Spotlight

First Hit:  Excellent writing, outstanding acting, powerful scenes, and a story that turned out to be spot-on.

This is a story about how Catholic Priests took advantage of young boys (and girls) by molesting them and getting away with it for years.

It begins with the Boston Globe getting a new Chief Editor named Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber) and while doing his due diligence of current staff, discovers that the Globe has a small group of reporters called “Spotlight”. This team digs deep to uncover meaningful stories that make a difference to Boston and beyond.

An old article comes across his desk about priest abuse and he asks Walter “Robby” Robertson (Michael Keaton), head of the Spotlight team, if this is the kind of story they work on. The team of Mike Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo) Sacha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams), and Matt Carroll (Brian d’Arcy James) are asked to take a deeper look. As they begin to dig, the level of cover up by Cardinal Law (Len Cariou) and his crew of Bishops and Priests becomes grossly apparent.

Many people are involved with the cover up including the creation of a cottage business where lawyers and their law firms defending the church reap high fees while the abused is paid next to nothing and told to keep quiet. There were many heart breaking interviews with the abused including Eric Macleish (Billy Crudup) who, with needle marks in his arm, tells how this has affected his life and his family.

The script was sharp, always on point, and reflected a caring towards giving the audience a clear understanding of the problem. This film never lagged and reflected the urgency required to make a difference.

Ruffalo was superb. His ability to be smart, urgent and both careful and reckless and the same time was perfect. Schreiber was excellent as the steady hand looking to make the paper relevant again and seeing that this story was worthy of the effort being put in by his staff. Keaton was amazing as the leader of Spotlight, knowing when to reign in or let his staff loose. The confrontation with Ruffalo was respectfully wonderful and intense. McAdams was strong and especially good in her interviews with the abused. Her empathy and ability to obtain information was excellent. James was wonderful. I loved his caring about the home near his house and how he wanted to ensure everyone knew about the danger lurking inside for young kids. Crudup was so strong in his portrayal of an abused man that I felt his pain while he spoke. Cariou was very good as the Cardinal who tried to come across as Teflon. One of the most outstanding parts is by Stanley Tucci as an independent attorney working for the abused. His role was amazingly great because of him. McCarthy and Josh Singer wrote a remarkably strong pointed script. There was no fat, just great dialogue. McCarthy directed this film with a purpose, to tell a difficult story with clarity of purpose.

Overall:  I was fully engaged and entrenched in this story in every way.

The Last Days on Mars

First Hit: This was a painfully poor film in all ways.

The film begins with people outside on a landscape that is supposed to be Mars but it could have been California, Utah, and Arizona or somewhere in the Middle East where the landscape is void of vegetation and it is both rocky and sandy.

The set up was extremely poor and when they finally tried to frame the story with shots from above the surface of the planet, it was too late. The premise that this group was on Mars was null and void from the very beginning. Briefly the rest of the story is that the group on the planet is just about ready to leave the surface and head back to earth, when at the last minute, they think they find some sort of life. In a snap decision two of the crew goes out and get sucked up by the organisms which make them zombies. They come for the rest of the crew.

Liev Schreiber as Vincent tried to make his character thoughtful and intense but it didn’t work. Romola Garai played Rebecca who was the one thoughtful character. Elias Koteas, Olivia Williams, Johnny Harris, Goran Kostic, Tom Cullen, and Yusra Warsama were all part of the crew that suffered both the script and direction of this poorly conceived film. Sydney J. Bounds and Clive Dawson wrote this lame script. Ruairi Robinson directed this and he’s got a long way to go to figure out how to tell a story worth telling.

Overall:  Nothing about it made sense and there is no way this should have found a screen.

The Butler (Original Title)

First Hit:  Some of the performances were outstanding while others were miscast and poor.

I do not like the ego of directors or writers who name their film with their name as part of the title. This film was originally called "The Butler" and now it is called and marketed as “Lee Daniels’ The Butler”.

I’m sure there are reasons why, but for me it taints a films’ integrity. Why? Because it means that the director (in this case) views himself as or more important than the film itself.

The best thing about this film was viewing changes in the civil rights movement through Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker) life. Where he watched his mother being abused by the slave owner, his father shot by saying something about it to Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and finally a black man being elected President of the United States. How it was portrayed by Whitaker, David Oyelowo, and Oprah Winfrey was excellent.

What didn’t work about this film? The representation of the Presidents Cecil served during his time in the White House. This is a great story about how a man learned how to serve with great strength of character and gained respect for his service and being of service. Although his home life was hard at times with his wife being an alcoholic and his oldest son becoming a radical of the sixties with the Black Panthers, he persevered these things as well as losing his youngest son in Vietnam and through it all he continued to be an honorable man.

Whitaker is wonderful and electric in this role. Winfrey is difficult to watch at the beginning because it is hard to separate Oprah from the role. If she acted more, she would be able to have the audience transcend her television persona more easily because she is a very good actress. Oyelowo is absolutely great as Whitaker’s son. Robin Williams as Dwight D. Eisenhower didn’t capture Dwight’s pace or energy. John Cusack did get the creepiness of Nixon but paled as the film moved on. James Marsden seemed more like Bobby Kennedy than John F. Kennedy. Liev Schreiber as Lyndon B. Johnson was pathetic. Alan Rickman was slightly worse than Schreiber as Ronald Reagan. However, I though Jane Fonda was a priceless and fabulous choice as Nancy Reagan – she caught the look, feel and ways of Nancy. Danny Strong wrote a good script. Lee Daniels got good performances from some actors but the choice of others for their roles was very weak.

Overall:  The real story got slightly demeaned by the actors chosen to be Presidents.

Salt

First Hit: Despite Jolie’s strong acting and excellent execution, the ending was predictable and telegraphed.

For a film to be suspenseful it has to be set up that way. It has to keep the audience wondering what will happen and make them believe what they are seeing is really the truth. Salt was not set up to do this.

I’d be surprised if anyone in the theater thought for one minute, that Salt (played by Angelina Jolie) would turn out to be a die-hard Russian spy wanting to kill the President of the US. With that resting in one’s mind from the get go, how could one buy into the story on the screen? I didn't.

Therefore the film became one about; can this obvious story be told well and would the acting and action be engaging? To those questions the answer is yes, it was engaging and it was fun to watch.

The story is about a Russian man named Vassily Orlov (played by Daniel Olbrychski and Daniel Pearce) who wants to cause havoc in the world because he prefers the cold war fight between the U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. of the 1950's and 1960's to the present day friendship. To keep that old battle alive he kidnaps young kids in Russia and trains them to be obedient killers and spies.

Salt, who is a US Russian diplomat’s daughter, is one of them. To carry out his plan he sends these well trained people into the US to live their lives and to be ready to march on his orders to perform the covert functions they were trained to deliver.

Jolie is good and keeps the whole film interesting. She is both athletic and beautiful. You believe she can to all the things she does in the film; from beating the crap out of people to saving the world from total destruction. Liev Schreiber as Jolie’s boss Ted Winter is strong as the man who cares but also has his own secret. Chiwetel Ejiofor, as Peabody the government agent overseeing the problem of spies, is his usual strong self. Olbrychski is great as the Russian activist who wants the world to be different than it is. Phillip Noyce did well with the given script but the problem is that the script is too obvious to work as a suspenseful thriller.

Overall: It is entertaining in an action sort of way but it is not suspenseful as the ending becomes glaringly obvious as the film rolls.

Repo Men

First Hit: What started out as a film with promise, it soon dug itself into a very deep and mediocre hole.

Jude Law and Forest Whitaker are good actors however the script and direction let them wallow in a poorly executed idea. This film had possibilities because the idea, artificial body parts being used to save humans, is not that far away.

Think about what it would mean to be able to go into a store and buy a kidney, liver, lung or heart if you needed a new one. Let’s say you’re 35 years old and your kidney is failing. Waiting for a donor is takes a long time. What if you go to a store and buy a new kidney? What would you pay? Would it be worth $50,000, $100,000, $250,000 dollars?

Let’s say you buy one for $100,000 but started missing some payments. Would the company that sold you the kidney have the right to repossess their product?

In this film, they do and Remy (played by Law) and Jake (played by Whitaker) are two of the best at repossessing the product their company sells when clients are past due. They work for Frank (played by Liev Schreiber) a store manager whose job it is to sell product to people who cannot afford it and to allocate the past due notices to his "Repo Men".

Their repossession methods are a bit extreme, but it is all in the contract the clients sign and this is where the company makes money, the repossessed parts are cleaned up and used again. All this backfires on Remy when he becomes a body part recipient.

Law attempts to keep this film alive and attention-grabbing, but the script and overall direction of the film is impossibly lost and becomes complicated in an attempt to be interesting. Whitaker is one of the few people that, even in a poor film, can express so many different and interesting feelings and emotions with his face. In one moment he can seem jovial but there is always a new expression coming and it may be dark. Schreiber is good as the store manager. Eric Garcia and Garrett Lerner wrote this very poor screen play while Miguel Sapochnik directed. His lack of a clear and realistic vision made for a lack luster effort.

Overall: This is a waste of good talent. A better developed story with clear direction could have made this a real interesting science fiction thriller.