Samsara

First Hit:  Powerful images, beautiful cinematography, and elegantly shot, if you want to see the circuitous cycle of life (Samsara) in musical rhythmic technicolor, watch this film.

How does a filmmaker create a film that encompasses “Samsara”, which can be interpreted as the cycle of life; the birth, dying and rebirth of all things?

Shot without descriptive words, and enhanced with elegantly selected music, Ron Fricke gives the audience a physical view of our world that most will never see. The images of life, death, rebirth and life unfolding in its own inimitable way tie this word together like no other film I've ever witnessed.

The ancient  art of dance is bookends this film with three very young Balinese dancers presenting religious and artistic expressions all with frozen facial gazes. The segment where prisoners dance on the exercise yard in the Philippines was oddly engaging. This is all balanced at the end by a Chinese troupe doing the 1,000 hands dance towards the end of the film. Their arm movement is ethereal.

We look at the food that sustains us and how it is processed in various parts of the world. Some of the scenes are very graphic, powerful, and, at times, difficult to watch. The slaughtering of animals and birds and how it is packaged for our consumption. This segues to observing an overweight American family eating processed fast food. This sequence ends with a very large obese man getting marked, with a felt pen, on his chest and stomach by a surgeon for weight loss surgery. It was a very graphic sequence.

The amazing memory I have of watching Tibetan Monks creating a large sand mandala in a monastery in Nepal  was re-engaged when the film presents the audience with a mandala being created. The added joy of seeing young monks, eagerly, carefully and intently, watching the older monks was emotionally stirring. The construction of a sand mandala is grain by grain over a number of days and is stunning to watch. The breathtaking colors of sand carefully laid on a predetermined pattern constructs a picture to represent life. This is followed by the monks destroying  the mandala thereby completing the mandala’s cycle: Birth, Death, and Re-birth exemplifying the meaning of "Samsara".

Part of how we humans view life is through our religions. To bring this to the audience the film shares amazing shots of religious buildings and areas across the globe. Mecca invites curiosity by seeing hundreds of thousands of people bowing and praying in unison while tens of thousands are circling the sacred Black Stone of the Kaaba. Buddhist temples of Bagan in Myanmar and Tibetan Buddhists in Ladakh India along with the amazing cathedrals of Notre Dame , Mont Saint Michel in France, the Basilica Di San Pietro in Italy, and the Church of the Redeemer in Jerusalem. Giving us a view of how humans have a particular reverence for our beliefs.

How do humans spend their time? Much of it at work and this film shares many segments of all types of people at work. The poorest of the poor in Sao Paulo Brazil scraping together a living, the suffering sulfur mine workers in Indonesia, a life size doll factory in Japan shares variety as does a coffin building shop in Ghana and then the sadness of people going through the trash dumps in Quezon City in the Philippines and Accra, Ghana.

Additionally, the physical beauty of the planet is one of the stars of this film including volcanoes, deep canyons, immense forests, and the ever-present water. The film shares the beauty of nature with the amazing creations of man like the Pyramids, man-made islands in the mid-east, shopping centers, and other amazing constructions of grandeur.

To exemplify death and the way humans try to control "Samsara" were the segments on the creation of guns. It was one of the most powerful and sad segments of this film. We witness gun manufacturing along with owners, proud owners, of their weapons that kill. They share this with pride. One warrior in Omo Valley in Ethiopia was especially arresting to see.

"Samsara":  The life, death and life again of everything. Truly a film of beauty creating thought provoking questions that each of us.

Ron Fricke is an amazing director. His vision is sublime. Like in his film Baraka, he selects stunning locations and gives us so much information about humanity that one will leaves the theater slightly stunned, intriguingly awake, and filled with thoughts about our place on this blue marble we call Earth.

Overall:  Amazing and overwhelmingly rich in beauty and thoughtful probes into our inner life.

Don't Breathe

First Hit:  A fairly good horror thriller that had me jumping in my seat a couple of times.

I’m not a big horror fan, but going to this film with my daughter, who loves horror films, was fun. My first jump in my seat happened when a dog jumped up to a window of a car, the second is when a man came through a door. There are a number of car and door type sequences, so I’m not giving anything away here.

The story is about three people; a young mother named Rocky (Jane Levy) who is living a repressed life with her mother and daughter, a nice thoughtful young man named Alex (Dylan Minnette) who cares about Rocky, and a sleazy boyfriend of Rocky’s named Money (Daniel Zovatto). Together they break into houses taking no cash, but gathering and taking as many valuables as they can to fence for cash. Tired of not making much from their efforts and Rocky promising her daughter they’ll move to California; they decide to rob a blind man (Steven Lang) who won a large financial judgement when his daughter was killed by another motorist.

Because he lives in an deserted neighborhood, they believe that robbing blind man will be easy pickings. However, they discover differently. Much of the film is shot in darkened rooms, but there’s enough light to ensure the audience sees all they need to see. The blind man is very adept at creating fear and seems to have multiple lives because just when you think he's out of the picture, he shows up again. The script is clean, simple and not overly complicated. The director got everyone to buy into the script and each played their part well. It had suspense and moments of tension which was the purpose of this story.

Levy was strong as the woman who had lived a hard life and wanted something better for her daughter. She expressed the right amount of fear and courage. Minnette was sufficiently kind and driven to participate in robberies to be close to and help Rocky. Zovatto was OK as an uneducated thief who was brutish towards Rocky and domineering towards Alex. Lang was very good as the blind old man. His unshaven face and blind eyes were intimidating. Fede Alvarez and Rodo Sayagues wrote a strong script which director Alvarez did a great job of getting tense suspense from the actors and scenes.

Overall:  This was one of the better horror films made in the last few years.

The Magnificent Seven

First Hit:  The original 1960’s film had heart, this one doesn’t.

As much as I like Denzel Washington (playing Chisolm) and Chris Pratt (playing Josh Faraday) in films, this one felt dead. No character was really given a story to care about until the end when Chisolm shares why he really took the job to kill and defeat Bartholomew Bogue’s (Peter Sarsgaard) group of men who controlled the small western town. But until this moment, there was only some “telling” as to why this small band of men decided to protect this small town versus engaging the audience in a story having heart.

It is a shame, because there's a slew of wonderful actors in this film but they cannot make up for a mediocre script by Richard Wenk and Nic Pizzolatto and direction without vision. Yes, director Antoine Fuqua got the action of movement and shooting to kill reasonably well. He even got the small western town set well, but the heart of the film, the townsfolk’s fear as shared by Emma Cullen (Haley Bennett), lacked depth as did most of the Seven hired men.

The strong points of the film were initial discovery of each of the characters. But after this, it fell flat. Besides Chisolm, the main characters were:  Faraday as a self-professed great lover and fast drawing gunslinger. Goodnight Robicheaux (Ethan Hawke) and Billy Rocks (Byung-hun Lee) as a team of two who bet on their skills of speed to take people's money. Goodnight, who was formerly a confederate sniper with legendary rifle abilities haunted him. The overall story about his connection with Chisolm is that Chisolm saved Goodnight from self-destruction.

As in kind, Rocks, a foreigner, was being help to interpret the West by Goodnight. Vasquez (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) was the least defined character. Still not sure how or why he joined the group. Red Harvest (Martin Sensmier) was a Comanche Indian that was ousted from his tribe and seemed like he needed something to do.

The most amusing and fun character was Jack Horne (Vincent D’Onofrio) who was a bear mountain man sort of a guy. He was fond of pontificating religious beliefs and sayings all the while being part of the team of seven. The basic story is that these seven men help a small town from a siege by Bogue and his army of killers that have taken over their gold mines.

Washington did what he could do to make this film work, but the lack of a good screenplay and an action only focused director, let him down. Pratt made the most of his character and, although he didn’t seem to care about the lack of story, he made it fun for himself and the audience. Sarsgaard’s role didn’t work for me. He didn’t seem to embody the role from the inside although his actions were rather ruthless. Bennett did what she could to create caring about the town and its hapless citizens. She was one of the stronger characters. Lee was OK and seemed to relish his role as fast with a knife. Garcia-Rulfo did what he could but I didn’t get his particular “role”. Hawke was OK but his fear of killing more people wasn’t developed very well. Sensmier had a strange role in that I never got why he would bother helping this band of white men in their quest. I did like his handling of the Indian character on Bogue’s team as it was inevitable that these two would tangle. D’Onofrio was very engaged in his role. He embraced the nuttiness of this man bear. Richard Wenk and Nic Pizzolatto’s screen play from the famous Akira Kurosawa Seven Samurai screenplay was poorly conceived. It lacked heart and a way for the audience to care. Antoine Fuqua did the action part OK, but everything else was empty – no soul.

Overall:  Don’t bother seeing this version go back to the 1960 version – much better.

Snowden

First Hit:  Oliver Stone is on his game – excellent film about a man who wanted to let us know that the US Government has been spying on us without our permission.

I won’t often get political in film reviews, however, nearly two years ago I saw a film called “Citizenfour” which was a Laura Poitras documentary film about Edward Snowden. I indicated then that I thought everyone needs to see how the US Government could use their existing technology to spy on anyone they wanted to.

This new Stone film uses the filming of the Poitras’ documentary as it’s center point plot device to fill in the picture in a fuller way. Stone tells the story leading up to Snowden (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) making the choice to copy data files from the NSA’s database and share them with the media (Briton’s "The Guardian" newspaper was the first) from his hotel room in Hong Kong. This hotel room is where most of Citizenfour was shot and those events were effectively reproduced here by Stone.

Playing Poitras in Oliver's film was Melissa Leo, “The Guardian” correspondent, Ewen MacAskill, is played by Tom Wilkinson and Zachary Quinto played Snowden’s lawyer Glenn Greenwald. These were the people Snowden entrusted with the absconded data.

The film traces Edward’s path from a young man trying to get into the “Special Forces" because he wanted to do something for his country after 9/11. However, because of his weak and broken leg bones, he receives an Administrative Discharge from the Army. He then interviews with and joins the CIA. After joining the agency, he begins to date Lindsay Mills (Shailene Woodley) who teaches a creative dance, is a photographer and is very liberal.

This relationship is important to Snowden and it is a key to his seeing the everything more openly. The film has to tell a convincing story and, in my book, effectively does so. It provides enough information about how the data collection systems work. It gives you Snowden slowly realizing that what he’s doing, in his mind, is wrong. It gives you the struggle Edward and Lindsay have about his secret work, and how their love helped him make his decisions.

The sets of where Snowden worked were wonderfully constructed and gave the sense of the power behind computer data gathering. And although this film is 134 minutes long, I cannot think of where one scene could be cut to reduce the running time. Yes, this film is weighted towards Snowden’s view of the world and the rightness of the data he collected and distributed. And in my view it needs to push this view because the US Government is one hell of a spying machine and you do not know if you’ve been in their sites.

Gordon-Levitt was a perfect Snowden. And during the end and in the credits, where the real Snowden appears on the screen, you can see why Gordon-Levitt was selected. He not only looks like him, but he got Snowden’s speech pattern down as well. Leo, Wilkinson and Quinto were wonderful as the team supporting Snowden in the Hong Kong hotel room. Woodley was sublime. It was her that created the chemistry that made the relationship and much of the film work. I also appreciated Nicholas Cage as Hank Forrester an older, one-time coder, instructor to Snowden and one who fell out of grace with the CIA and was left to manage their cyber museum. Kieran Fitzgerald and Oliver Stone wrote an effective screenplay which wonderfully bounced from period to period without losing momentum. Stone did a fantastic job of bring this story to life in a way that made it interesting. Scenes were set up beautifully. I suggest that everyone see this film and Poitras’ film "Citizenfour".

Overall:  This was a fully engaging film about someone who has bucked our government and made them think (and blink).

Bridget Jones's Baby

First Hit:  Occasionally funny but generally slow and simply didn’t work.

The very first film of this series, Bridget Jones’s Diary, was fun and it worked in many ways. Being introduced to Bridget Jones (Renee Zellweger), a woman who struggles with her weight, is lonely and falls in love with two men. The second was somewhat more of the same; but by this film, the main thing we’ve dropped from the plot is the weight although there are references to weight in the film.

Another constant in the previous films are her two love interests Mark (Colin Firth) and Daniel (Hugh Grant). However, because Grant dropped out of project, he's referenced in a plot device funeral. Here Bridget is successful at her job as producer of a television program. She is celebrating her 43rd birthday and ends of doing it alone in her apartment. She goes to Daniel's funeral and runs into Mark.

A few days later, her coworker Jude (Shirley Henderson) decides to take Bridget to a rock-in-roll festival where she happens to fall into bed with Jack (Patrick Dempsey) and they have a sexual evening. Running into Mark again at a Christening, she has sex with him as well. Having sex with two different men in a short period of time (within a couple weeks of each other), she becomes pregnant and doesn’t know who the father is. That is the plot of this film.

Jones is pregnant, she’s going to keep the baby, she doesn’t know who the father is, and she may lose her job at work. Generally, this plot has a bit of interest but the execution is mediocre. At the end of the film a newspaper article comes up stating that Daniel is still alive, God I hope this doesn't mean there is another film planned.

Zellweger seemed out of place and unengaged in the part. Dempsey seemed to put the most energy into his part although there didn’t seem to be chemistry between him and Zellweger. Firth did well by keeping his stogy, disengaged self in tack. Henderson was delightful and carried her scenes well. Jim Broadbent as Bridget’s dad was his wonderful self and Gemma Jones as Bridget’s mum was good. Emma Thompson co-wrote and also played Bridget’s physician in a wry manner. The other co-writers were Dan Mazer and Helen Fielding. Overall the script was not very strong because it was more rehashed material, although the overall story idea could have been interesting. However, this film is too long and falls apart because of less than engaged acting and lapses of interesting direction by Sharon Maguire. For instance, the scenes of Mark and Jack carrying Jones to the hospital weren’t funny and could have been cut.

Overall:  Despite some funny moments, this film didn’t work and wasn’t worth the price of admission.