deliberately misled, or of our own negligence, ill informed as to the 360 degrees of such a cause...The outcome finds us mere onlookers as a latent evil takes center stage, and thrusts the well-intended into a dark tunnel. In Jeremiah's case, he is so devastated that survival and retribution become one and the same. We too embrace his outrage. Although we want him to remember the canvas of his former dreams, we know that his palette is now colorless, his brush stroke now too broad to paint the intricacies of what he used to imagine for himself...Robert Redford is brilliant in a must see film.

As one so enamored with Period Piece films, I deeply regret to say that this rendering of the classic Wuthering Heights was almost unwatchable. This is as uninspired a screenplay that was ever ill-conceived in what must have been a lapse of the Screenwriter's sanity There is not a single character that you can truly have empathy for. You want to at least like the patriarch, Mr. Earnshaw, but he too is so gruff, and uncivilized that his genuine affection for the rejected Heathcliff seems almost out of place....Gratuitously violent, pitifully acted, and unskillfully cast and directed, I don't dislike anyone enough to ask them to watch this production!

Derailed is yet another film about the power of and fallout from CHOICES. Owen and Aniston are very effective here as people who appear to both have decent, but uninspiring lives, hence they give themselves license to do something stupid to spice up their humdrum existence... I was struck by the fact that in coming together, there were pauses with which to reflect and analyze; lust and the hurry that accompanies it was not so all-consuming that it shut out the PAUSE....Such are the goings on of flesh and blood fallible sexual beings: WE WANT INSTANT GRATIFICATION SO BADLY THAT WE FLIP THE PRICE TAG TO THE BLANK SIDE IN THE HOPES THAT THAT WILL CANCEL IT (that pesky price) OUT ALTOGETHER...Giancarlo Esposito is right on here as a seasoned detective. He who sees crime, and the effects of crime daily, must in the end come to terms with his own definition of Justice, lest his own finger disturb the precarious balance of that scale.....Watching Derailed is a bit like watching the Game of Life: Some make good choices, some make awful choices, and sometimes the innocent suffer for sins they did not commit....Not a flawless film, but well worth the lessons to be learned from it!