Tag: Biography

The Birth Of A Nation is titled as such to recall the film with the same name slightly over a hundred years ago. That one was racist, sure, but it was also one of the biggest movies of the time and revolutionized film so it still has a reason to be talked about today.

This modern version is about a true slave revolt that happened before the civil war. That’s right. They are taking the title back and making it pro-black. A bold and almost genius idea.

It was also one of the most anticipated films of the year, with Oscar hopes and dreams, long ovations at Sundance, and a giant bidding war to get rights to distribute. It was the first film to potentially win the Best Picture award this year, so the hype was un real. And no, Free State of Jones being terrible didn’t bring the hype down at all.

Picture of how I imagined the hype train would rush to theaters for this film.

The story is about Nat Turner (Nate Parker), a child born into slavery, who was taught to read the bible a bit by kinder owners (Penelope Ann Miller), but eventually was put back into the field.

As an adult, he was one of the head slave workers and he also preached to his fellow slaves every week. A slave preacher! Yes, because they wouldn’t let him preach to white folks of course. Well, the drought was hurting the small farm, so his owner (Armie Hammer) began to take him to other farms to have him preach to other slaves about the importance of obeying your master in order to get to heaven, helping them earn extra money.

But on these voyages he started to see worse and worse conditions for slaves. It began to break him as a person, so much that he would lash out and get more punishments on his own farm. So eventually he had enough. He got a few men together, they planned to kill all their masters, go north to an armory, grab weapons, take the town and try and end slavery once and for all. Whoops, that is most of the story!

Also starring Jackie Earle Haley as the typical evil slave catcher, Esther Scott, Aja Naomi King, Mark Boone Junior, Colman Domingo, Aunjanue Ellis, Dwight Henry, Gabrielle Union, and Roger Guenveur Smith.

Obviously, given the subject matter you can tell this will be a powerful drama and story and one has to just hope and hope that the people behind it do it justice. And since one man is behind it there is a lot of pressure on Parker to deliver. He was the director, star, writer, main producer, everything. And thankfully he also delivered.

From the cinematography, to his acting, to the costumes, to the close up faces, it was an easy and hard two hours to get through. Easy as it just seemed to flow by rarely having a dull moment, and hard given the subject matter. For those worried, it was actually a lot less graphic than I had anticipated, with a terrible scene involving teeth and some dead bodies.

Whether the movie gets the real story perfect, or what happened in anyone’s real life past is irrelevant. The film itself is actually a well-crafted piece and worthy of praise on many regards. Is it the best movie this year? I don’t think so, but it is one with few issues outside of pacing concerns and behind the scenes drama.

I don’t want to sound like a cheap comparison, but I would definitely say another recent slavery movie, 12 Years A Slave, was definitely still better. But I mean, 12 Years was reall fucking good.

Definitely go see The Birth of a Nation which you will certainty see it mentioned at awards ceremonies in a few months, but I doubt now it takes the top prize.

Honestly, Queen of Katwe came out kind of a surprise to me, which is mostly surprising as it is a Disney movie.

I mean, shit, the bombed film The Finest Hours which Disney barely cared to promote I was still able to see advertisements for. But queen of Katwe? I just assumed it was some random actual Queen of an African nation. I mean, I recognized actors on the poster and it seemed like it could be about royalty.

But no, this is one of those Disney true inspirational stories. And I completely missed the fact that the poster had a ton of chess pieces on it as silhouettes, just assuming it was a fence. Fuck. A Disney movie about Chess and Africa? What a brilliant idea to really bring two things not really thought about together to make a unique film.

Well, unique if it wasn’t a true story. Now I am babbling. Yay chess?

Yeah, there is some chess right there!

In Uganda, a large portion of the population does not play chess. In Katwe specifically, it is a mostly village town with a lot of people living in the slums, struggling to survive. Phiona Mutesi (Madina Nalwanga) is a young girl living in these slums! She doesn’t go to school as they cannot afford it. Instead she helps sell corn all day to people in cars so they can afford rent. She lives with her mother (Lupita Nyong’o), older sister Night (Taryn Kyaze), younger brother (Martin Kabanza), and a baby brother too. No dad anymore, he died a few years ago, thus the struggle to survive.

But there is some hope. There is a church group nearby that is helping keep the kids in good health and spirits, teaching them soccer mostly. But one man, a very smart man, Robert Katende (David Oyelowo) wants them to learn chess. A game that he learned as a kid to beat those “city folk” and really stick it to them. Phiona follows her brother to a meeting spot for this, instantly falls in love with the game and begins to play as well.

And she is super interested in chess. She makes a makeshift chess board out of bottle caps with her brother so they can play at home. And soon, SOON, she is the best player in Katwe of the kids who can’t afford school.

But that isn’t her end goal. No, she needs to go to bigger tournaments. In Uganda, in Africa, hell, in other continents around the world. Her drive and desire is pushing her forward and it might what can really save her family from poverty in their small village.

Also featuring Ronald Ssemaganda and Esther Tebandeke.

You might have your mothers features but you lack her sense of style.

For a movie that lacked a lot of advertisement, it sure does tell a good story.

This isn’t the greatest film by any means. It is average on the acting front, pretty normal camera work and scenes to keep you entertained. It won’t win any awards. But when it comes to telling an interesting and inspirational tale, it does a wonderful job.

Our big three leads do a good job of carrying the emotional/spiritual side of the story, Nyong’o, Oyelowo, and Nalwanga. You will like all the characters, through their faults and triumphs. We even get to see cute baby scenes, yay cute baby scenes! (And one scary one that almost freaked me the fuck out).

For her first ever film (and she had only seen one movie before in her life while filming this one, Jurassic World) Nalwanga plays her part with ease. Despite the bigger names, it is very clearly her film and a story about this chess prodigy and not the coach who found the diamond in the rough or anything like that.

And on that note, there aren’t a lot of movies really about chess. Sure we had Pawn Sacrifice a year or two ago, but that was about the most famous chess player of all time and nothing to special. Maybe it appealed to me more given that I am becoming a chess club coach in a week and excited at the timing of this film. It is a nice film about picking hard to reach goals and doing whatever it takes to achieve them.

When I heard about the movie Southside With You, my first reaction was to laugh. The plot, about Barack and Michelle Obama first’s date just sounded so oddly specific.

But at the same time, technically, I didn’t know anything about them when they were younger. Did they have lofty political ambitions? Were they jerks? Why did their first date make them fall in love? Was their first date actually a good story.

Shit, the hook actually worked. I wanted to find out more. And I also based it off the assumption that there is no way they would make a movie like this unless it was an interesting first date. Sure, some liberties would be taken, but the real life story has to be a good one. My first date with my wife would be terrible as a movie, but maybe the second or third date would be better.

I also find it funny that, outside of documentaries, this is the first movie about Obama’s life. Our last president was stuck with the unflattering W. as his legacy, but Obama gets a romance flick. Better PR team I guess!

Also, I was secretly hoping that this would basically be like Before Sunrise, but more Obama-y.

Technically, this film takes place before sunrise. Technically every film does.

The year is 1989, the season is summer, and the city is Chicago. To put that into more perspective, I would have been a few months old only at the time, because I am still a young little whippersnapper.

Michelle Robinson (Tika Sumpter) is a second year associate at a law firm. She went to Ivy League schools for her degrees and has succeeded in a white and male dominated field. And yes, she still lives with her parents, because her father has MS. She doesn’t really date, but today…well, that is still true.

Because today she is going to a meeting with Barack Obama (Parker Sawyers). He is a summer intern at the same law firm, while going to Harvard for his own law degree. He invited her out to a meeting about local community problems that he figured she would be interested in. And that is all it is, according to Michelle. Certainly not a date, that would be inappropriate, she is his adviser.

But it turns out that when he picks her up in his beaten down car early in the morning, the meeting isn’t actually until 4. What a ruse! He wants to take her to a museum first to see an Afrocentric art exhibit. And some food in the park. But if she doesn’t want it to be a date, then hell, they can just be friends. Just talking, getting to know each other, friends.

You sly little so-and-so Barack.

It takes a lot of acting balls to want to play someone real, let alone real and super famous. The President and First Lady are really high up there in terms of famousness and some pretty big shoes to fill. And with that, I want to say that Sumpter as Michelle reminded me constantly of Suzanne Cryer‘s character on Silicon Valley. Just the way she talked and where she placed pauses, that is all I could think about. I also can say that I have absolutely no idea what the hell Michelle Obama talks like now or did back then. I assume it is an accurate portrayal, but it was definitely jarring throughout the whole film.

On the same side, I know what Barack Obama sounds like. I have heard many of his speeches. The mannerisms that Sawyers gave clicked really well with my view of the president and it was awesome to see. By the end, I accepted Sumpter’s Michelle as well and figured they were both spot on. Because damn it, why else would she use that voice?

Enough about the voices, Sumpter and Sawyers also remarkably had enough of the look down to make this film very believable. It was just about two young, highly educated and motivated people, trying to make the best out of their lives and help others along the way. It is a great propaganda piece, very in your face to some of the more vocal arguments about Obama. They talked about his family, his birth, his religion and more.

Sure, it wasn’t Before Sunrise, but very few films are. Instead, Southside With You is a nice romance flick. It feels real, it is full of wonderful smaller moments that build up into something bigger than the sum of its parts. The leads are charming. And it will really humanize two individuals that are somewhat hard to relate to.

My All American is one of those films that came out in 2015 that I just flat out avoided. Football films have been extremely disappointing lately. Heck, for quite a few years I guess. After the extreme disappointment that was When The Game Stands Tall I knew I couldn’t see another one in theaters for some time.

On top of that, Aaron Eckhart has also been equally disappointing, almost entirely, since The Dark Knight. Dude needs to step up his game, I am tired of being let down.

According to IMDB, this movie is actually called Courage. I just have not heard that said about it in any other context, except for it being a big part of a title of one of the many books on this subject. Fucking IMDB, stop being weird.

There is no way this image is not a hand job. Can they show this in a family movie?

This is a true story of course, and of course, some of this is a bit unbelievable.

Despite the billing, it is about Freddie Steinmark (Finn Wittrock), a boy with a lot of heart. But you knew that, why else would he get his own movie? He is a smaller guy, like Rudy, sure, but he gives it his all, he is super fast, and smart on the defense. He is a safety, and fantastic. But because of his size, no one gives him a chance. Except for one guy, Coach Royal (Aaron Eckhart), at the University of Texas. The Longhorns.

He sees his drive. And he also has a friend, Bobby Mitchell (Rett Terrell) who might come by as well. A nice two for one.

Well, sure enough, Freddie becomes their main defensive player. He is on the highlight reels. He is top form. He wants a national championship. And he might be able to force his body to go places no single human body should go. But will he become an All American? That is really what is important. He won’t. Nope. Sorry. But they let you know that one right away.

His parents are played by Michael Reilly Burke and Robin Tunney, girlfriend by Sarah Bolger, and other quarterbacks are played by Juston Street and Donny Boaz.

Holy shit, is everyone on this college football team a guy in their thirties?

Heart. Drive. Inspiration. I already made the Rudy connection, but apparently Steinmark was a bit better than Rudy. Rudy got to play one game, because he was willing to practice so hard and make it his one goal. Steinmark had family support since he was kid to be the very best and it actually showed, despite his size. Steinmark helped championship games get won and rivalries get stomped down.

My All American is better than it has any right to be. It is more or less a by the numbers inspirational sports film. It is PG, it shows mostly just some personal struggle, and it is about an optimist. It has a lot of really easy material to pluck from to get people nostalgic and tearjerking. In fact, by the end it feels like it is trying to hard just to get some cries out. Did I cry? Yes, but only like half of a cry. It didn’t fully get to me, despite giving its best.

The film is also surprisingly well shot. You can generally tell what is going on during the plays, everything looks really nice and you can tell that someone wanted to put their best foot forward for the film. In terms of acting, most of the side characters are understandably average, being reduced to mostly one or two bit players. But Wittrock as our lead was a joy to watch and is the type of lead you want in a sports bio pic like this one.

My All American won’t be for everyone. In fact, I probably won’t watch it ever again unlike what I do almost bimonthly for Remember the Titans. But it was a better effort than recent fair and hopefully means we can get some better football movies in the pipeline soon.

I totally forgot the film Experimenter existed. In 2015, I saw it was coming out, planned on watching it, and then, well, we are halfway through 2016 now. Shit.

The only reason I remembered it existed was browsing Anton Yelchin‘s IMDB page, looking for recent films he was in that sounded interesting enough to review. The title Experimenter seemed good so I figure’d I’d “randomly” give it a shot.

It wasn’t until I actually started watching the film did I remember that I totally knew about this film before and I once again have found myself being a forgetful dumbass.

But hey, Yelchin is in this movie! And some other folks, can’t wait!

And I also have a huge hankerin’ for some science, even if it is of the social variety.

Stanley Milgram (Peter Sarsgaard) is a social psychologist in the 1960’s-80’s, known for quite a few extreme experiments that really got the world talking. And no, he didn’t do The Stanford Prison Experiment, he did all the other ones.

This is mostly about his super famous experiments, dealing with obedience, trying to figure out why so many people could commit terrible acts during the Holocaust. This had a great concern to Milgram, who himself was Jewish. So the main point of his experiment was simple.

He would have two people come in, one would randomly be assigned the teacher, the other the learner. The learner would be hooked up to an machine that would shock them every time they got an answer wrong and they would sit alone in a room. The teacher would ask them questions based on a memory assignment and if the learner asked the question wrong they would get an electrical shock. Every wrong question, another shock, but a higher voltage level. And the teacher got a sample low shock at the beginning to get a feel for it.

Over time, the learner would start to scream louder and louder. And eventually ask for it to stop and then refuse to talk and refuse to answer (which makes them more wrong). The teacher doesn’t know that the learner is actually someone in on the experiment and not getting shocked at all. And of course, Milgram’s results were shocking. The world wasn’t ready for his tests and they raised quite a hubbub.

The first half of the film is mainly about that experiment and its variations, with the second half being the rest of his life, his other smaller (and still brilliant) experiments, life with his wife (Winona Ryder) and eventual death. Sad face.

Also featuring Jim Gaffigan and John Palladino as assistants, and John Leguizamo, Anton Yelchin, and Taryn Manning as a few people who were paid participants. Aka, very small roles.

This unflattering freeze frame of Gaffigan gives him a mouth that can fit several hot pockets.

Experimenter ended up being a really strange movie and not your normal biopic. It is definitely a drama, but it still feels comedic in a way without telling a lot of jokes. Like, the whole film is saying his life is just one big joke, but again, not in a mean way. It is narrated by Sarsgaard, constantly breaking the fourth wall to discuss his life (and death), no shame at all. Hell, it even has an elephant in the background to not so subtly talk about the elephant in the room.

Speaking of backgrounds, a lot of them are just so incredibly fake it is beyond obvious. Like they made this film in the actual time period that it is set. You can notice it in the car rides, when they go to a one time scene, and it is just fake. It was intentional, perhaps because they are almost insinuating that the aspects of his life not in the university are just a series of tests and fake set ups for experiments.

Shit, from the last two paragraphs, you might think this movie is meta as fuck. And honestly, I think that was their point. Meta as fuck but in a strangely subtle, obvious way.

I clearly have no idea what I am actually talking about. This movie is really entertaining and just so damn odd. I want to learn a lot more about Milgram, so I should read that book that made people scared of him. Or a biography that goes over all of his most famous experiments.

I tried to go into The Infiltrator blind, like a perfect critic, but I ended up reading the IMDB page for both a brief plot analysis and actors. I’m sorry, I failed, I’m not perfect.

The film is directed by Brad Furman, who did Runner Runner and The Lincoln Lawyer, both vary different films in terms of quality and subject matter. Given the cast involved, I certainly hope this is more of a Lincoln Lawyer than a Runner Runner.

Shit, why is this movie not an alliterative title? He could have a thing going. I, Infiltrator would work. Or Informative Infiltrator, that would be fun. But we couldn’t do Informant + Infiltrator, that is too close to just The Informant.

Just looking at the image makes me feel 10 monies more worth.

Robert Mazur (Bryan Cranston), totally a real dude, was a U.S. customs agent who worked in Tampa, Florida in the 1980s. He was one of those guys trying to get Pablo Escobar, to stop so much cocaine from getting in to the US, because Reagan said so. He is getting old and could retire, but he finally has a good idea to “Get these guys!” for good. Despite what his wife (Juliet Aubrey) wants.

He is going to follow the money. Which sure, seems obvious now, but apparently his idea was cutting edge. He got approval from the boss (Amy Ryan) and has to team up with Emir Abreu (John Leguizamo), a kind of crummy agent but who currently has an undercover role in the organization to get him in.

Robert just has to pretend to be a money launderer. Once he gets in the ground level of the business, like with the Gonzalos (Rubén Ochandiano, Simón Andreu), he can then get to Javier Ospina (Yul Vazquez), then a big name like Roberto Alcaino (Benjamin Bratt) and his wife (Elena Anaya)! Speaking of wives, Robert said he only had a fiance, so they had to bring in an agent (Diane Kruger) to pretend to be that as well in order to keep his story straight.

Another agent is played by Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, some corrupt bankers by Art Malik, Saïd Taghmaoui, and Tim Dutton. Olympia Dukakis is his aunt, Joseph Gilgun his actual bad guy body guard, and Michael Paré with a smaller role.

I was just wondering why that “guy from Miss Congeniality” didn’t have a bigger career. Now look at him, drug lord!

Halfway through the movie I still wasn’t sure what I thought about it. My mind was going everywhere. The acting was good from Cranston, Leguizamo, Bratt, and Kruger, yes. But the story felt like it was full of annoying cliches that kept getting on my nerves.

Of course, given that this is a “True Story” I don’t know how many of the cliches ended up being real or not. But one that really bugs me is that since The Sopranos, it seems that every drama story needs to have extreme marital tension or drama, potentially up to divorce. From the text at the end of the movie, it looked like all of that was completely added in for shitty tension and it gets old.

We had silly lines like the wife needing a promise that this would be the last mission (of course, because he is old and we need the movie) and Cranston becoming someone completely different (despite going undercover a lot). There was a terrible scene involving a wedding cake that just was cringe inducing and took me out of the film, it just seemed so silly to drive a simple point home.

Dumb cliches and scenes aside, the ending really drove this movie home into something better. The event where they were able to get a lot of the criminals under one roof was very emotional. They turned these “bad guys” into real people, with families, reason for working with drugs and more. And they all got busted equally. It didn’t drive home the point enough that the War on Drugs in itself is a complete failure, but it makes sense that Robert Mazur wouldn’t mention that in a book where he is the hero.

Pretty good acting and a strong ending. Maybe the film is a bit too long with some cringey moments, but overall it was really enjoyable and a good couple of hours.

U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!

Welcome to July 4th! And because Independence Day: Resurgence had to go and come out super early and of course not be good, I have to review something else today instead. And I had nothing. Nothing in my to watch queue fit the theme of the day and my mind was completely blank.

So sure. Netflix to the rescue? I first searched for the word America (and American), but none of the movies really felt patriotic. Or the ones with America in the title weren’t new enough for me to want to review them.

Okay, fine. So I went for the next best word to describe today. Straight up Freedom, and a movie called just Freedom is what I got. And it had to do with American civil war stuff! Great! I just had one of those also, Free State of Jones, but it also didn’t come out July 4 weekend so…yeah, we already talked about that.

A mostly random film that I know nothing about, just for July 4th review.

Although with a civil war theme, I wasn’t expecting this guy to be a main character.

Samuel (Cuba Gooding Jr.) is a slave and he doesn’t to be a slave. He is on a plantation with his mom (Phyllis Bash), wife, Vanessa, (Sharon Leal), kid (Aaron Bantum), and other people. The group of them and someone nicknamed Big Hand (Phillip Boykin) want to escape and finally try it, but the plantation owners find out really quick. Big Hand distracts the dogs so the family can escape though.

This pisses off the owner, Monroe (David Rasche). He really liked Vanessa, like sometimes slave owners did. He gets his old friend, Plimpton (William Sadler) to get out of retirement and hunt the slaves down with a small team. He used to be really great at it too.

Ahem, sorry, back to Samuel. Samuel doesn’t like singing. What the fuck right? He also doesn’t believe in God, or at least the “white man’s god” that would make them slaves and hurt them so. Yet he is alone in this regard. His family thinks he is ridiculous for not going on with their masters religion. Which is why his mom starts telling the story of a guy, a hundred years ago, who knew his great grandpa or something, who also made the song Amazing Grace.

Yep, we have a side story, of John Newton (Bernhard Forcher), a British dude who had to sail a ship as the captain. He just had to go pick up slaves, take them to America, and come home. His fiance (Anna Sims) would be waiting for him. Hell, he wouldn’t have to interact with the slaves. That is what his first mate (Jubilant Sykes) was for, also a slave. Fun!

And so we get the stories of the Samuel family escaping to Canada, and this British guy getting sad about slavery while taking them to the US. Also featuring Michael Goodwin as Garrett.

Yep, this is what I expected with the civil war theme.

At the end of the movie, I was shocked to find out that a few characters in this film were supposed to be real. This Garrett fellow apparently helped get 2,500 slaves over many years to freedom. Cool dude. And of course, John Newton, a British guy who actually did make the song Amazing Grace. This film was partially a biography to him, or at least why he was inspired.

Ah. Cool I guess? The story itself though had very little to do with Samuel’s story. And the “connection” to the story was unfortunately forced and silly, because Samuel isn’t a real person, just Newton is.

Instead, Samuel and his family get to be the slavery representation of thousands of people who had similar trips. They just wanted to also talk about Newton for whatever reason. The struggles shown for the family are relatively small on their hundreds of miles of journey though. In fact, most of it went pretty smoothly.

No, the crux of this movie is people being mad at Samuel despite Samuel having a perfectly reasonable attitude towards life. Slaves were forced to like Jesus and Samuel never really caring for that fact makes a lot of sense.

But no, by the end he figures out that Jesus is still awesome, despite his own personal struggles. So he finally sings a song when he is free, and then the movie ends.

The reason I gave this a 1 is because there is a surprisingly large number of songs in this movie. And yes, all of them are Gospel in nature but I happen to like that. Most of them didn’t really feel realistic as they tended to have that “produced” quality to them, but hey, it helped break up the monotony that was this dull, possibly offensive story.

I love period piece films as long as that period isn’t Victorian-era England. Those ones aren’t necessary bad, they just feel overdone to me and now I have developed a slight bias against them. Sorry, not sorry.

Civil War era films usually get me all excited though. Or just pre-Civil War slavery films. I don’t even need them to be based on real events, which is the recent trend. Just give me a movie with brothers killing brothers and morals on the line. I wanna tear up at the hardships of war and get mad at something that happened 150+ years ago.

So the Free State of Jones is based on real events? Cool, whatever. I accidentally saw a trailer a few months ago before another screening and it looked pretty interesting. I know it was originally supposed to come out in March but got pushed back to Summer for reasons. Doesn’t matter, still excited to watch it.

“Oh, sup prof. Just chillin'”

In October, 1862, Newton Knight (Matthew McConaughey), up for the sweetest name award, was also serving in the Confederate Army. For whatever reason he was given nurse duty, so he used that status to save his friends from the battlefield and getting them to doctors quickly. Then his son, Daniel (Jacob Lofland) appears, saying that their farm animals were taken and crops to feed the army. Newt agrees to escape with his son and take him home, but tragedy occurs and Newt is forced to just bring home a body.

Newton came from a small farm in Jones Count, Mississippi. He has been poor and kind of pissed off at the rich. Pissed that their sons don’t have to fight in the war, when he feels the entire war is them fighting for slaves that only the rich have. So he decides to stay home with his wife (Keri Russell) and young boy. He becomes a protector of all the homes in the area from Confederate troops looking to take more than the 10% allowed.

They quickly turn on him and he has to go into hiding in the swamp. There he joins a camp with Moses (Mahershala Ali) and four other runaway slaves. They hide together, work together, and eventually get guns to protect themselves. Overtime, more and more Confederate deserters are on the run and end up at this camp until they have over 100 members. Newt has developed a relation with a House slave Rachel (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) who has been secretly helping their group.

Anyways, short story long, they eventually set out to take their land back from the Confederate soldiers that are trying to take their crops and resources. They get three counties to their name before resistance starts and decide to start their own Nation, a Free State of Jones, to like, grow their own crops and have equality and all. Fun times.

Donald Watkins and Troy Hogan play two other slaves, Bill Tangradi and Thomas Francis Murphy play our confederate leaders trying to stop this group, and a whole lot of other white people, played by Sean Bridgers, Joe Chrest, Brian Lee Franklin, Kerry Cahill, and Christopher Berry.

The way to prevent your stuff from getting stolen is to burn it all down.

Never before in a movie have I seen a drop in quality so much as Free State of Jones. At the beginning we are dropped right in the middle of a random Civil War fight. It showed that the Civil War was brutal, people died and marched on and died some more. Newt escapes, quite easily apparently and continues to be mad at the rich for not fighting their own fights and his friends losing their livliehoods over it. Sure, makes sense. Newt doesn’t care about Slave rights or anything, he has none. It isn’t until a Slave helps save his sick son.

But even then, it is extremely awkward in this movie, even when he is living with just runaways. They never get close. When it is a giant army of Confederates and the few slaves, people are still dicks to slaves. It isn’t until one of the more cringey movie moments that I have ever seen that things start to change. When Newt’s character gives a speech about how basically everyone there is someone’s slave, no matter the color and they shouldn’t be jerks. He used a bit more “colorful” language, but that speech helped change everyone’s mind, albeit temporarily, to work together towards a goal.

In terms of modern comparisons, it reminded me of the All Lives Matter backlash to Black Lives Matter. This movie argues that the poor southern farmers were treated just as bad as slaves, but then goes on to show that technically the slaves still have it worse. I don’t know if the Moses character is real at all, but they put all of the slavery baggage on him, as the other members of the camp apparently don’t have lines and I barely heard two of their names mentioned. It was such a shit way of trying to get us emotionally invested in the slavery story, when they only put personality in him and Rachel. We also find out he has a wife and kid somewhere in “Texas” (again, we are in Mississippi), yet they are able to reconnect extremely easy post war with zero explanation as to how.

This kid is killed off in the first 10 minutes and gets more promo pictures than other people in teh film.

There are more problems with this movie outside of making it super white focused. I can’t remember when, but early on in the movie, we get a title card that says 85 YEARS LATER… and we are shown a court room setting where the whiteness of a person is being put on trial, because his great grandmother might have been Rachel, making him part black, and thus his marriage illegal. This was a real trial and actually true, but HOLY CRAP, this has no reason to be in this movie at all.

The “future” scenes do nothing for the rest of the film and they keep coming back, breaking up the plot and slowing it even more down. Whoever decided to add this constantly interrupting subplot/finale to the film should be fired from whatever future film jobs they have, because it was such a poor choice.

The Confederate “bad guys” and post War bad dude are basically cartoon villains, just missing some finger twirling of their mustaches. The film is especially insulting over the “peanut scenes” in the last twenty minutes.

Oh, and guess what. The film doesn’t end with the end of their rebellion or the end of the civil war. It goes over another year or so after the fact, during early KKK period and reconstruction. Why? Because they feel like it. Because the ending drags on and on, for over thirty minutes. The filmmakers had no idea how to end this film and practically none of it matter for the overall story they were trying to tell.

Fuck, Free State of Jones. I can’t believe it ended up being so blah. There were good moments in there and with 45 or so less minutes, plus more character development for some other characters, and this would have been fantastic. This film makes me less excited for The Birth of a Nation, which is stupid, I know.

I’m not angry at your Free State of Jones. I’m just really disappointed.

Oh sorry, here is an extra picture. It is really hard to find any of Moses or Rachel, let alone any of the other black characters in the film. This is basically the best I can do (without huge watermarks), even by googling the movie title with actor names. Shit, if you google the movie and Gugu Mbatha-Raw, the main love interest, you will find barely anything from the actual film and some pictures of her from Belle.

The director was Gary Ross, an old white guy who has only directed a handful of films. His first one was Pleasantville, which I love and adore, but I guess it makes sense. In that movie, he told the problem of Racism in America using only white people. In Free State of Jones, he basically just does that again, but in a more insulting way.

Eddie The Eagle is one of those movies that I heard was coming out, I wanted to see, and then never saw. I know I know, it happens all the time, but usually I at least manage to see the movies that interest me.

Fun fact about watching the movie. Well, fun to me. The entire time, despite knowing the actual actors name, I assumed it was Emile Hirsch. The problem is that I could not remember Emile Hirsch’s name, but assumed it was very close to Taron Edgerton. They don’t really look alike, have no where similar names, but I finished the film thinking “Man, that guy from Prince Avalanche sure did nail it!”

It is one of the strangest mix ups I have ever experienced, so strange that I decided to write about it in the intro of a movie review.

“What is this, a ski jump arena for ANTS?”

Eddie Edwards (Taron Edgerton, not anyone else) always wanted to go to the Olympics when he was a boy. He was kind of nerdy, but he had a goal and put his mind to it. He just wasn’t very athletic. He tried so many types of Olympic actives but always came up short. His mum (Jo Hartley) encouraged him to reach for the stars, but his dad (Keith Allen) eventually got sick of it, wanted him to end his obsession and to focus on getting a job and an income. And then Eddie decided he was doing it all wrong. He should train for the Winter Olympics instead.

So Eddie learns to ski and heck, he becomes pretty good at it too. He gets decently fast, but he still doesn’t qualify for the British Olympic team. Partially because they think he is a weird guy and not “Olympic Athlete” material. You know, he is quirky. An embarrassment. So what does Eddie do? He finds a new thing to try. Olympic Ski Jumping. If he can learn how to jump and reach a certain distance, then he can qualify for the Olympics on his own, standards be damned!

Which is why Eddie heads to Germany to a Ski Jumping school. If he can learn to jump quickly, he can participate in a competition, qualify, and still make it to the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics! Yes, those Winter Olympics. The same ones that featured the Jamaican Bobsled team. And sure, he finds a gruff but eventually lovable coach (Hugh Jackman) and is faced with the fact that most jumpers start training when they are 6 and not when they are in their 20’s. But damn it, this is his best chance at going to the Olympics and he won’t let anything stop him!

Also starring Edvin Endre, Rune Temte, Iris Berben, Jim Broadbent, and Christopher Walken.

Yeah, technically this is not how an Eagle would fly. But if an eagle had Skis, maybe they would!

I am only human. That means I like to be inspired every once in awhile, and hell, I can find a sports movie inspiring as well. I love the classics but I have found lately that sports movies are trying to hard for inspiration and forcing too many changes into the story. Only a movie studio can take an amazing 100+ game winning streak and lie about everything after the team finally lost and think its a good idea. I’ve been needing something greater than Spare Parts or McFarland, USA or Million Dollar Arm to really get me going.

Thankfully, Eddie the Eagle had everything I wanted and fulfilled something missing in me for years. Hell, I felt inspired just six minutes into the movie. A lot of credit needs to go to the sound and music team. I don’t know what inspired the music, but the tune throughout the film just made me feel like I could do anything.

And heck, the movie is about a guy that constantly got shit upon by others. Especially those in charge. No one wanted him to succeed and constantly they blocked his attempts to go to the Olympics. But he made it. Did he medal? Nope. Did he do his best? You betcha! And he broke records too. Mostly because no one before him had really Ski Jumped in GB since the 1920s.

And what confused me the most after the film ended is that it DIDN’T give me a nice blurb about what ended up happening with Eddie after the Olympics. That is because the Olympics changed their rules to make people like Eddie ineligible for the Olympics in future years. Basically, modern Olympic people don’t know how to have fun and are jerk faces. But I had to learn that on my own.

Egerton was wonderful as the lead and I just wanted to hug him the whole film. This is a drastically different role than the one he played in Kingsman, so I am now excited to see where Egerton takes his career outside of that franchise. The guy can act.

Fly like and Eddie the Eagle. Do it or live in regret the rest of your life.

I met Infinity once. He was at a night club, surrounded by friends and seemed to be in a never ending conversation. The friends were all large and powerful people. Saying “met” is a bit of a stretch, because every time I tried to walk over to him, the distance never seemed to lessen. Eventually I decided reaching Infinity was a long battle I was not going to win, so instead I went home and cried myself to sleep.

Srinivasa Ramanujan was The Man Who Knew Infinity though, an Indian math genius who (eventually) blew the math community away with his theories and identities. And I guess he is a famous enough dude who no one knows about (I don’t, you probably didn’t either), so they want to make a movie about his victories.

You know, like A Beautiful Mind, but with less conspiracies and spy stuff. Or like The Theory of Everything, but with less crippling and romance, and more actual math. The last example isn’t that good, because everyone knows who that wheel chair guy is.

That feeling you get when you’re trying to work and you start hallucinating a large British man is judging you.

Srinivasa Ramanujan (Dev Patel) never received formal training in high levels of math. But he was an Autodidact, which the movie never says on its own, but it is someone who can learn a subject at high levels without help. A really rare form of smartness. He can’t explain why he knows everything he knows, without any of the formal training or background, but he knows that they must be true. He can see numbers damn it, and so he understands them pretty damn well.

After some amount of training in India once they find out about his gift, Ramanujan realizes he needs to get published with his equations in order for the rest of the world to get his information. He also doesn’t want to be “second place” by publishing the results because someone else publishes it first. He didn’t want to be the Leibniz to someone else’s Newton.

He searches out for a place to go to publish his work, and at Cambridge, a math professor named G.H. Hardy (Jeremy Irons) takes interest in his work. The only problem with the equations, no matter how “right” they look, is that Ramanujan doesn’t have real proof of any of them. Ramanujan doesn’t understand the concept of mathematical proofs either, he just wants to get his formulas published, proofs be damned. His years also take place at Cambridge right before and during World War I, where British people apparently start to hate Indians making his life more difficult. Heck, he is forced to take classes with these white racist blokes just to get some more background, despite it feeling like a waste of time.

Anyways, this films is about a group of people trying to get their math on and eventually, you know, do basically get their math on.

Also starring Malcolm Sinclair, Raghuvir Joshi, Dhritiman Chatterjee, Stephen Fry, Toby Jones, Jeremy Northam and Padraic Delaney.

To be fair, neither of these men are clearly normal. Look at how they walk and use umbrellas.

Math is something that should be celebrated, including the discoveries of important aspects of math. We all know Newton and uhh, the other guys, but why not some lesser known people? Especially if they aren’t white! So hooray for Srinivasa Ramanujan, a smart guy who deserves his own film! I just wish they could have made it more exciting.

After our star gets to England, the movie feels very repetitive. He wants to publish formulas, professor wants him to come up with proofs, some sort of compromise, then repeat. Bad things happen to Ramanujan, some racist, some natural, and some…also racist, and he pulls through and gets his math on.

It is good to see that he never gives up despite the pressures, but at the same time, the film barely goes heavy on math (despite him being a really heavy on math individual). And the acting from everyone is the most hum drum experience ever. I didn’t see any passion, which can be a problem with the script more than anything.

Srinivasa Ramanujan was a smart guy, and eventually he died. That’s really what I learned from the film. A book on his life would probably be a bit more interesting than this movie.