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This is a public service announcement.  Do not see "Winchester".  (Unless you want to lose about 15 IQ points.)  About the only thing to see in the City of San Jose, California, is the Winchester House.  The widow of the founder of the Winchester Rifle Company was quite looney.  She believed that she would never die as long as she was in the process of building her house.  At least that is the story that you get when you plunk down the price of admission to walk through the place.  The house is interesting, for about 15 minutes, which is 15 minutes longer than the interest generated by this movie.  It is among the worst movies that I have ever seen.  It stars the great Helen Mirren.  How bad can a movie with Helen Mirren be?   Very bad.  Atrocious.  It isn't even good history.  About the only thing that they got right is the date of the EARTHQUAKE.  You know the one.  It brought down hundreds of buildings in San Francisco, but we San Franciscans prefer to refer to the catastrophe as The Fire.  The house is hilarious, but in this movie it is simply boring.  They show a stairway that climbs up to the ceiling, and stops.  It goes nowhere, you have to turn around and come back down.  Unfortunately, that is the only oddity about the house that they show. So they show it over and over.  It was made by two guys in Australia who apparently have never seen the Winchester House, only heard about it from someone who was in a hurry and didn't spend more than ten minutes there. 
Mrs. Winchester got her money's worth.  She lived a very long time.  I didn't get my money's worth.  Save your money for when you are stuck in San Jose with an extra hour or two on your hands and visit the real thing. 

Christian "I'm Batman" Bale portrays a jaded American captain serving in New Mexico with two months to go before his 20 year retirement and claim to a pension.  He is given an assignment to guard a dying Native American chief who has been in custody back to Wyoming.  (I am not sure why the Chief is being sent back to his home.  Seems like a lot of trouble for someone who is considered a criminal and is going to die soon.)  The detachment runs into all sorts of trouble that anyone in the audience could have warned Bale about.  Did I mention that Bale's character hates Native Americans?  Something that struck me when the movie was over is that they traveled consistently across the screen from right to left, which for me heightened the sense that they were going from south to north.  The star of the film throughout was the landscape.  The photography left anything the John Ford did in the dust.  Literally.  Rosamund Pike plays a woman whom they pick up along the way.  Her family has been slaughtered by Comanches and she is a babbling idiot, until she snaps out of it and becomes a heroine, of course.   If this review sounds sarcastic, that is just my personality.  Ignore the my review and go see the movie.  It will cost you more than $8 dollars.  I don't know where Andy got that $8 ticket price.  It must be left over from when he was a fan of Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland.

It's not my fault.  Well, technically it is.  We had a 4.5 earthquake that was centered 2 blocks from our house here in Berkeley. 
https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2018/01/04/powerful-4-5-magnitude-earthquake-rattles-californias-bay-area-today/#7723f8b66665

We had one thing fall off a shelf, but no breakage.  No new cracks in the plaster. No bricks fell off the chimney.  Otherwise we had light rain and about 60 degrees Fahrenheit.  I would rather be here than on the East Coast today. 

If you saw the 1974 version with Albert Finney as Hercule Poirot don't go to see this movie.  If you haven't seen the 1974 version then download it from Amazon.  Whatever you do, don't bother with this Kenneth Branaugh attempt at outdoing the old version.  Branaugh twists himself into a pretzel trying to show off what an original director he is.  In one scene shows three people having a conversation by putting the camera directly over their heads!   Why?  Don't ask me.  Maybe it was only to be able to say "See how innovative I am. No one has done this before."  The movie has some very attractive scenes, but then I am a sucker for 1930ish art deco.  The Albert Finney version did Agatha Christie correctly.  You watch the plot unfold slowly and then in the final scene the quirky, preposterous looking detective gathers all of the suspects together and shows that he was paying attention all along.  In this version Branaugh solves mysteries as he goes along, deflating the plot while he does it.  Oh.  The moustache.  Finney had that tiny handlebar.  So did Suchet in the PBS series.  Branaugh's moustache is a bizarre mess that Christie's prissy little detective would be too embarrassed to go out with in public.   Save your money.

Is it:
A.  A thriller?
B.  A horror movie?
C.  A Comedy?
D.  An allegory?
E.  All of the above?

You know where I am going with this.

The answer is E.  I wouldn't have given you that option if I wasn't going to use it.  It is a movie that you have to see.  It takes place in 1959 and captures that era perfectly.  I know.  I was there.  DJ and I were married that year.  I wasn't in the suburbs.  But some of my best friends were suburbans.  Men wore suits with short sleeve dress shirts.  Women wore shirtdresses.  Cars had fins.  Men wore their hair short and women had permanents.  I am not sure how all that authenticity made its way into this movie.  It was directed by George Clooney and he is not old enough to have experienced it.  It stars Matt Damon as some kind of businessman, what exactly he did was not clear, except for... (no, that would be a spoiler).  There are terrific actors in this movie.  My vote goes to Oscar Isaac?  Who?  He plays a slimy insurance adjuster and steals every scene that he is in.  Go see it.  You won't be disappointed.

A well made movie.  It tells the story of the evacuation of over 300,000 mostly British troops from France back to England.  It was an amazing feat and had it not been successful you might be speaking German today.   You, not me, because I wouldn't be here at all.  This is not a date movie.  Clichés?  Yes.  It is hard to make a war movie without them.

I admit it.  I have a great interest in Shakespeare.  Not so much the plays, but the person.   I have around a dozen books about his life and times.  I am amazed at the scholarship  surrounding his life.  About 50 years after he died the biographers started in on him, and thousands of books have been published about him.  It is amazing that there are some "scholars" who doubt his authorship.  (Mark Twain, Winston Churchill, etc.)  Yet when he lived no one accused him of claiming credit for someone else's work.  I guess no one at that time thought there would ever be any reason to doubt his authorship.  In fact, it is well known what he wrote and with whom he collaborated.  The claim is that he had only the equivalent of a grammar school education and it would be impossible for him to have acquired the talent.  I think that the same argument could be made about Abraham Lincoln. 
This series makes Shakespeare into a naïve booby, which is a novel approach to say the least.  It has him writing the script for Act One, scene two, while the actors are on stage performing Act One, scene one.  It also suggests that the actors improvised at will (no pun intended) and that he then incorporated the improvisations.  I guess that is possible, but this is the first that I have heard about it.  What else?  Female actors.  No, not men dressed as women.  Actresses?  "Shakespeare In Love" nothwithstanding, that just didn't happen during Shakespeare's lifetime.  It took about 75 years after he died for women to be allowed on an English stage. 
In spite of all these issues, I will follow the entire series because I am hooked on Shakespeare and the diverse approaches to his story. 

I admit it.  I am not young enough to appreciate this movie.  It is not a bad movie, if you like to watch improbable gymnastics performed by muscle cars and the unidentifiable crop of cars recently populating city streets and freeways.  No plot.  At least none that I can remember, but the audience in the theater that we went to didn't mind and many applauded at the end.  The star is a kid with some talent, Ansel Elgort, whom you may have seen in "The Fault Is In Your Stars", a tear-jerker about a fatally ill young woman.  This is not a "date movie", although Mrs. Cubbiebluestew gives it a thumbs up.

I mentioned this show in the Desipio Lounge Thread, so I figured that I should plug it here where it belongs.  Tuesday nights on ABC.  If you like dogs, (who doesn't?), you will enjoy this show. 

We in the Bay Area have just had the pleasure of watching a great team, functioning as a team.  Contrast that with the LeBron James and associates organization.  A play in Cleveland consists of LeBron holding the ball and running down the length of the court where he makes his dramatic dunks to the oohs and aahs of the savants in Ohio.

Richard Gere delivered an award worthy performance as a middle-aged, upper middle class, Jewish schlemiel.  It is not a comedy, although there are several amusing episodes.  Norman is doomed to spend his life alone and he has no idea why.  He has no visible means of support and doesn't have a job.  He just hangs around.  Eventually you wonder if this is an allegorical story.  There is something like a plot, however.  He performs an incredibly generous act for someone who becomes an internationally important person.  That person sees Norman in a different light than the movie audience.  Is that person right about Norman and are we wrong?  The final scene of the movie answers that question.  This is very worth seeing.

He has written some good stuff.  For instance his Lincoln is a very good read.  However, I just finished his Burr (well, I actually skimmed the last 50 pages) and I found it difficult to read.  Vidal's characterization of Aaron Burr is very snarky.  The book is oddly written.  Different sections of the book are narrated by different persons, one of them being Burr himself.  That voice seems to be what I remember Vidal himself speaking like.  I think that Vidal had great admiration for Burr.  Burr was an incredible character, and he came very near to becoming the president.  In Vidal's version he is a sinister monster, whether Vidal knew that or not.  What we expect to be the dramatic highlight, the duel in which he kills Hamilton, is almost a throw away scene.  His almost invasion of Mexico is a fiasco.  I don't recommend reading this for historical accuracy.  Vidal's Burr is the prototypical unreliable narrator.

This doesn't belong under the Boobtube topic, but I don't know where else to put it. I saw Billy Crystal live on stage in Oakland in a show that was supposed to be an hour and a half, but went almost three hours.  All of it was hilarious.  He has done one man specials on HBO and this certainly deserves a wide audience.  I literally laughed until I wheezed.  (Sorry Wheezer)  It is done with Bonnie Hunt "interviewing" him about his life, but her real purpose was to remind him about certain set pieces that he does.  SNL, When Harry Met Sally, City Slickers, hosting the Academy Awards, are all shown on a large screen from time to time and remind you of how long he has been entertaining us.  He was also connected with a lot of sports figures, Muhammed Ali and Howard Cossell, mostly.  This was part of a 40 city tour, I hope they record one and show it on TV.

I just saw "Moonlight" (Thanks to Amazon TV).  It is a sensitive and haunting story.  It depicts three phases of the life of an African American in Miami.  It is worth your time. There are no big named stars, but all of the important roles are outstandingly acted. 

SPOILER ALERT




He is gay.  It starts with him as a depressed boy who is the son of a drug addict prostitute.  In the second phase he is a withdrawn misfit in high school who realizes that he is "different".  In the final episode he is an angry, drug dealing ex-con.  Right.  It is not a feel good, date movie.  I have not seen LaLa Land.  Nor will I even watch it on TV.  Well, maybe on TV.

(?)

The question mark above represents my confusion about the title of this movie.  You would expect that a movie named "The Comedian" would be funny.  If titles are supposed to reflect the theme of the movie then this one should be called "Major Depression".  I laughed only once in this movie.  The rest of the time I was near tears.  It is probably just me, but this movie seemed to be about getting old, realizing that it was time to retire and make end of life decisions.  (Have YOU finalized your will yet?)  De Niro plays a stand up comedian who isn't funny, has serious emotional issues, and whose stand up routine sounds more like a cry for help.  After reading this you will go to this movie much better prepared than I was, because you will see some outstanding dramatic acting instead of a laugh out loud feel-good movie. 

SPOILER ALERT!   I think that when the director saw the almost last cut of this movie he/she got the message and added a feel good final scene that contradicted the rest of the movie.

Hammel, T. wood, Joe Smith.  Should the Cubs try to hold on to any of these pitchers?  Are there other free agent pitchers that the Cubs have shown an interest in?  When a team has a winning formula substantial changes are worrisome. 

Mel Gibson has given me another reason to dislike him.  This is the goriest thing that I have ever seen on film.  During World War ll Hollywood had our soldiers die bloodless deaths.  Very neat.  No suffering.  No one died without an opportunity to make a last speech telling the hero to whom to send his love.  Gibson wasn't having any of that.  How can a soldier whose head was just blown off his neck tell someone to tell mom that he loved her?  No one gets shot in the leg in this movie without both legs being taken off above the knee.  My wife spent the entire second half of this movie with her hand over her eyes.  As for the Japanese, of whom there appeared to be an inexhaustible supply,  they appeared to favor being immolated, (spoiler alert)  except for the commanding officer, who gratuitously commits hara-kiri, and then, for good measure his head is lopped off with a Samurai sword. 

MORE SPOILERS.  There is a plot to the movie.  Andrew Garfield plays a conscientious objector who could have claimed a deferment, but elected to be a medic who refused to touch a weapon.  He did something that earned him the Congressional Medal of Honor.  It is a true story, which I found hard to believe, and you will too.  At the end Gibson shows film of the person on whose life the movie was based, so you have to believe it is mostly true.  Garfield's performance is outstanding.  You may almost forget his performance as Spider-Man.  The movie will win Oscars.  Possibly for Garfield, but definitely for special effects.  Hopefully not for Gibson's directing.  But Gibson is probably too hated in Hollywood for that to happen, Sugartits!

If Alfred Hitchcock had this story it would have made a hell of a movie.  But he didn't and this production just didn't make it.  A World War ll "thriller" that forgot to be thrilling. The movie builds to what should have been a dramatic climax.  But what you get is a burp instead of a bang.   The best thing about it was that the theater sold tickets for $5.25.  I thought that the ticket seller took a look at me and automatically gave me the senior price.  He told me that was the price for everyone.  Even if your movie house gives you a cut rate price think twice before you go to this one.