Tag: Mike O’Malley

The Academy loves them some nostalgia. That is the only way I can explain why they continually love Clint Eastwood directed films. They elevates the okay American Sniper, and now there is wind out there that they will elevate Sully as well.

I didn’t want to see Sully, honestly. I just didn’t care. I don’t care who was involved, it was a story that didn’t feel like it should be a movie. A guy landed a plane in the water, no one died. Shit, didn’t they make Flight just to sort of go off the good will of the Sully situation?

Yes, this film just seemed like a combination of Flight plus Captain Phillips. You know, plane crash landing, but true story with Tom Hanks.

Yep, plane, water, crashing, it is all there.

Did you hear about the plane that went down? Which one? Oh, the one in January of 2009, that left LaGuardia and crash landed in the Hudson River after it ran into some birds and lost both of its engines. It couldn’t make it back to an airport, despite being NYC an close to about a dozen of them, so the pilot just knew he had to glide it down into the Hudson River. Some people came and rescued them quickly, none of the passengers or staff died. And everyone left happy, giving us a movie!

Just kidding. Some people were angry.

Sully (Tom Hanks) is a long flying pilot, who did what he thought he needed to do. He flew in a war, he was a crop duster, the typical stuff, and he has survived many hard situations, and he survived this one as well. Now the guys in charge are saying he had time to get to a couple different airport and needlessly endangered lives on a hunch. They have computer and other pilot situations! Looks like Sully is fucked. Unless he…isn’t fucked!

Aaron Eckhart is his mustache wielding co-pilot, and it also features Mike O’Malley, Anna Gunn, and Laura Linney. And other people I recognize as minor passengers, but they aren’t important.

Mustaches tend to raise a rating on average a single point!

Somehow like I imagined, Sully ended up being a very simple movie. It is only an hour and a half and even that seems too long. We get to see the crash from their point of view, from an air traffic controller, from flashbacks from news people, from random passengers. Eastwood literally made this movie 90% about this one event and that is it.

We received two flashbacks from Sully’s youth of other situations and training, but honestly, they drag the movie further. The only other aspect of the movie is a couple scenes of investigation threats, and the final conference involving computer and pilot simulations.

My biggest beef with the film is obviously the point of the movie. It is about a true event, technically not a super heroic landing all things considered, and it feels too long at only 90 minutes. This maybe should have been a documentary, a 45 minute one, with some re-enactments. That might have been worth my time. The re-enactments for this movie had some intense moments, but that was about all it had going for the movie.

Sure, Hanks’ acting is fine in it (not extraordinary), Eckhart is okay. But there is nothing really worth writing home about. I don’t see why this film is in the awards talk at all. Hell, final scenes ends on a joke, people laughing, and then a fade to black, like a crappy TV sitcom.

Head injuries are serious things. Because your brain is your most important organ. You can’t survive without your brain, so things that hurt your brain are literally the worse. And vague things like concussions become scary nightmares.

These may sound like facts, but that is because your brain is telling you they are. If you asked any organ what was the most important organ in a body, they would name themselves. What games are you playing, Brain? Making us do shit to appease you? I’m on to you.

So, Concussion. A film about head trauma and the NFL. The NFL supposedly didn’t like this movie to protect their players from hearing about the probably brain problems they may have in life. Yay controversy. It definitely sells tickets.

Science used to sell tickets on its own merit.

Dr. Bennet Omalu (Will Smith) is a smart man, and you should most definitely listen to him. He has like, seven degrees, both PhD and masters levels. He is smarty smarty smart. And he is generally a coroner, finding out big mysteries as to why people die.

Omalu ends up getting quite a strange case in his current city of Pittsburgh. Mike Webster (David Morse) is a famous ex-center for the Steelers, loved by everyone in the city, and now he is dead. He was having some issues near the end, going a bit crazy, alienating his friends and family.

Needless to say, Omalu spends a lot of time figuring things out. His brain had deteriorated and no one could explain it. Eventually, science happens everywhere, and he determines it must be due to the thousands of small (And large) blows to his head. Blows accumulated through youth play, high school, college, over a decade in the NFL, and of course practices for all these things. He had tiny concussions and they lead to problems most people just described as early Alzheimer’s.

This is bad news for the NFL, so they ignore the crap out of his results, make him seem like a liar, and bury him in the media. Yay PR machines.

Also featuring Alec Baldwin, Albert Brooks, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Eddie Marsan, Mike O’Malley, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, and Luke Wilson.

He is making that face because Luke Wilson is playing Roger Goodell.

Speaking of selling tickets, to promote this movie, Columbia promised free tickets to any NFL players who wanted to see it in theaters. After all, they have a lot of twitter and instagram followers, so that is free press. I have two problems with that. One, NFL players make shit tons of money, even the bench riders. They can afford a movie ticket. And two, they should have offered it to High School or College players, people who make no money from the sport and are young enough to get out of it if they are truly worried about saving lives with this film. Columbia went for the cheap and shit route.

Now, the good news about this movie is that Will Smith actually acts. He isn’t just playing a cool version of himself or an action version of himself. He is playing a foreign (African) doctor, who doesn’t care about football or American things, just science. It was great to watch him actually try after seeing Focus and v.

Unfortunately, the rest of the movie fails to live up to its subject matter or potential. According to news reports, the NFL was involved heavily in the editing of this film. The filmmakers didn’t have rights to NFL press reports or team names/logos, or any of that. In order to make it seem more realistic, they wanted all this in the film. So they had to offer concessions and leave parts out in order to get the logos. So the NFL helped make this film and now they don’t get attacked as hard.

Do they still look bad? Sure, but they come across as unrealistic cartoon villains, not actual bad real live people. The film doesn’t go strong on the science, strong on the PR campaign, strong on anything but Smith’s accent. And now we are left with a mostly boring and pointless film that won’t change anyone’s minds when they are facing potential millions.