Movie Reviews: Report To The Commissioner

Report To The Commissioner
directed by Milton Katselas

This is a grimy looking NYC cop drama that works the same side of the street as such near contemporary films as Across 110th Street, Serpico, and The French Connection.

Report To The Commissioner and The French Connection shared the same screenwriter in Ernest Tidyman, so perhaps it's not too surprising that the cop played by Yaphet Kotto seems to have a lot in common with The French Connection's Popeye Doyle, right down to the porkpie hat. 

Report To The Commissioner has understated social commentary. By today's standards the language is rough befitting the sort of story this film is trying to tell but the violence is minor and not explicit. 

I haven't been to New York City in decades; I hear that compared to the seventies and eighties everything has been cleaned up and "Disneyfied". 

This 1975 film takes place in the bad old days of live sex shows, garish neon, and big yellow Checker taxicabs. There's an excitement and energy to the film that leaps off the screen even when nothing much is happening. 

That's not something that's easy to pull off. This movie makes New York City look like a smelly rotten den of iniquity full of lowlifes, ripoff artists, and corrupt government officials. It also makes it look like a place you might want to visit though perhaps not live.

Right-Wing Loons Force Closure of National Butterfly Center

When two people can't get along they have to stop living together. 

One underlying reason that people can't get along is that they no longer share the same reality. 

From a societal standpoint two people's personal problems don't mean very much.

But when entire swaths of society reject empiricism, embrace outlandish disproven conspiracies, and seek to harass and intimidate other people based on their distorted reality map then that is a much bigger problem than two people getting upset because they have different ideas about money, child raising, fidelity, or clothing choices. 

Society begins to fall apart when too many people no longer agree on reality.

Conservatives have been on the warpath about race (what else, I may have more to write on that later) but have recently taken a detour to attack the National Butterfly Center. Yes you read that correctly.

Movie Reviews: The Many Saints Of Newark

The Many Saints Of Newark
directed by Alan Taylor

The Many Saints of Newark (TMSOM) is a prequel to the HBO crime drama series The Sopranos. The Sopranos creator, David Chase, produced and wrote, but did not direct this film. With prequels, unless there is some undetailed and exciting narrative that improves the original story, audience interest can flag.

The audience already knows what happened to the major characters in the original story. Skilled creators can find ways around that.  

Instead of examining the young adult Tony Soprano who will become the intimidating (and depressed) boss of the DiMeo Crime Family, TMSON focuses on Tony's mentor, his uncle by marriage, Dickie Moltisanti (Alessandro Nivola), whose translated surname provides part of the film's title and serves as a indicator of the struggle between good and evil that lives in his heart. 

Less successfully TMSON also tries to say something about race, by introducing the character Harold McBrayer (Leslie Odom Jr). A Black gangster who was a high school schoolmate (and football teammate?) of Dickie's, Harold now works for Dickie overseeing numbers and gambling rackets in inner city Newark. And I do mean "overseeeing". 

Email Spam and Lottery Win

In the past sometimes friends or loved ones sent me email which I didn't see either because I wasn't online or more likely because the email went to my spam folder. 

After a few unpleasant conversations that could (wrongly) end up with the person believing that I didn't think that they were important, I changed all of my personal email filters so that certain ids were automatically sorted into the appropriate non-spam folders. 

I didn't do this with my work email because there I think there are indeed many emails and senders that aren't that important. Still, from time to time, on both work and personal email accounts, occasionally stuff winds up in the spam folder that really isn't spam and really is worth my time to read and respond. So far such items have never included a notification of a $3 million lottery win but you never know right?
Jan. 21 (UPI) -- A Michigan woman checking her email spam folder for a missing message made a far more surprising discovery -- she had won a $3 million lottery jackpot. Laura Spears, 55, of Oakland County, told Michigan Lottery officials she bought a ticket for the Dec. 31 Mega Millions drawing on MichiganLottery.com.
"I saw an ad on Facebook that the Mega Millions jackpot was getting pretty high, so I got on my account and bought a ticket," Spears said. "A few days later, I was looking for a missing email from someone, so I checked the spam folder in my email account."
Spears said a message from the Michigan Lottery caught her eye.
"That's when I saw an email from the lottery saying I had won a prize. I couldn't believe what I was reading, so I logged in to my Lottery account to confirm the message in the email. It's all still so shocking to me that I really won $3 million," she said.  LINK

Health Care Costs Continue To Rise

Because many people who supported the PPACA, both popularly and derisively known as Obamacare, did so from moral fervor and political partisanship (as did many opponents, often with the added fecal nugget of racism dropped in) they were utterly uninterested in any epistemological or evidence based evaluation for the claims that Obamacare would lower premiums, deductibles, and health care costs. 

Supporters took it as an article of faith that Obamacare would do all of those things. And if you questioned that belief or wondered if there were a better way of lowering health care costs, lemming like supporters squealed that you were a dummy, a useful idiot for Republicans, or worst of all some sort of hateful right-wing conservative cretin misogynist misandrist who just wanted people to die.

Silence heretic!!!!

Well.

Movie Reviews: Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard

The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard

directed by Patrick Hughes

This is a sequel to the film The Hitman's Bodyguard. While you might argue that the first movie had some Odd Couple comedic points to be made about learning how to get along with people who don't share your world view, personality, or sense of professionalism, this film downplays those points to ensure that you know that the actress Salma Hayek has very large and very firm breasts. 

Now I was already aware of that factoid but if you didn't have that piece of information floating around your skull, I guarantee you will remember it after you have finished watching this movie.

I am certain that the male audience will like this. Even so, I thought it was a little over the top; it was even called out by the character which the actress was playing. 

Although exaggerated for comedic effect I didn't think the cleavage display was degrading or sexist. It was similar to some classic Hammer movies from the fifties thru the seventies in which much appears to be exposed but not that much is actually seen. But other viewers may see things differently. 

This was a movie sequel that, like many such, didn't really need to be made. The story, such as it was, had been completed. 

Movie Reviews: The Undercover Man

The Undercover Man
directed by Joseph Lewis

This 1949 film is more of a crime drama than a noir film.

Although Eliot Ness and his high profile raids are popularly linked with the downfall of Chicago Outfit head Al Capone, it was actually the more anodyne work of IRS accountants/tax agents like Frank Wilson that actually resulted in Capone's conviction and imprisonment on tax evasion charges.

This movie is loosely based on Frank Wilson's story. 

The film deviates from noir storylines by avoiding the true bleakness of real life events.

In real life although Capone was convicted and later sent to Alcatraz, the organization that he inherited and built thrived without him, growing to wield national influence, including in Hollywood and Las Vegas. 

Capone's conviction did not prove that good would win over evil. It just showed that mobsters needed to pay their taxes and keep a lower public profile, a valuable lesson that Capone's successors took to heart. 

Nevertheless The Undercover Man still effectively used noir elements of claustrophobic corruption and frustration with the law. Although everyone at the time would have recognized the Capone story, this movie set its tale in an unnamed city. As Tolkien did with Sauron, the film keeps its Big Bad (Capone) off screen for 99% of the story.