Dark Money

First Hit: A fantastic view of how the Supreme Court’s Citizens United VS F.E.C. decision changed the course of politics to; whomever has the most money behind them wins.

This film uses the State of Montana’s experience with corporations taking control of the government to make its point.

In the early 1900’s Montana was the epicenter for copper production in the United States. Anaconda Copper company started excavating the beginning of the worlds largest open mine pit which also turned into one of worst environmental calamities in the world. As this pit grew, money was made, and the interests of the company started butting up against the people of Montana who wanted to be safe from the poisoned mine pit. To keep control large sums of money was used to bribe government officials to look past the destruction of the communities affected by the mines. Soon, Montana’s government was controlled by mining companies.

The citizens revolted and wrote the strongest legislation possible against this sort of government control by corporations and their money. Other states followed because citizens everywhere were getting the short end of the stick through corporation abuse of legislation that supported their profits.

This film follows John S. Adams investigative reporting through modern day events in Montana where the Koch brothers and others like them are attempting to control local and state government agendas by having candidates who meet their criteria, sign up for their campaign programs, and vote the way the financiers want. All these events are the result on the Supreme Court decision to allow, for profit, not for profit, and other groups and corporations to donate money and resources to political elections.

To me the irony of this is that the “Citizens United” name sort of implies individual citizens, it doesn’t it is about wealthy groups of individuals and companies to control government for their monetary gains.

My favorite part of the film was watching State Senator Art Wittich R-Bozeman stand on the Montana Senate floor threatening other senators who want to create a law to restrict corporate campaign donations by saying “the worm will turn.” What happens is that he gets convicted for illegal contributions. I couldn't help but think the worm did turn.

Kimberly Reed and Jay Arthur Sterrenberg wrote a powerful story and Reed’s direction was fantastic by bringing the past and present together to show why we’ve not learned well enough from our past mistakes.

Overall: This was a powerful film about how corruption by money is killing a true democracy.

Mission: Impossible - Fallout

First Hit: Holds tension and action throughout, however it is long and we all know the ending.

I’ve said this many a time, what I like about Tom Cruise (here as IMF Agent Ethan Hunt) is that he’s always all in for the characters he chooses. As Ethan Hunt he’s one with the role. What is always disappointing is that we always know how the film is going to end. For instance, my previous review of the film Blindspotting, I had no idea how the movie would end, that’s what partly made it great. Watching Mission, I know that Hunt is going to save the day in the nick of time and he doesn't fail.

Despite that, this film is action packed from the very beginning and creates tension by delivering on some hair-raising predicaments and stunts. One of the nice touches was how the film began. Playing the Mission: Impossible theme music, it showed brief pictures of was to come, just like the television show use to do. The cast is solid, especially Hunts team of Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) and Benjamin “Benji” Dunn (Simon Pegg). Their chemistry of working together on previous Mission films makes the impossible missions more possible and believable to the audience – they are pros.

The plot has Hunt attempting to obtain three plutonium devices that are on the black market. The US Government want to keep them out of the hands of terrorists. Hunt makes the choice to save the life of Luther over obtaining the devices.

Solomon Lane (Sean Harris), who Hunt previously captured and put into prison, is attempting to obtain the devices through surrogates. He wants to use the devices to make a point that the world must suffer greatly if it is to get better. His former organization, The Apostles, want the weapons as well.

One of the plot devices is to have CIA agent August Walker (Henry Cavill) join the team to protect the CIA’s interest in IMF’s plot to re-obtain the devices. Walker is directly under CIA Director Erica Stone (Angela Bassett). The twist is that Walker is also playing John Lark who is an enemy of the CIA and IMF.

Hunt and his team are under the direction of former CIA Director Alan Hunley (Alec Baldwin) who now leads the IMF task force. The film shows the tension between the CIA and IMF because the CIA doubts that the IMF can get the job done.

Another twist to this plot is the MI6 agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) who has to redeem herself to her organization, therefore she must also obtain the plutonium devices.

Lastly, trying to broker a sale of the devices the story has the White Widow (Vanessa Kirby). I'm not totally sure why this part was needed but it worked.

What the film has is a number of different groups trying to get control of;  the plutonium, a captured prisoner, or Hunt.

There are plenty of gun battle scenes, lots of chases (cars, motorcycles, running, and helicopter), and plenty of costume changes that the Mission: Impossible team is noted for. Everything is done very well, and the cliff hanging scene is simply a great cliffhanger. Lastly, one of the highlights for me was the different ways the theme song was used throughout the film.

Cruise always puts everything into his action roles. He can be funny, self-effacing, and believable all at the same time. Cavill is good as the agent with dual identity. Rhames is fantastic as part of the IMF team. He shows smarts, affability, and is fully believable in his role. Pegg is spot on as the one always questioning whether a plan Hunt has devised will work or not. In the end, he does his part and is often the one who figures things out. Ferguson is excellent as one of two women Hunt admires and loves. As an agent of MI6 she’s excellent. Harris is good as the slightly off-base mastermind who wants to teach the world a lesson or two. Bassett is good as the CIA Director that is elusive about her commitment to the IMF team. Baldwin was very good as Hunt’s immediate boss. Kirby was good as the White Widow, but I found it difficult to buy into why she held so much sway. Michelle Monaghan was excellent as Hunt’s former wife who is in jeopardy at the end of the film. Christopher McQuarrie wrote and directed this adventure with complete idea of what he wanted and with a knowing how to build tension to the end.

Overall: This was a fun filled film although it was a bit long.

Blindspotting

First Hit: Extremely powerful and pointed film and raises the bar for Best Picture of the Year.

Opening the film, is a sequence of short video shots of Oakland. Among the short montage of clips are the Fox Theater, Oakland homes, jump roping, Whole Foods, and a shoving match between two women on BART. Each of these are perfectly brief and set the stage for the racially tense film to come.

Collin (Daveed Diggs) is living in a probation facility and he’s got just a few days to go before he’s free. He came out of Santa Rita prison for something, we find out later, was a horrible fight outside a bar.

He’s working for a moving company with his lifelong friend and troublemaker Miles (Rafael Casal). Miles has a hair trigger and lashes out from time to time. As a racially mixed friendship, they have each other’s back and have had their fair share of run-ins together.

One of the early opening scenes, they are sitting in a very tricked out car, smoking weed, while Collin laments that he’s only few days away from being free of his court mandated probation. When Miles finds a pistol between the seats he brandishes it about, Collin gets upset and asks Miles to keep it away from him.

What does Miles do? He finds more guns in the car, playfully holds them up, and buys one. Collin, although upset, just asks Miles to not let me see or know that he has the gun on him while they work or hang out together. The way this scene unfolds is both pointed and funny.

Miles lives with Ashley (Jasmine Cephas Jones) and they have a son Sean (Ziggy Baitinger). Collin picks Miles up for work the moving truck. Because Collin is on probation he uses the truck to get home and to work. Arriving at the moving company's office to punch the time-clock, you can tell that Collin and Val (Janina Gavankar), the front desk receptionist and dispatcher, have some history together. It is obvious that she’s called off the relationship by the way they interact.

After dropping Miles off at home one night, Collin is waiting for the light to turn green when all of a sudden, a black man appears in front of his truck, looks at Collin, and continues to run. An Oakland policeman soon follows and when the policeman is adjacent to the truck’s door, he fires four shots and kills the running man. The policeman turns and looks directly at Collin.

This scene and image haunts Collin throughout the film. From this point on, the ominous tone of guns, racially charged words, social-economic and cultural differences begin to shape this film. The gun Miles owns plays a prominent role in two incredibly powerful scenes, as does their friendship and how it is tested. Collin wants to clean up his act, but racial tensions that build in the community because of the shooting, the have and have nots, and what he's going to do next once he's off probation makes his path difficult to master.

The term "Blindspotting" is explained in a very moving scene with Val and Collin and it’s usage is one I will not forget as it points out something we all do.

Diggs is sublime. The range of emotions and actions he shows as Collin are engaging and powerful. Casal as Miles was amazing. He’s powerfully rowdy but when Ashley reaches out to him about a particular incident, his compassion and love is amazingly evident. Gavankar is wonderful as Collin’s former girlfriend and truck dispatcher. She holds true to her beliefs and is a powerful force in Collin’s life. Jones was wildly wonderful. Her clarity of boundaries was perfectly expressed. Baitinger was great as Miles and Ashley's young boy. Ethan Embry as the Oakland Police Officer who shoots the running black man is incredibly engaging in both his scenes; the shooting and in his confrontation with Collin. Tisha Campbell-Martin as Mama Liz, Collin’s mother, is a scene stealer. Casal and Diggs wrote this insightful engagingly powerful script. Carlos Lopez Estrada directed this story with amazingly deft hands. He totally captured the feel of this powerful story.

Overall: Because this film is so powerful it must be considered one of my favorites as film of the year.

Unfriended: Dark Web

First Hit: This was an interesting and reasonably solid attempt to use the world of personal technology as the vehicle to create fear and horror.

A group of friends gather weekly at one home or online to play games. In this group we’ve got Matias (Colin Woodell), Serena and Nari together (Rebecca Rittenhouse and Betty Gabriel respectively), Dj Lexx (Savira Windyani), Aj (Connor Del Rio), and Damon (Andrew Lees). When the film begins they are gathering together online using a facetime app.

Matias is also attempting to create a program that will allow him and his deaf girlfriend Amaya (Stephanie Nogueras) to communicate better. He’s hoping that his speaking will end up as printed words on her screen. However, he’s done nothing to help her communicate with him. This frustrates Amaya. While he's online with his group, he's also attempting to communicate with Amaya.

To help him with the program he's trying to create, he’s picked up a newer computer that was left at a coffee shop. Using this computer, he runs out of space for his program and his buddies guide him to explore the hard disk and delete some files. In doing so he finds some very disturbing files.

In the meantime the group is connected and deciding what game to play together on facetime.

As a movie watcher you think you’re looking at this film from the viewpoint of Matias, but in the end you learn differently.

The lifted computer he's working with really belongs to someone who exploits the dark web. And unbeknownst to the group, they are being watched and played themselves in a game that is about life and death.

I was fascinated by the quick alternating points of view Matias was taking when he becomes engaged with juggling the group facetime, a separate facetime with his girlfriend Amaya, and with Charon IV whose computer he’s taken.

Woodell was sufficiently paranoid and taken aback when he gets caught by his friends for lying and leading them into this path of horror and death. Rittenhouse was wonderful as the young woman flush with excitement to be engaged to Nari. Gabriel was perfect in her anxiousness towards the events as they were unfolding. Windyani was strong as the independent woman doing her own thing. Del Rio was good as the young man still living at home and wanting to strike out on his own. Lees was very good as the computer geek of the group that they all looked towards for technical guidance. Stephen Susco wrote and directed this ambitious story and script. I was torn between being caught in the story and fascinated by how the story was presented.

Overall: This film is and will not be everyone’s cup of tea, however aspects of how easily people fall into electronic set traps was fascinating to me.

Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far On Foot

First Hit: A unhurried film revealing the power of how forgiveness of others and self, can make one’s life different.

Many of us know of people who have struggled and paid prices by their addiction to alcohol. Here we get a glimpse into the life of cartoonist John Callahan (Joaquin Phoenix). As an orphan he struggled early with his own identity and reconciling his life. He claimed he knew “three things about my mom; she was Irish, had red hair, and she was a school teacher. Oh, yeah, and she didn’t want me. I guess that makes four things.”

He was molested at age eight by a school teacher and began drinking by age twelve. He claims that the last day he walked, he woke up with a hangover.

The film spends a fair amount of time showing the audience how blatantly he liked his drinking. One scene that exemplifies his cluelessness to his drinking is when he’s walking along a beach, he spies a beautiful young woman surfer. He tries a pickup line from a song, offers her a drink from the bottle he’s got in his pocket, and her look of polite disgust, says it all.

The film follows his journey of drinking and when he meets Dexter (Jack Black), the two magnificent partier’s have a wild night of drinking. It finally ends with Dexter driving John’s car, having an accident, leaving John a quadriplegic, and Dexter walks away with a few scratches.

As you might imagine, he’s angry at his predicament and takes it out on a number of people who are attempting to help him. However, one person who comes to help him weekly was Annu (Rooney Mara). She’s assists people who have a physical handicap. The way she enters the scene, she’s angelic and that’s exactly how John sees her.

One of the people he needs for support and whom he also antagonistic towards, is Suzanne (Carrie Brownstein) who oversees monitoring social, services expenses to keep him in an apartment, with wheelchairs, and covering medical costs including Tim (Tony Greenhand) who takes care of John. Tim’s job is to wash John, do his grocery shopping and clean his house.

Eventually, John finds himself going to an AA meeting, but he doesn’t speak much. Eventually he gets a sponsor named Donnie (Jonah Hill). Donnie is rich, gay, and calls the people he sponsors “piglets.”

He begins to draw crudely renditioned cartoons using his two handicapped hands pressed together to hold the pen. They are very funny because they are extremely poignant and targeted. One that I easily recall from the film shows two men in sheets (as KKK people), talking to each other, and one says, “Don’t you love it when they’re still warm from the dryer?” Another caption is the title to this film, where a small band of cowboys are in the desert find an empty wheelchair and the lead cowboy says “(see movie title)”

The group he sponsors are wildly honest and engaging to watch while they work out their stuff in front of one another.

When Donnie tells John to work on AA's Step 9, which is about making amends, he begins to see the power of forgiveness.

Phoenix was powerful in his portrayal of Callahan. He definitely shared a depth of pain in never thinking his mother wanted him. Black was perfect as his alcoholic friend. The scene when John comes to make amends is with Dexter was extremely well done. Mara was fantastic as a woman who always looked passed John’s handicaps and appreciated him for him. Brownstein was excellent as the caring yet restricted by policy social worker. Greenhand did a great job as the caretaker. Hill was amazing as the AA sponsor and friend. John Callahan wrote a pointed and direct script. Gus Van Sant directed this thoughtful film.

Overall: This probably isn’t everyone’s kind of film, but as the ending began to reveal itself, I loved the theme of forgiveness.