Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019)

Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a B actor whose career is starting to fade.  His one time staring credit in a popular western TV series - Bounty Law - now gets him guest appearances as the bad guy du jour.  His long time stuntman, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), serves as his driver, handyman, and best friend.  It just so happens that Rick lives next door to Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate.

The movie reminded me of Hail Caesar!  The setting is the main character and all the actions just offer more details of a specific time.  Tarantino is celebrating late 60s Hollywood in this movie, offering a deep dive into the era through the main characters.  Behold the nostalgia.

Pitt and DiCaprio are excellent in their roles and, though most of the movie has little to nothing to do with the climax, it is always fun and engaging.  After watching this, I wanted to go rent the 14 Fists of McCluskey and check out a couple episodes of Bounty Law.

Definitely worth seeing though I'm not sure I'd say anything here is Oscar material.  Well, set design is pretty impressive.

Thumbs up.

Radius (2017)

A man wakes up to find himself next to a car wreck.  His face is half-covered in blood.  He walks toward the road and flags down the first car he sees.  He is almost run over as the car drifts off the road and stops.  The driver is dead.  He uses the woman's cell phone to call 911.  When asked for his name, he doesn't know.  At a nearby diner, he finds everyone is dead.  As he stands there, a van crashes and the driver is dead.  Fearing some sort of airborne contagion, he puts cloth over his mouth.  By trial and error, he discovers that anyone or anything that gets too close to him dies.

 

While hiding at his house (he discovered it thanks to his drivers license), a woman arrives.  Though he tries to warn her off, she comes close but doesn't die.  Not only is she immune to his death field, she turns it off.  Moreover, she also suffers amnesia but had no ID to give clues.  She was in his truck during the unremembered accident.

 

The story follows their efforts to find out how they knew each other and what happened.  This is complicated by suspicions that he is a terrorist thanks to all the bodies in his wake.  Sadly, the movie falls apart in the end.  The mystery of their relationship sucks and the Radius is never explained beyond a 'magic' lightning strike.  The conclusion destroys what had been an engaging film.

Rush to Impeachment

Do the Democrats know how this works?  The House plays prosecutor and the Senate plays judge and jury.  The prosecutor is supposed to investigate all the fact before the case is ever brought to court.  What prosecutor would schedule a court date and arrived to announce that the case needed more evidence?  The vote to impeach in the House was supposed to be the completion of the investigation.  By voting to impeach, the House declared that sufficient evidence and testimony had been uncovered to merit the removal of the president.  However, now in the Senate, there are calls to examine witnesses who did not appear in the House.  That would be a continuation of the investigation rather than a trying of the case.  Why didn't the House simply investigate longer?  The entire foundation of the obstruction of Congress charge is based on the House not pursuing remedies in the courts.  The President can't have executive privilege during impeachment hearings?  If so, executive privilege would always be nixed by the House declaring all hearings to be for impeachment.

 

The House had hearings and heard testimony.  That is what should be presented and nothing else.  That is the case they voted out of the House.  If it isn't enough, tough.  Be more thorough next time, which may very well happen before the election.  Trump may be the first president with multiple impeachments.

Leviathan Wakes

Julia Mao has been locked in a closet, seemingly forgotten.  She floats in zero-G.  Mostly fearful, she quietly suffers captivity.  Eventually, she calls for help but no one comes.  She kicks the door from its hinge and searches the empty ship.  Where is everyone?  In engineering, she finds a strange goo on the reactor.  She recognizes a crewman reaching zombie-like from the goo.

 

The ice hauler Canterbury makes regular runs from the dwarf planet Ceres in the belt to the rings of Saturn where it collects ice.  A distress call is received from the freighter Scopuli and the Canterbury is the nearest ship.  Executive Officer James Holden, an Earther, is dispatched with a small crew on the shuttle Knight to rescue any survivors.  No sooner have they boarded the derelict freighter than they discover it is a trap.  The Canterbury is destroyed and the five crewmen aboard the Knight are now the only survivors of some Martian plot!  Moreover, the flagship of the Martian fleet is en route 'rescue' them.

 

Meanwhile on Ceres, Detective Joe Miller has been given a side job: find the missing daughter of a wealthy industrialist and send her home.  It's a kidnap job.  During his investigation, the destruction of the Canterbury and belief that the Martians were responsible creates a riotous atmosphere.  He soon learns that Julia Mao had joined the Outer Planets Alliance (OPA), generally considered a terrorist organization by the inner planets (i.e. Earth & Mars).  He tracks her to the Scopuli.

 

The story takes place in a future where humanity has spread throughout the Solar System but has yet to reach another star.  There are no gravity generators, phasors, transporters, disintegrators, or other sci-fi magic.  The story is told from the points of view of Holden and Miller, slowly revealing the underlying plot and the fate of Julie Mao.  The political situation is well-developed, with Earth, Mars, and OPA factions.

 

The first 15 episodes of The Expanse TV series are fairly faithful to the book.  There is some time compression and minor changes.  Also, Avasarala is never mentioned in the first book; her part was either taken from later books or created to introduce the character immediately.  The most obvious difference is that Belters are tall.  Naomi towers over Holden in the book though not in the TV show.  Seven foot tall skinny actors are not plentiful enough for casting this series.

 

Thumbs way up!

Void Moon

Cassie Black is an ex-con working at a Porsche dealership in LA.  She was released from prison less than a year ago and her parole has 14 months to go.  When not working, Cassie spies on the child she gave up for adoption.  She had been pregnant when she went to prison.  Then, she sees the for sale sign on the house and learns the family plans to move to France.  This is going to require lots of money.  She contacts a former partner in crime, a man who is obsessed with astrology, and asks for a big score.  He arranges something in Vegas (traveling there will break her parole) but warns her to complete the job before the Void Moon.  The Void Moon means disaster.  It goes without saying that circumstances prevent her from timely completion.

 

Private investigator, amateur magician, and cold-blooded fixer Jack Karch is called in to track down the thief.  He is startlingly efficient and extremely cold-blooded.  He has Cassie's name and is on his way to LA within hours of the heist.

 

The book is told from two viewpoints: Cassie and Jack.  As a career criminal, Cassie is a change of pace for a Connelly protagonist.  Her motivations felt like something out of a Hallmark movie.  Jack is an outstanding antagonist, a fully-realized character with multiple motivations and depths to plumb.  His backstory is more detailed than Cassie's and makes for a villain who is often a sympathetic character.

 

Thumbs up!