George H W Bush

I read an interesting article that described Bush well.  He viewed himself more as a caretaker than a leader.  He didn't have the vision thing.  Per the Constitution, the president enforces laws that Congress passes which is how he saw his domestic position.  He had spent his life preparing for the Cold War and then it ended in the middle of his presidency.  With no Soviet Union, the country was willing to take a risk with an anti-war Democrat.

 

The first opportunity I had to vote in a presidential election, I voted against George Bush.  He won despite me.  The next time around, I voted for him.  He lost.  I have a very bad record with presidential voting and it all started with Bush.

 

The most memorable thing about President Bush is Dana Carvey.  What a terrific impression.

 

RIP

Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018)

1991: Lee Israel (Melissa McCarthy), a successful writer and author, has fallen on hard times.  She has no job, her agent won't return her calls, she's months behind on rent, and her cat is sick.  It is so bleak that she takes a framed letter from Katherine Hepburn from her wall and sells it.  Later, while researching for a book she's planning, she encounters some letters that she pockets and sells.  This proves lucrative so she decides to write some originals.  When buyers start getting suspicious, she uses Jack Hock (Richard E. Grant) to sell her forgeries.  Then the FBI arrive.

Billed as a biographical crime comedy, this had very little comedy.  Melissa McCarthy, who can be enormously funny, has almost no material here.  She is a sad alcoholic cat lady who has resorted to crime.  Lee is an unlikeable character throughout the movie.  Even when she tries to be funny, it is the sort of humor that is mean.  For instance, a used book seller didn't want the majority of the books she brought to the shop so she phoned him a few days later and said his apartment building was on fire.  What a sense of humor.  The scene where she and Jack discover that the cat has been pooping under her bed - and she had gone weeks without noticing - was just pathetic.  There is virtually no comedy and the main characters are terrible people.  Jack is a homeless homosexual alcoholic and drug abuser.  His only redeeming feature is he can be charming.  Lee doesn't even have that.

 

This is the unfunny story of a criminal who got off lightly and then profited further by publishing a book of her exploits in 2008.  Unable to sympathize with their hardships or laugh at their antics, this story offers nothing to enjoy.  Skip it.

Bohemian Rhapsody (2018)

Farrokh Bulsara (Rami Malek) is working at the airport as a baggage handler when one of his co-workers call him a Paki (Pakistani).  It is 1970 and he has big dreams.  Over his family's objections, he goes out that night to see a band, Smile.  As luck would have it, Smile's lead singer leaves and Farrokh - who goes by Freddie - jumps at the opportunity.  Also that night, he met Mary Austin (Lucy Boynton), the inspiration for the song Love of My Life.  Shortly after joining Smile as lead singer, the band name is changed to Queen, Freddie switched from Bulsara to Mercury, and the hits start coming.

 

The movie is basically a history of the band from 1970 until about 1985, focusing primarily on Freddie.  There are some origin stories for the various hits, most notably Bohemian Rhapsody.  It plays as a greatest hits album with story.  Queen did the score for a couple of movies and now for their own biopic.  Cool.  The inclusion of Mike Myers (aka Wayne of Wayne's World) as a music executive who doubts the merits of Bohemian Rhapsody was great. 

 

Here is a movie that is about the rise of Queen and also the tragic life of Freddie.  I don't know how accurate a portrayal of Freddie this is.  When onstage or working on music with the band, he was aggressive and controlling.  Away from music and the band, he came off as somewhat shy and uncertain.  An interesting contrast.  He also is seen as easily manipulated into becoming a meal ticket for the unscrupulous.

 

Fun movie, mostly for the music.  A must if you are a fan of Queen.

Overlord (2018)

It is D-Day and a particular plane full of paratroopers is bound for France.  Their mission is to knock out a radio tower to aid the landing.  However, flack is heavy and the plane is shot to pieces.  Only a handful of the platoon survives and gathers.  The highest-ranking survivor is a corporal who is utterly ruthless.  The central character is Private Boyce (Jovan Adepo), who is viewed poorly by most of the soldiers.  Not because he is black but because he declined to kill a mouse in the barracks during training.  To the good, it turns out he speaks French.

 

No sooner do they arrive at the target than they notice some strange goings-on.  There are Nazi scientists who are collecting corpses for some reason.  Boyce accidentally finds his way into the complex and - inexplicably - explores almost all of it without being spotted.  He witnesses the revival of an apparently dead soldier.  The Nazis are working on a super soldier formula.  I almost expected to see Red Skull and Captain America!

 

A lot of the movie is hiding and fleeing, which provides lots of tension but gets old.  The big fight had entirely too few zombies.  The goal may have been to limit the zombies entirely in the underground complex to explain why this incident is unknown to history.  But speaking of history, the US Army was segregated during World War II.  There were no black paratroopers on D-Day.  There certainly wasn't a black sergeant in command of mostly white soldiers.  This sort of historical revisionism is rampant.  History wasn't inclusive and it was mostly ugly and brutish.  It should not be rewritten to match modern sensibilities.  If you want black and white troops together, set the story in Vietnam.  Or maybe embrace an alternate history and have the zombie run wild.  Pick one.

The movie is so-so.

Always Democrat Votes Found

Isn't it odd that every time someone discovers an uncounted batch of votes in a close election, they are overwhelmingly in favor of the Democrat?  You would think that it would be just as likely to break either way in a close election but time after time, it breaks Democrat.  Why is that?  Can't be voter fraud.  It has been repeatedly pointed out that there is no voter fraud and laws requiring photo ID to vote are racist and suppress votes,  because minorities don't know how to get photo IDs.  Um, who's the racist?  After the debacle of the 2000 election in Florida, how is it that the state didn't address that to prevent the current repeat?  Someone must like this state of affairs if no one bothered to fix it after 18 years.  Maybe this time they will fix the problem so we don't see another fiasco in 2036.  Somehow, I doubt it.

Halloween

The new Halloween dismisses all but the original 1978 movie.  It is explained that after having crawled away from the house where he nearly killed Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), Michael was arrested by a young policeman who prevented Doctor Loomis (Donald Pleasance) from finishing the job.  Since then, Michael has been in a mental institution.  Enter Aaron and Dana, a pair of Brits who have a true crime podcast.  They attempt to interview Michael but he says not a word.  He is soon to be transferred to a more prison-like facility where it will not be possible to interview him.  Next, they interview Laurie, finding her at a secure compound in the woods.  Her life has been one of paranoia and marital failure.  Her only daughter was taken from her.  She scoffs at them when they suggest she confront Michael at the institution and get him to talk.  Yes, the Brits have notions of finally rehabilitating Michael or at least getting him to explain himself.  Ha.  Of course, Michael escapes during the transfer and makes his way to Haddonfield where he recommences his murderous ways.  Laurie grabs some guns and goes hunting!  First, she checks on her estranged daughter (Judy Greer) before looking for Michael.  Like Ripley in the Aliens series or Sarah Connor in Terminator, Laurie has become a badass.  Badass grandma! 

Though it discards all the sequels prior to it, it does offer the occasional homage.  The idea of Laurie being Michael's sister is mentioned and dismissed as a rumor.  At one point, Laurie falls off a balcony and is lying on the ground but when Michael looks again, she's gone!  I was reminded of a Chuck Norris movie - Silent Rage - where an unkillable baddie was on a murder rampage but Chuck kept trying to kill him anyway.

It was awkward to have both a daughter and a granddaughter, which really watered down the character conflict between parent and child.  However, it was necessary to have teens for Michael to slaughter and Laurie is a bit old to have a teenager at this point.  As such, the daughter gets to have angry arguments with her mom and flashbacks to her childhood of being trained for combat while the granddaughter gets to run from Michael while all her classmates are sliced and diced.

 

I do miss Doctor Loomis.  The psychiatrist running around with his Colt .45 trying to kill his former patient was awesome, definitely Donald Pleasance's most defining role in my view.

 

This is a good sequel to the original.  Thumbs up.

Solo: A Star Wars Story

Solo is too ambitious, serving more as an origin story than a good adventure story.  The movie starts on Corellia where Han (Alden Ehrenreich) is a low level goon in a criminal underworld ruled by a swamp dragon.  He is in love with Qi'ra (Emilia Clarke).  They try to escape but she is caught.  Han is forced to join the Empire and enrolls in flight school.  However, next we see him, he is a grunt on some random planet, rating somewhere below a storm trooper.  Trying to go AWOL, he is caught and tossed into a cage with the beast.  He sees the remains of the beast's previous victims.  The beast proves to be Chewbacca and Han speaks just enough Wookiee to join forces to escape.  Next, the pair join Beckett (Woody Harrelson) and his band of rogues.  Beckett needs to get his hands on some coaxium, a miracle fuel.  They go to yet another planet where they try to hijack a coaxium shipment but everything goes sideways when a rival band intervenes.  Beckett takes them to another planet to meet with Dryden Vos (Paul Bettany) to work out another means of delivering the promised coaxium.  To his amazement, Han encounters Qi'ra there!  With Qi'ra now joining them, Beckett, Han, and Chewie recruit Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover) and his crazy android, L3-37.  They fly to Kessel, where coaxium is mined.  The Kessel run requires a circuitous 20 parsec flight path to navigate a dangerous nebula.  Han took a shortcut on the way out, thus his claim of doing the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs.  The movie has more twists and turns to go after that.  There is too much to digest.

There are a series of villains and the story can't settle on one overarching bad guy.  We start with the swamp dragon and her minions, move onto the Empire that he is trying to abandon, then there are the rival raiders, Dryden Vos, slavers, and more still.  Dryden is the closest to a main villain but he is introduced late and has a worse bark than bite.  Combined with the constant change of venue and the series of 'jobs' that almost always fail, it contributes to the lack of focus.

Han comes across as hapless.  Pretending a rock is a thermal detonator was cheesy.  Why is he a pro at Star Wars poker?  We've had no hint that he is a good gambler prior to his joining the card game.  That he later walks in and trounces everyone makes you wonder why he doesn't just become a gambler rather than risk being a smuggler.  The way Han wins the Millennium Falcon from Lando is much different from what I had pictured based on the comments in The Empire Strikes Back.  Han repeatedly tries to talk his way out of things and it fails miserable, mostly humiliating our hero.  Once, okay.  But it happens several times.

Beckett was the best character of the bunch.  He is kind of like Han Solo from Star Wars (1977), so it is unsurprising that he serves as a mentor to Han.  And like Han, he is beset by bad luck.  Where future Han is in hock to Jabba, Beckett is in hock to Dryden Vos.  Looks like Han chose the wrong mentor.  Yeah, yet another bad move by young Han.

Qi'ra is a mystery that is not solved.  Exactly what happened to her in the years since Han left her on Corellia is implied but not spelled out.  She repeatedly tells him that she has changed though he doesn't take her word for it.  Her ambition outweighs any feelings she has for Han, which dampens the romance qualities of their relationship.  Han is deluding himself that they have a future, showing yet again that he is clueless.

L3-37 is annoying from her first appearance.  Look, it's a droid that wants equal rights and jeopardizes the mission because of it.  Now that we have successfully infiltrated, how about I remove the restraining bolts from every droid and encourage them to revolt.  So much for stealth.  She entirely earns being blasted.  Lando risks life and limb to rescue the remains and has to 'save' her by integrating her with the Falcon.  Um, shouldn't you just need to get replacement parts?  Chewie was able to reassemble C3PO in The Empire Strikes Back.

In the end, Han aids the seeds of the rebellion, putting him in the good guy camp because he needs to demonstrate selflessness.  That undermines his transformation in the original trilogy.  He's been a rebel sympathizer all along.  Heck, he infused them with a huge fortune when Luke and Leia were children.

The movie ends with a clear intent for a sequel.  Han and Chewie plan to go to Tattooine and do a job for one of the Huts while Qi'ra is off to join the leader of Crimson Dawn, none other than Darth Maul.  Based on the box office, that presumed sequel may not come to pass.  Ron Howard should have streamlined this movie and cut as much of the non-essentials as possible.  Make it a stand alone adventure story that doesn't have a constantly rotating cast of characters.

Fun but not great.