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Life at the Movies

Polynesian myth comes to life in the Walt Disney computer animation Moana (2016) with the daughter of the village chief in the thick of it. Moana (Auli’i Cravalho) is the village chief’s daughter who has been told, along with the other villagers, that they have never been explorers. This message, however false, keeps the islanders…

Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol (2011) layers in a sobering sense of how the IMF spy agency is blamed for an explosion at the Kremlin. Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and the IMF analyst are talking about the explosion in a rail-yard. Did this really happen, they ask? They can’t believe they are to blame. IMF didn’t…

British adventurer and idealist Denys Finch Hatton says, in Out of Africa (1985), we’re all passing through. As people pass through life, they have various experiences. In Out of Africa life is a mixed blessing for business woman and storyteller Karen Blixen (Meryl Streep). Though this Danish woman runs a successful coffee plantation in Kenya,…

Star Wars is back, or has been back. Rogue One (2016) now on DVD is a Star Wars story. It is famous already as the story-line that featured in the opening scroll of A New Hope in 1977. A small band of Rebels steal the secret plans to the Empire’s “sinister weapon” the Death Star.…

We live in a world of extremes. This is apparent in Man on Wire (2008) a documentary about Phillippe Petit’s astronomical feat in crossing the twin towers on a high wire Phillippe and his team hoisted between the towers. This documentary came before 2015’s The Walk, a thriller cum dramatization of the event and Phillippe’s…

Will Sacks, in Annie, learns to face a problem he has. As he does, he’s edging towards a new direction. Maybe people don’t like to face problems. It’s more comfortable and easy to avoid. I’d rather listen to a song then perhaps realize I better look into something. Sometimes, problems take years to confront, especially…

Hacksaw Ridge (2016) is a World War II drama of two halves. The first half is Desmond Doss’ life before war—his love story with Dorothy (Teresa Palmer) and his family background—the second half a bloody recreation of the Battle at Okinawa. Soldiers facing fighting, violence, combat; the war scenes in Hacksaw Ridge are about facing…

Triggers to happiness, in Trolls (2016), are music, hugs, love, friendship, community and positivity. And parties. It’s not that the trolls are born happy. They would sooner be happy than not. So they turn on the parties, turn up the music, hug every hour, and have meaningful friendships, and they love each other in a…

The Expendables 4 is “in development”, with a release expected next year. The original The Expendables (2010) is about a group of mercenaries bringing down a dictator. It has well-staged action, that’s—in the final act—extremely violent and off putting to some degree. As the mercenaries, the “old guys” and some young ones are one of…

Over the weekend, the science fiction thriller Life arrived to theaters. It is about the kind of thing that has been on the screen before. The whole threat from outer space has its comparisons with any number of similar films such as Anaconda twenty years ago. Anaconda (1997) starred Jennifer Lopez, Ice Cube, Eric Stoltz,…
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