I know. I KNOW. A movie about the financial crisis and the crash of 2008 and the people who bet against the housing market (and won BIG) doesn’t sound that good. Or entertaining. Or interesting. Throw in the fact that it was directed by the dude that made Anchorman and Talledega Nights and you have yourself a potential hot ass mess. But it had a few things going for it. It’s based on the book by … Continue reading Movie Review: The Big Short
I’m going to tell you straight up that this has an happy ending. This is not a given in a love story about two women in 1952, even in such a cosmopolitan locale as New York City, so I’m telling you now: there is a happy ending and neither woman ends up dead. I was worried about that. I know I’m not the only one. This is a beautiful movie about a young woman exploring … Continue reading Movie Review: Carol
This was such a sweet little movie, y’all. It’s a romance on paper, but it’s really a meditation on immigration, homesickness, and what does “home” mean. Eilis Lacey is a young woman in 1950s Ireland, with no job and no real prospects. Her sister asks an Irish priest in New York to sponsor her immigration to America. She leaves her sister and mother behind, and moves into a boarding house, finds a job in a … Continue reading Movie Review: Brooklyn
This is the year of the Message Movie. The Martian stressed the importance of science. Spectre took the concern of government surveillance to the ad absurdium conclusion (Christoph Waltz is watching you sleep!). Suffragette showed us the lengths some women felt forced to go to in order to get the rest of us the right to vote. The Walk reminded us what the World Trade Center had been. What Spotlight does, besides talking about the … Continue reading Movie Review: Spotlight
It boggles my mind that it’s been less than 100 years since we’ve had women’s suffrage in the US and the UK. Less than 100 years, and even after that, women were still expected to vote as their husbands decided (My grandmother once voted for Goldwater because, “Well, that’s who my dad would have voted for… I don’t LIKE him, but….” My mother is still just agog at this, and that election was over 50 … Continue reading Movie Review: Suffragette
As you might remember, I live in Boston. You may not know that I have worked in Boston politics on occasion. To not go see this movie and have an opinion on the accents therein would prevent me from working in Boston politics ever again. This is the story of James Whitey Bulger, leader of the Winter Hill Gang, which essentially ran the Boston criminal world in the 70s and 80s. He got away with … Continue reading Movie Review: Black Mass
In The Martian, based on the novel by Andy Weir, a manned mission to Mars goes wrong and the team leaves the planet, but they left behind botanist and bad-ass Mark Watney. In order to make it until help might come to get him, Mark must survive, alone, on Mars, for years. Fortunately, he’s a scientist. Also fortunately, NASA is also full of scientists who will stop at nothing to get him home. Elyse: I … Continue reading Movie Review: The Martian
