Tag Archives: Movie review

Movie Review: Military Wives

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Military Wives, inspired by true events was directed by Peter Cattaneo, famed for the film, The Full Monty.

Two women, Kate (Kristin Scott Thomas) and Lisa (Sharon Horgan) are from very different backgrounds with very different views. Kate has lived the life of a military wife for years, is conservative and toes the military line. Lisa on the other hand is relaxed, drinks and likes to have fun with the other wives. With the promotion of her husband, Lisa is forced to undertake a leadership role with Kate, to come up with ideas to occupy everyone while their partners go to Afghanistan for six months. The two disagree about everything and when they start a choir with a group of women with varying singing ability, things get very interesting with very funny results.

But it’s not all humour. The anxiety of worrying about their husbands and partners and wondering who will come back, is well done. It is a well-trodden formula and fairly predictable but what seemed different to me was how deeply moving it was.

What might be commonly known in Britain but little known elsewhere is that there was an initial Military Wives Choir who gained fame in 2011 with a hit song which inspired 75 other military wives’ choirs around the world.

The music is wonderful and while it’s not likely to win any Oscars, it’s a feel-good film. Oh, and a word of warning for some of you … perhaps pack the tissues.

Out in Australia on wide release mid March 2020.

Movie Review: The Professor and the Madman

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Most of us have or have had an Oxford English Dictionary.  The Professor and the Madman relays the fascinating story about how the Oxford Dictionary came to be compiled during the mid-nineteenth century.

Professor James Murray, (played by Mel Gibson) is tasked with the enormous job to edit the floundering English dictionary begun by Oxford University’s Fredrick Furnivall (played by Steve Coogan). Murray is given seven years and seeks help from the public across the Commonwealth by placing notes inside books requesting help with words and their origins.

William Minor, (played by Sean Penn) an ex-soldier having been a surgeon in the American Civil War is in a psychiatrist hospital in England. He’s there because he killed a man who he believed was someone haunting him from his days in the war. He receives a book and rises to the task to provide help to Murray by providing over 10,000 entries.

Because Minor helped save a guard’s life, he is allowed privileges one of which is bringing his books into the Institution. His brilliant mind is astonishing even to Murray who fights hard to get Minor’s work acknowledged against vast opposition by the University. Minor tries to make amends with the murdered man’s wife who is left with six children and a relationship of forgiveness evolves.

Based on fact it is an incredible story of two brilliant minds coming together to accomplish a monumental task in a short amount of time. In further research I found the dictionary actually took seventy years to compile. Astonishing.

Mel Gibson bought the rights to the book, The Surgeon of Crowthorne by Simon Winchester in 1998 and the film was caught up in legal battles over creative differences.

The way mental health was dealt with in the 1800’s was hair raising and was covered very well in the film. Sean Penn was amazing as the anguished and haunted Minor.

The only difficulty I had was in the Scottish accents by Gibson, which was incredibly authentic but so much so that it was hard to understand some of the dialogue. Likewise, I found the same for Penn. This could well have been the quality of the sound in the movie theatre I visited rather than the quality of the sound of the film. Nevertheless, it wasn’t bad enough that I didn’t know what was going on.

It’s a very enjoyable movie and I learnt a lot. For all of you word lovers, check it out and for everyone see it anyway. It opens Feb 20 in Australia.

Movie Review: Ad Astra

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Who doesn’t love a good old science fiction space film? There have been a few, Gravity, Interstellar and of course my personal favourite, The Martian. So I was looking forward to checking out the latest space movie, Ad Astra.

Ray McBride (played by Brad Pitt) is an astronaut who follows in his famous father’s footsteps. His father, Clifford McBride (played by Tommy Lee Jones)is revered by all for his space research and is given the assignment to captain the Lima project to find out if there is any life out there. The mission is sent to the edge of the solar system and there’s been no contact for over sixteen years until a series of power surges strong enough to threaten human life occurs. The authorities believe the source of the surges comes from the Lima project space station somewhere near Neptune. So begins Roy’s mission to reach his father, stop the power surges and at the same time, deal with his feelings of abandonment and loss and work out why he can’t maintain a relationship with anyone especially his ex-wife Eve (played by Liv Tyler).

The opening of the film shows Roy climbing some sort of scaffold which is high enough in the earth’s atmosphere to warrant a spacesuit. Extraordinarily, the scaffold seems to be rising up from the earth which would be one hell of a climb. A surge shakes the structure and Roy falls. Luckily he has a parachute and although falling pieces of metal damage the parachute as he plummets to earth, he somehow survives virtually unscathed. But let’s move on.

The setting is described as some time in the near future but the commercial Virgin flight to the Moon and the fifteen hundred people living on Mars tells you it might be set in fifty plus years. Donned in a space suit, Roy asks the Virgin hostess for a blanket pack and she shoots back by telling him that’ll cost him $125. Why he needed a blanket over his space suit, I don’t know.

Once Roy reaches the Moon he has to take a rocket from a top-secret location to Mars. He and an old friend of his dad’s Colonel Pruitt (Donald Sutherland) are escorted in moon buggies across rugged terrain to the top-secret rocket site and of course, are chased by moon pirates. Why? I don’t know. Did it add to the tension? It only added to the implausibility. Of course, everyone dies and with Roy taking over the driving he and the Colonel manage to get there in one piece. Or did they? Why someone like Colonel Pruitt who must be eighty-five plus and barely able to walk is accompanying Roy is strange? Now I’m not trying to be ageist but I’d imagine peak physical and mental fitness would be a given to work in space. Surely Pruitt would have hung up his spacesuit years ago.

Anyway, Pruitt can’t go to Mars – he has to have an operation and of course, he isn’t fit. Space Alert! He was never fit! Roy heads off to Mars as a VIP in the secret space rocket. On the way, the Captain receives a mayday call from a Norwegian biomedical research space station. He decides to investigate but the co-pilot is too scared to spacewalk over and knock on the door, so Roy volunteers. After a tussle with a couple of mutant apes, Roy comes back to the ship with the dead Captain. After a funeral, a few words to God and jettisoning the body, the co-pilot proceeds to Mars only to freeze in fear when another power surge shakes the ship so they can’t land. You guessed it! Good ol’ Roy takes over because he can basically do everything.

Once on Mars, Roy’s mission is meant to end when he records a message to his father in the hope the authorities can trace where the old man is and finish him off. Why Roy had to go to Mars to do this simple task is anybody’s guess. Technology can get a rocket to Mars it seems, but not a recorded message.

Of course, Roy has to get off Mars, appropriate another rocket, accidentally kill a few crew members, including the scaredy-cat co-pilot, (whoops) and head to Neptune in seventy-nine days to find his father, nuke his ship, stop the surges and bring the old man home to face the music. How does a little spaceship in Neptune create powerful enough surges to almost wipe out the human race? Who the hell knows?

You’ve got to take an enormous leap of faith with this movie and I guess that’s the same for all space movies. But in this case, the leap is much larger than most. Throw away all logical rationale and those pesky questions for which you will get no answers and enjoy the ride through the beauty that is the solar system. The effects are as you would expect, the acting is strong enough and the dialogue is sparse with lots of close-ups of Brad’s face and a tear or two.

This really is a story about a man’s conflicted feelings about his father, his boyhood hero. He just happens to be dealing with it in space. In all those days of space travel, Roy has plenty of time to ponder on his relationships trying to come to terms with who he is and who he wants to be.

You’ll have to check it out if you want to know if he makes peace with his dad, if anyone can really hear you scream in space and if the Lima mission really did find out if there was anyone else out there. I’ll leave it to you to decide.

Movie Review: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

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As I was coming out of this film, I heard the woman in front of me say, “What the fuck was that about?” You would think that after sitting in a movie theatre for two hours and forty-five minutes, the woman would know. She didn’t and neither did I.

Sadly, the latest Tarantino film failed to deliver much of a storyline. Set in 1969, Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a washed-up actor, who begins to realise his stardom is waning in a changing world. Yet he seems to be very much in demand and working – what more does an actor want? Stunt man turned personal assistant, protector and long-time friend, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) is at Rick’s beck and call. Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) happens to live next door to Rick. And that is about it. We watch a series of vignettes. Rick’s day to day struggles and his interactions with other stars. We spend an inordinate amount of time watching him making a B-grade Western. Cliff makes friends with a girl who lives on a ranch where Charles Manson lives who we glimpse now and then. When we think the story is finally going to head somewhere, we’re let down because it doesn’t lead anywhere.

The scenes with Sharon Tate had promise but mostly we got a long tedious look at her walking down a street in a mini-skirt; riding in a convertible; in a movie theatre watching a movie of herself. Margot Robbie really gets little dialogue and not a lot to do. Yet she still manages to light up the screen. It’s a pity that the Sharon Tate story wasn’t used to full effect because, in my opinion, this should have been the story.

Cliff as a character doesn’t seem to develop in any direction. There is a fight scene between Cliff and Bruce Lee. Why? If the scene had remained on the cutting room floor, it would have made no difference. And Bruce is not painted in a good light. Does Tarantino have something against him?

You could spend your time in the theatre spotting where Tarantino pays homage to Hollywood of old as well as the large numbers of cameo appearances from various actors. Every scene goes for too long and I wonder why the editing wasn’t more vigilant. That’s not to say that cutting scenes would have overly saved this movie. If you’re looking for the classic Tarantino violence, there are some brief moments but you will mostly have to wait until the end for this anticipated over-choreographed scene. The music is good as you’d expect and the acting strong. But there’s no tension, just a flat series of scenes with uninteresting people. The highlight for me was the little girl and the dog who stole the show. Hippies are given a bad rap and history is subverted.

Why this movie has got the acclaim it has escapes me. Perhaps Tarantino’s star has also waned or perhaps I just expected so much more to keep me interested.