RUTHFULLY YOURS

The grand jury foreman told the Vineyard Gazette, “There seem to be two sets of rules and justices that are doled out — one for the rich and powerful, and one for the regular people, for you and me.” Exactly.

Chappaquiddick — a name that should live in infamy … as “Watergate” does. But as bumper stickers said during the Nixon scandal, nobody died at watergate. And nobody’s died at Mar-a-Largo either. You’d never know that the Kennedys’ very own Chappaquiddick saga is the mother of all American scandals — and that, of course, is the real story.

The movie gives a more or less accurate picture of part of that story. Some say that Jason Clarke’s portrayal of Edward M. Kennedy is perfect, including his voice. Different ears, perhaps those brought up near Boston, may think differently. Clarke makes Kennedy seem a bit listless — not the way most people remember him, but then Chappaquiddick took place only thirteen months after Kennedy’s brother Robert was killed, and Kennedy probably was a bit listless.

In an early scene after the opening credits, Kennedy is talking to 28-year-old blond Mary Jo Kopechne on the beach (not by accident, probably, the director does not have them sitting close to each other) raising an obvious question: how did Kennedy get to the beach? Two methods leap immediately to mind: 1) He drove (the movie has him being driven down Dike Road and over the bridge — he’s in the back seat reading the paper, presumably in English) and then walked to the beach; or 2) He rappelled down a seriously long rope from Apollo 11, then on its way to the moon.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/markhughes/2018/03/29/review-ready-player-one-is-spielbergs-best-film-in-a-decade/#48c5064a7081

With the official summer box office season fast approaching, the current spring of tentpole contenders continues apace with the arrival of cinema’s grand master of blockbuster franchise filmmaking. Steven Spielberg returns to theaters with Ready Player One, the sort of big-budget action-adventure extravaganza that turned the director into one of the most successful, beloved, and acclaimed filmmakers of all time. Can he work his magic again after many years away from the tentpole game?

With Ready Player One’s domestic opening weekend shaping up for $40-50 million, international markets will provide a welcome boost expected to exceed $100+ million over the Easter holiday. Some tracking suggests interest in the film is slowing a bit as we head into the weekend, but don’t be surprised if the numbers tick upward as the weekend progresses.

An average run would see a $150+ million global bow translate into perhaps $300-350 million range. If word of mouth is strong, however, then the initial relatively modest opening numbers (particularly in North America) could give way to solid holds and long legs that carry the film toward $400+ million territory.

With terrific critical reviews pushing it over 80+% at Rotten Tomatoes, a best selling novel to provide branding, Spielberg’s name recognition, and the story’s mix of video games and ’80s-90s nostalgia, there’s good reason to expect audience word of mouth to drive attendance for Ready Player One. It lacks any big-name stars who could attract an additional fanbase, but these days only a few performers really deliver that sort of star power anyway.

Spielberg used to be the poster boy for blockbuster box office results, as his films through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s regularly racking up several hundred million bucks apiece. After the turn of the century, Spielberg slowly turned his focus away from franchises and big mainstream crowdpleasers, and toward more serious dramatic fare. As a result, the box office revenue from his pictures declined significantly — which, of course, is fine for movies made without need for massive box office results.

Ready Player One will be Spielberg’s highest-grossing movie since at least The Adventures of Tintin, and more likely his biggest box office success since Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It’s also one of only six of his post-2000 films to top 80% at Rotten Tomatoes, out of 13 total pictures he’s directed during that 18 year period. It could also become his second-best domestic performer in a decade, possibly behind only Lincoln, which took $182 million stateside).

So, why do I think audiences will reward Ready Player One with good word of mouth and long box office legs? Read on and find out…

The movie isn’t a hit piece, but the history it tells is infuriating.

Chappaquiddick must be counted one of the great untold stories in American political history: The average citizen may be vaguely aware of what happened but probably has little notion of just how contemptible was the behavior of Senator Ted Kennedy. Mainstream book publishers and Hollywood have mostly steered clear of the subject for 48 years.

If Chappaquiddick had been released in 1970, it would have ended Kennedy’s political career.

Chappaquiddick the movie fills in an important gap, and if it had been released in 1970, it would have ended Kennedy’s political career. (It was only a few weeks ago that a sitting senator resigned over far less disturbing behavior than Kennedy’s.) Yet this potent and penetrating film is not merely an attack piece. It’s more than fair to Kennedy in its hesitance to depict him as drunk on the night in question, and it also pictures him repeatedly diving into the pond on Chappaquiddick Island, trying to rescue his brother Bobby’s former aide Mary Jo Kopechne (Kate Mara). He may or may not have made such rescue attempts. Moreover, as directed by John Curran (The Painted Veil), the film is suffused with lament that a man in Kennedy’s position could have been so much more than he was. Yet Ted, the last and least of four brothers, was shoved into a role for which he simply lacked the character. That the other three were dynamic leaders who died violently while he alone lived on to become the Senate’s Jabba the Hutt is perhaps the most dizzying chapter of the century-long Kennedy epic.

Jason Clarke, an Australian, is superb as Ted, who as of July 18, 1969, is mulling a run for president in 1972. To that end, he gives a solemn TV interview and then, when the cameras are off, turns to his family flunkies and insists that they round up the juicy “boiler-room girls” without whom, he says, there can be no Friday-night party at the beach cottage, on the island at the eastern edge of Martha’s Vineyard. Kennedy’s wife, Joan, being pregnant, is home on bed rest. Meanwhile, the space program that John F. Kennedy championed is two days away from culmination in the moon landing. The contrast between one’s brother’s far-reaching vision and his soft-bellied sibling’s grubby venality is so conspicuous that you could castigate the screenwriters for inventing it; except they didn’t.

Long before and after Chappaquiddick, Ted Kennedy was a drunk, a reprobate and a liar. The “lion” of the Senate was a drunk and a sexual harasser of women. He had been expelled from Harvard for cheating on a Spanish test which a surrogate took for him. His military “service” was engineered by his father. In June 1951, he signed up for a four year term which was immediately shortened to a two year term by his father’s cronies. His father’s political connections ensured that he was not deployed to the ongoing Korean War and he was discharged after 21 months. In spite of his sordid history he is buried in Arlington Cemetery….rsk
Donald Trump famously bragged during the last presidential campaign that he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody without losing voters. Unless the president actually picks up a pistol to prove that point before 2020, Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy will remain the prime example of a modern politician who retained the support of fanatical forgive-anything followers after committing what should have been considered a capital crime.

In July 1969, Kennedy drove off a bridge, left 28-year-old campaign worker Mary Jo Kopechne to die in his submerged car, then failed to inform police about the event until 10 hours later. Director John Curran’s “Chappaquiddick” focuses on that tragic night and the immediate aftermath of the scandal that should have killed Kennedy’s political career, but instead became an almost black-humor indictment of American politics and certain voters’ gullibility.

What’s refreshing (if not downright amazing) about Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan’s screenplay, based largely on facts from a lengthy 1970 court inquest, is that it fairly recounts the reprehensible episode without any liberal-Hollywood sugarcoating or raging right-wing hysteria. Although there certainly is little to like about the movie’s Kennedy, who is well portrayed by actor Jason Clarke as a self-serving, deceitful embarrassment, the writers evenhandedly refrain from resorting to any needlessly trashy sensationalism.

While scenes such as backroom damage-control strategy sessions at the Kennedy compound are credibly imagined, for example, the writers resist dramatizing any implied adulterous relationship between Kennedy and Kopechne. With so much documented depravity already on the record, there’s no need to go overboard making up any new misdeeds.

There is a tendency among critics to assume that an inscrutable, disjointed, overlong, tendentious film with characters bearing the names Bloom and Dedalus – must be paying homage to James Joyce’s Ulysses and must therefore be deep. There is also the tendency to give a pass or the benefit of one’s doubt to a director who has achieved some prominence with past work. So this rebuke is meant for movie-goers only – do not fall into the same trap as the pro’s. Ismael’s Ghosts, starring Matthieu Amalric, Marion Cotillard and Charlotte Gainsbourg – all first rate French actors – is a mess. It asks viewers to do the work of turning a grab-bag of plots and characters into a coherent narrative – something the screenwriter is supposed to do way before filming begins.

There is the re-entry of a woman who disappeared 20 years before the film takes place and has been presumed dead; there is her husband, the filmmaker creating a story based on his brother, a mysterious spy; there is the woman’s father – a master filmmaker whom her husband idolizes and who will be honored at a Tel-Aviv Film Festival; there is an astro-physicist who is in love with the deserted husband/director and an actress who is in the film within the film who is smitten with him too. At his best – all 110 pounds of him – Matthieu is not a sexy man; in this movie he is increasingly more dirty, disheveled, sleep-deprived and bug-eyed – the kind of man anyone but the French would hose down before touching Yet we are meant to believe that the beautiful Marion Cotillaard needs to be frontally nude in an attempt to win him back. After seeing over-the hill Stormy Daniels on tv, we know that Marion would only need to expose one of her shapely legs to get a man’s attention. But why would she want to? Why would anyone?

“As is customary in Mr. Desplechin’s work, there’s a lot of dialogue in “Ismael’s Ghosts,” but this movie’s nerve endings vibrate most avidly and tenderly in scenes where not a word is spoken: Sylvia on her first ride home with Ismael, looking up in serene rapture from a cab window toward the night sky; Ismael, angry and confused, framed between walls at the top of a dark staircase; Carlotta in tears, letting the blast of water from an ornamental shower head blast against her brow. It’s moments like these that make Ismael’s Ghosts” an unforgettable experience. (Glenn Kenny, NYT 3/22)

Caution: this is critic’s snake oil. Do not believe a word of it and do not go near this film – it will make you more frustrated and angry than its characters and you will find yourself wishing that you could watch The Sound of Music a few times to clear Ismael from memory. I’ve just done you a big solid – you are very welcome

His new movie reflects on the flight from reality.

Ready Player One presents a sci-fi vision of the near future so eerie and provocative that the first half of the movie constitutes Steven Spielberg’s most captivating work since A.I. (2001), the only film he’s ever done that merged his fairy-tale awe with Stanley Kubrick’s cold fatalism. By the climax of the new film, though, it has morphed into a serviceable if trite blockbuster about a plucky multicultural gang of cute kids outsmarting the cruel chief of the greedy corporation.

It’s a serviceable if trite blockbuster about a plucky multicultural gang of cute kids outsmarting the cruel chief of the greedy corporation.

On the surface, the screen version of Ernest Cline’s novel is a quest narrative set in a dystopic 2045, when Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), a resourceful orphan, undertakes a search for three magical keys stashed inside a massive multiplayer virtual-reality game by the game’s late creator, Halliday (Mark Rylance). Wonka-like, Halliday (who continues to exist in virtual form online, as a wizard avatar) has promised to give away the kingdom to whoever proves worthy enough to solve his riddles. That prize is also sought by a nasty corporation whose domineering boss (Ben Mendelsohn) is using a brute-force strategy of sending out an army of players to find the keys by trying every possible option.

That’s the core of the film, and also the most routine aspect. But it’s interspersed with a delightful Gen X pop-culture scavenger hunt that gives the film considerable bounce: In retrospect, The Lord of the Rings could have used the leavening touch of a couple of Hall & Oates tunes. References to Back to the Future, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, Atari video games, Twisted Sister, and especially The Shining (which gets a lengthy homage) blanket everything as relentlessly as the popcorn explosion in Real Genius. Ready Player One may feature more direct references to other movies than any blockbuster ever, even The Lego Movie, though Spielberg is notably coy about referring back to his own movies or to those of his sometime partner George Lucas. That’s probably just as well; Spielberg ruled the early 1980s and it would be unbecoming of him to brag about it. (No need to inform me he had an executive-producer credit on Back to the Future, by the way.) For extra nerd points, there’s a special guest appearance by the Holy Hand Grenade, that super-weapon from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

It’s Easter weekend. Like any good Southern mom, I have approximately 17 pairs of shoes for my daughters and me, three coordinating but not matchy-matchy Sunday dresses, and some very matchy-matchy polka-dot bunny leggings I picked up at Target in the little girls’ section for good measure. Those were all easy to find.

A little trickier to find are activities that commemorate the actual reason for Easter in a way that young children can understand and enjoy. Obviously, if you’re looking for stories of suffering and sacrifice that end with the ultimate fulfillment of God’s promises, start with the Bible.

But may I also suggest the 1998 animated movie, “The Prince of Egypt.” This ambitious production was the first project undertaken by Jeffrey Katzenberg’s DreamWorks and was the top-grossing non-Disney animated film at the time, but it’s a bit of a forgotten gem 20 years later.

Here are five reasons to watch it this weekend with your kids.
1. It’s Epic

I don’t mean epic in the overused modern Internet slang way. I mean the themes are serious and universal, the story timeless, the music moving. Animation allows for the locusts and the blood and the frogs to pour forth in a truly stunning fashion, giving the Exodus story the towering, overwhelming imagery it was meant to have. There is one shot, during the parting of the Red Sea, of a whale silhouetted behind the giant curtain of water as a parade of tiny people walks to freedom in its shadow that is just stunningly beautiful.

As Roger Ebert said in his review, “What it proves above all is that animation frees the imagination from the shackles of gravity and reality, and allows a story to soar as it will.”

A lot of animated films aim to be entertaining for both adults and kids, tossing in sly jokes for the parents in the crowd. Pixar is famous for this. “The Prince of Egypt” feels more like an animated film for adults that children will also enjoy. There’s a bit of comic relief in the form of the Pharoah’s two hapless magicians (Martin Short and Steve Martin), but the movie is dignified and sophisticated. I discovered it as an adult and it holds up 20 years later with my kids.
2. The Cast

“The Prince of Egypt” was lauded for its voice acting, and with good reason. The cast is a bunch of A-listers in their prime in the ‘90s. Val Kilmer, Ralph Fiennes, Michelle Pfeiffer, Patrick Stewart, Sandra Bullock, Danny Glover, Helen Mirren, the aforementioned comic superstars as Pharaohs lackeys, and a special treat for any cast, but particularly voice acting — Jeff Goldblum.

This version of the famous Israeli rescue of hostages from the hijacked Air France plane should be known for its hard-left slant and its glaring omissions. Written by Gregory Burke and directed by Jose Padilha, its main purpose is to humanize the hijackers and to trace all of Israel’s current problems to ITS failure to negotiate with peace-loving, occupied Palestinians. Here are some of the facts this movie does not contain.

Palestinians began the practice of hijacking planes in 1968 and were the leading perpetrators of this particular form of torture, managing one a month in 1972. The Entebbe event of 1976 was organized by a founding member of the German Revolutionary Cells (RZ) and his female accomplice together with two Palestinian drop-outs from Habash’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) Though they appear in the film, we are not given any background into the virulence of these movements. Rather, the German Bose (played by Daniel Bruhl) is seen as a humanitarian who stands up for women and children. His accomplice (Rosamund Pike) is a garden-variety nut bag compelled to save Palestinians who are described by one of the hijackers as the people who were treated just like the Jews in the holocaust once those Nazi-like Jewish survivors came to Palestine to steal land and occupy it Of course many Jews had already emigrated in the 19th century fleeing European pogroms and some had drifted back after much earlier expulsions of Jews from several European countries. Many “Palestinians” were actually Arabs from Syria and other parts of the middle-east who migrated after the Jews began draining the malaria-infested swamps and creating jobs and better living conditions for unskilled labor.

Sternly, one character tells another that the fight must go on, for the sake of the hostages. Just as sternly, the other character replies that if the fight must go on, then we are all hostages. The latter is being metaphorical, maybe even metaphysical, musing about a future marred by perpetual hostilities. The former is being a bit more literal: There are 246 men, women, and children held at gunpoint in Uganda who need saving.

How to resolve this breakdown in communication? You can’t, which makes 7 Days in Entebbe, a new movie adaptation of what may be history’s most audacious rescue operation, particularly vexing to watch. One moment it’s Ziv, a hardened young commando about to report for duty, bickering with his girlfriend, a peaceable dancer. The next, it’s Shimon Peres, the operation’s chief cheerleader, bickering with his quivering frenemy, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. No matter who’s doing the talking, the question pondered is the same: How long must we fight?

The answer, to all but high-minded screenwriters intent on making serious movies about moral conundrums, is not too complicated: as long as there are bad guys with guns trying to kill us. In 7 Days, however, the bad guys aren’t that bad—they’re German intellectuals, which means that, periodically, they must put aside their AK-47s and debate the dialectical nature of history.