December 2017

This was the month I took my 19th cruise (Miami to the the Western Caribbean on Carnival’s Splendor) and then spent Christmas with the Steeles. Boy, was I glad to come home. I closed the year by taking care of Cindy’s house and her dog Mochi. BOOKS: I finally finished reading Awakening by S.J. Bolton. I’m looking forward to reading the new Kathryn Croft’s new mystery novel. MUSIC: I continued listening to my Kinks iTunes playlist and some random new songs. TV: I binge-watched the latest seasons of This Is Us, Stranger Things and Black Mirror. 
Here are the movies I saw in December:

CALCULATED RISK (1963)—This was an old movie I found that sounded kind of interesting. A ex-con and his associates plan a bank heist by digging underound from an adjacent building. All goes according to plan...until the group discovers an unexploded WWII bomb while digging! The film is nicely paced, light and suspenseful; not really a lost classic, but reasonably entertaining. (8)

THE DISASTER ARTIST (2017)—Last month, I watched The Room, a 2003 flop written, starring and directed by Tommy Wiseau. The awfulness of this movie has attracted such a cult following that James Franco (with brother Dave) are now starring in a movie about the making of The Room. (This is equivalent to Johnny Depp starring in 1994’s Ed Wood.) It’s decent enough, but nowhere near as entertaining as The Room, which demands to be seen by lovers of cinematic fiascos. (7)

THE SHAPE OF WATER (2017)—By his own admission, Guillermo del Toro says his new monster movie was inspired by his childhood viewing of 1954’s Creature from the Black Lagoon. The creature in his new film bears an uncanny resemblance to the one in the earlier movie, but the “sexy monster” story is much more like Beauty and the Beast—again, by del Toro’s own admission—or even E.T. and King Kong. Based on the positive reviews, I was prepared to love this movie, but it’s so full of preposterous plot flaws that I grew weary of it. (Example: the female protagonist wants to create an aquarium-type habitat for the creature in her apartment, so she shuts them together in her bathroom, turns on the faucets and miraculously fills the entire bathroom full of water in about half an hour. Stupid!! SPOILER ALERT: At the end of the film, she and Mr. Black Lagoon jump into a river near an embankment and...it turns out to be about 40 feet deep there! Those are just a couple of examples. Sally Hawkins, so good in the recent Maudie, is excellent in this film, and the creature looks great, but outside of their performances and some decent special effects, this movie left me a bit cold. (7)

COCO (2017)—I was somewhat ambivalent going into Pixar’s latest, given that it bears a striking resemblance to 2014’s The Book of Life, which is also set against the Mexican celebration Día de Muertos (Day of the Dead). The difference turns out to be that Coco is an infinitely better movie, full of imagination, color, music and bittersweet pathos. A boy, forbidden to play his guitar, travels to the afterlife to find his great-great grandfather, a Mexican star of the screen and a respected musician. Great effects and animation. (9)

THE POST (2017)—Director Steven Spielberg has spent his career shunting back and forth between commercial blockbusters (Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jurassic Park) and history lessons (Lincoln, Amsted, Munich). With The Post, he finds himself squarely in history-lesson mode. I’m all for a story that defends journalism, as The Post tells the Nixon-era story of how the Washington Post obtained and published the famous Pentagon Papers, which exposed the true nature of the Vietnam War. With a top-drawer cast that includes Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, this thing has “Oscar” written all over it. Except....The Post takes more than half of its 115-minute length to really take off. It’s always nice to see these performers, but The Post is pretty boring much of the time. I’m looking forward to his next “blockbuster.” (7)

MOLLY’S GAME (2017)—True story of high-stakes poker-game impresario Molly Bloom, the former champion skier who, following a spinal injury, learned how to organize poker games where rich actors and businessmen often lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in one sitting. The movie explores how Bloom got involved with the Russian Mafia, was subsequently arrested and went on trial. Writer-director Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing) keeps the story chugging  along, and for much of its two-and-a-half-hour length, it’s fairly mesmerizing. Only debits for me: (a) way too much cigarette smoking, and (b) the audience is naturally curious to know what Bloom has been up to since her trial. (8)