Zero Dark Thirty

A few minutes after I left the theater I became aware my jaw was sore.  At first I didn't know why, then I realized I had been clenching my teeth for nearly the duration of the movie, Zero Dark Thirty, director Kathryn Bigelow's taut and riveting account of the hunt for Osama bin Laden.  The amazing part of my jaw soreness, is that while there is action to be had, in particular the assault on bin Laden's compound, most of the movie takes place in drab CIA offices or dingy CIA prison cells, or "Black Sites."

Zero Dark Thirty, unsurprisingly I suppose, has generated quite a bit of controversy over the scenes that take place in those far off secret prisons.  Namely, torture generally; waterboarding specifically.  The movie does not shy away from showing the "enhanced interrogation techniques" in action.  As anyone who has even accidentally watched the news in the last 10 years should know, the debate over the use of these methods has been spirited to say the least.  The movies portrayal of CIA operatives using torture to extract intelligence that eventually lead to discovering bin Laden's hideout is disputed by such disparate senatorial luminaries as John McCane and Diane Feinstein.  The official US government line is that waterboarding and it's equally unpleasant cousins were not used in the search for bin Laden...or at least did not result in useful intel.  However, Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal have stuck to their guns and insist that they based their screenplay on actual first person accounts of the events.  So, who knows I guess.  Regardless of where you stand on the issue, to say the torture scenes are uncomfortable is putting it mildly.

But, fortunately, there is much more to the movie than just that.  Jessica Chastain is a young CIA operative named Maya who we meet in 2003 when she arrives in Pakistan.  She is part of the group responsible for following leads on the whereabouts of bin Laden.  She seems in over her head at first, even frail, but quickly shows a steely will behind her delicate, porcelain facade.  She believes if they can find bin Laden's courier, he will eventually lead them to the Osama.  The process is agonizingly tedious; as leads dry up or hit dead ends the years drag on and for Maya's bosses, finding bin Laden becomes more and more of a secondary, or even lower, priority.  But Maya doggedly, and irritatingly to her superiors, refuses to give up.

In the same way Lincoln--a movie whose only other similarity is that it chronicles an important chapter of American History--excels at making a bunch of conversations about government a fascinating thing to watch, so does Zero Dark Thirty with conversations about intelligence.  I'll grant that not everyone is going to enjoy that; it can be very technical and jargony.  Some may find themselves scratching their heads at terms like "op sec" and "tradecraft."  But the pace is hardly plodding, and we zip through the years of the hunt at a breakneck pace.  As I alluded to at the beginning, this will be considered an action movie by some, but there is not as much shoot 'em up action as you might expect.  Despite that, the movie never relaxes and I was always anticipating something happening...in a good way.  Whether it was a suicide bombing, a shootout, or a new nugget of intel coming in.  Who knew a conference room could be so intense?

This is due in no small part to the great perfromances from the supporting cast.  Chastain is really the only main character and is terrific, but the others are very good as well.  Kyle Chandler, Jennifer Ehle, and Jason Clark all turn in excellent performances as fellow CIA staffers.

When the real action finally does begin, it's fantastic.  Of course, this is the raid on bin Laden's hideaway.  It's an incredible set piece, with Navy SEALs slicing through the shadows with surgical precision.  A lot of it is shown from their POV through night vision goggles and there is no soundtrack other than the scuffle of boots on the ground, pinpoint machine gunfire, and their communications.  It's gripping despite the known outcome.

It's not a perfect movie, and one does wonder about how factual it actually is, essentially making the case that a single CIA operative was the driving force in pushing the hunt for bin Laden forward for over a decade.  But it is a movie after all, not an historical record, and it's strengths more then outweigh it's weaknesses.

Die Hard

Mostly for reasons explained elsewhere I missed out on a lot of the 80's and early 90's era action movies. I have since made up for lost time, checking many if the "classics" off my list: Terminator 1 & 2, Rambo, Predator, Commando, Big Trouble in Little China, Lethal Weapon, etc. (To this day I've still never seen a Jean Claude van Damme movie, but somehow I don't think I'm missing much there.). Their was a gap in my catalog, though, a gaping one. I had never seen a Die Hard movie. This wasn't intentional, it was just one of those things. Recently, I finally had my chance,or so I thought.

I few months ago I DVR'd Die Hard off of HBO, along with several hours of other movies my wife had no interest in watching. In an effort to free up some space for some TV shows based on fairy tails or something, my wife decided to erase some of my movies. Being the considerate woman that she is, even when erasing my unwatched movies, she made an effort to erase the most likely to have already been seen.  When I returned home one night to find Die Hard missing I was incredulous.

"Why did you erase Die Hard?!"
"I needed the space and it was the oldest one.  What's the big deal, you've seen Die Hard before."
"No I haven't!"
"Really?"
"No."
"Really??"

When even your wife is shocked to learn you've never seen Die Hard--and she has!--it's time to take matters into your hands to rightfully reclaim your man card.  Once word got out to a few of my buddies, it became our collective mission to get me to the Greek, so to speak.  And no, I haven't seen that movie either, fortunately.

So, on Monday three of my buddies, (all Critical Errors contributors) Peter, Rhett, and Josh came over to join me on my maiden viewing.  If only I had known what I was missing!

Die Hard may be the best action movie in the long and storied history action movies.  I type that without an iota of irony in my meaning.  It is seriously great.

Being most likely the last man standing not to have seen it, I'll skip an indepth rehash of the plot.  To put it into a couple of sentences, Bruce Willis stars as NYPD cop John McClane who is in LA to try to patch things up with his estranged wife, a big wig at a multi-national corporation.  While visiting her at her company Christmas party in a high-rise office building, terrorists lead by Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) take over the building; action-comedy thrill ride ensues.

That's one of the things that makes it work.  The plot is simple, not surprising for an action movie, but also reasonably plausible.  No, in real life McClane is unlikely to survive the ordeal and no one's finger tips are that strong, but director John McTiernan does a great job of pushing the action envelope of plausibility to the very limits without somehow ripping it clean open.  Make no mistake, he comes very close to shredding the envelope into a thousand tiny pieces, but doesn't quite get there.  Not only is the action plausible, but holds up remarkably well for a 25 year old movie.  Yes, you read that right.  Die Hard is 25 years old!  But other than the costumes, cars, and maybe a couple other minor details, Die Hard may as well have been made last month.  No small feat when you consider the high-tech special effects we all take for granted these days.

Another strength are the two leads, Bruce Willis and Alan Rickman.  The screenplay blesses both with some really great things to say, and they both say them with appropriate zeal.  Willis as the wry, streetwise cop cracking wise and Rickman as a smart smooth talking German with a dry wit of a Brit.  Any action movie worth it's weight in C4 explosive needs a few memorable one-liners and it's like Willis and Rickman were in a contest of who could deliver the most and the best one.  Tough call, but Rickman's dead pan, "I read about them in Time magazine," might be my favorite line in the movie.  It's probably a better line in context.  Are there some cheeseball lines in there?  Heck yes!  But, again...action movie.

There is one glaring weakness, however, and it nearly kills the momentum about halfway through.  After LAPD beat sergeant Al Powell, played by who children of the '90's will recognize as Carl Winslow from Family Matters Reginald VelJohnson, is tipped off by McClane that terrorist have taken hostages (by dropping a dead terrorist onto the hood of his squad car--brilliant), Powell calls in the cavalry, the rest of LAPD.  While VelJohnson is fine as the lifeline to McClane over the radio, the weakness is Paul Gleason as Deputy Chief of Police Dwayne T. Robinson.  It's not Gleason's fault really.  Robinson is written like the biggest twit in law enforcement.  He's a boorish idiot and it really doesn't serve the plot in any meaningful way for him to be so.  It comes off as lazy to have the suit-wearing-desk-jockey-cop-in-charge be an utter moron, but fortunately after his initial appearance he only shows up in small doses for the rest of the movie.  The movie has so much going for it that he doesn't ruin everything, but it definitely went off the rails for a bit.

Fortunately, it finishes strong.

Bottom line, I had a blast--pun intended--watching it with my buddies and is one of the most enjoyable action movies I've ever seen.  The experience was definitely enhanced by watching it with a bunch of guys cracking one-liners of their own and remembering the big moments and telling me,"Dude, this next part is awesome!"  But it's not crazy to say it's the best ever, in 1988 or 2018.  Yippe kay yay....well, you know the rest.

TV Extravaganza: 30 Rock, The Americans, Parenthood

Well, my last post went over like a lead balloon.  Apparently not a lot of 1980's game show enthusiasts trolling my corner of the web or among my loyal fans.  Oh well, I enjoyed the walk down whammy lane.

Moving on.

Let's talk TV.  Three things:

1.  Yesterday was the series finale of 30 Rock.  To which I can only say, blerg.  My wife and I have been fans of Tina Fey's brainchild since the beginning, thanks to Jenna Fischer--no, really (thank you MySpace)--and it has been one fun ride.  No show could match 30 Rock's jokes-per-minute pace, save for maybe Arrested Developement but the cats at TGS are the champs by volume (thanks to AD's tragically short run).  There have been so many great gags and throw-away lines over it's seven seasons that it's immently rewatchable.  I love watching old episodes and culling out new one-liners for every occasions.  I'd love to have the comedic mind-grapes of Tina Fey and her slew of writers.

Besides the terrific jokes, what made 30 Rock unique was there was never any of that cliche' staple of the sitcom of the two leads of opposite sex ever hooking up.  Fey's frazzeled and trying-to-have-it-all Liz Lemon and Alec Baldwin's Vice President of East Coast Televison and Microwave Progarmming Jack Donaghy were close plutonically, rare in TV shows, and well, life, I guess.  But as weird and unlikely buddies, Fey, the liberal "artist" with a degree in Theater Tech and an unhealthy relationship with ham, and Baldwin, as the conservative corporate raider with mommy issues and a perfect head suit, had more on screen chemistry than most TV "couples."

Liz Lemon and Jack Donaghy are two of the greatest television characters ever.  There supporing cast was pretty great too.  Tracy Morgan's Tracy Jordan is the hilarious amalgem of every crazy celebrity to grace the headlines of TMZ, and Morgan is alarmingly natural in the role.  Jenna Maroney, played by Jane Krakowski, is equally insane, never growing out of the paranoid insecurity of a second-rate child star from Florida.  Results were mixed with Jenna, but still solid comedic chops from Krakowski.  The ancillary characters were great too:  applefaced goon and possibly immortal Kenneth the page, balding submits-to-dominant-exercise-dummies Pete, Twofer, Frank, and even Lutz.

Though comedy was obviously king, 30 Rock had no shortage of heart and was adept at pulling it off without being cloying or precious.  The end of the penultimate episode is the perfect example, a heartwarming final moment that is still funny and so 30 Rock.

I will miss Liz and Jack and the rest of the TGS gang.

2.  Watched the pilot for the new FX show The Americans.  Pretty great.  It stars Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys as Elizabeth and Philip Jennings, Soviet spies living as a married American couple in early 1980's Washington, DC.  When I first heard about this show I was very excited, as I love Cold War era spy stuff, but I was concerned with the casting of Keri Russell.  I haven't seen her in much, I was never a Felicity watcher, but the with few times I'd seen her in something and her cutsie look, I wasn't sure if she had the gravitas to play a ruthless KGB operative.  Uh, wrong.  She's like Shaft; a bad motha--shut your mouth!  Granted, it's only been one episode, but she is ruthless and intense.  Rhys is more than solid as well, but as the softer touch of the two.  It's a pretty clever plan by the producers, to make the husband the half of the spy couple who seems more enticed by the American way of life.

From the looks of the pilot, the series will feature plenty of action, some intense old school cloak-and-dagger stuff, the mental toll of duty to county and possiblity of the good life as a defector, the moral ambiguity of the espionage game on both sides, not to mention the equally ambiguous nature of a family life built on a lie.  The couple has two pre-teen kids who don't know what their parents really are and at times it appears Elizabeth and Philip aren't really sure who or what they are either.

It was a great opening to the series and I'm looking forward to more.

3.  The wife and I finally started watching Parenthood the other night.  Not the Ron Howard directed movie, but the Ron Howard produced TV show.  We had watched the first couple episodes a couple years ago and really enjoyed it, but for some reason never followed up with it.  Inspired by a Grantland article encouraging binge watching it, we gave it nother go and ended up mini-binging the first four episodes in one shot.

Couldn't be more different than The Americans, or Breaking Bad  or Mad Men or the host of other acclaimed TV dramas of the past several years.  And I think that's why I like it.  While I do love many of those shows, they're all pretty dark and heavy, so it's nice to have a drama that is a little more lighthearted and a lot more relatable.  Not that Parenthood is all giggles and smiles, like any real family the Braverman's have real family problems, and the show has gotten a repuation as an eye-wetter, but tonally it is much different from any of those other shows.  Sometimes something good happens!  And very few people die or get their feet run over by riding lawnmowers.

The performances feel authentic.  Peter Krause, Monica Potter, Craig T. Nelson, Dax Shepherd, Lauren Graham, and the rest of the cast are all great.  They seem like they might actually be a real family.

It's a family drama that rings true as it warms the heart and wets the eyes.  Looking forward to binge watching some more soon.

5 Things That Make Press Your Luck the Best 1980's Game Show

Taking a little break from our Year in Reviews 2012:  Movies Edition series to pay homage to that staple of 1980's day time TV:  the game show.  Specifically, one of my personal favorites, the ridiculous and whammirific Press Your Luck!  The Price is Right is the indisputable king of daytime TV game shows--synergistic fact, Rod Roddy was the announcer for both The Price is Right and Press Your Luck--a title I certainly will not contradict here.  But thanks to the magic of reruns and the geniuses of programming at the Game Show Network (GSN), here are five things that make Press Your Luck the best 1980's game show.

1.  1980's Contestants

I loved Press Your Luck as a kid during it's three year run from 1983 to 1986.  But it is immeasurably more entertaining looking back through our retro spyglass.  I was but a small child in the '80's so my perspective is a bit hazy, so a question to all you older folks:  was everyone just ugly and/or awkward looking during the Reagan years?  It's not just the bad haircuts, earth tone blazers, novelty sized eyeglasses, bushy mustaches, or in some cases all of the above.  You don't have to look too hard at your nearest hipster hangout to see a lot of "fashion" of the era has come back, and with a vengeance.  So it's not just the style, but the people themselves.  Everyone either appears to be a giant dork or a hayseed.  This was long before the reality TV era, where everyone and their uncle's cat thinks they can and should be on TV.  You can see a noticeable difference in the sensibilities of the eras.  I'm sure the producers told the contestants to act excited and whatnot, and you can see that their trying so hard.  But John and Jane Q 1980's were, generally, just not ready for the spotlight.  On a recently viewed episode, one of the female contestants, Bea, was so nervous on camera she could barely even speak!  Sort of an important aspect of game show contestanting.  Can you imagine such a thing on today's game shows, like Minute to Win It or Who Wants to be a Millionaire?  It's the exact opposite.  With the exceptions of Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune, and the Price is Right--all hold overs from the golden age of game shows mind  you--contestants on today's shows never shut up.  Before each question or challenge we're subjected to some inane reasoning for their answer or an obnoxious soliloquy about how when they're grandmother used to bake apple cobbler she always made sure to grease the pan with genuine hog lard and that memory gave the contestant the insight needed to complete the challenge in record time.  Or something equally stupid.  Yes, even Press Your Luck had it's share of blowhards, but they were much fewer and further between.  So, awkward and ill-dressed as they are, give me the unassuming not ready for prime time game show contestant of the '80's any day over today's fame seeking blabbermouth.

2.  Terrible Prizes

If you're not familiar with Press Your Luck here's how it worked.  It featured three contestants who would buzz in to answer a series of trivia questions to win "spins."  Their were two rounds of questions, and after each round contestants would get a chance to use their spins on the "Big Board."  The Big Board features many squares displaying dollar values or fabulous prizes.  And of course, the whammies (more on those later).  A lighted border would flash around the various squares and when a player would hit their buzzer and yell "STOP!" one square would remain lit, netting the contestant either a whammy, cash, or fabulous prize.  Except many of the prizes were far from fabulous.

Examples:

• A water conditioner - Huh.  A really nice, practical prize, I'm sure.  But maybe the most unexciting prize ever.  Wouldn't you have to live somewhere with the most mineral enriched water ever to truly appreciate a game show water conditioner?  As in, your faucet is basically dispensing rocks?
• A graphic - To this day I'm still not sure what this is.  The prize tile simply read "Graphic" and had a poor representation of American Gothic displayed on it.  I'm guessing it's art of some kind?  Why wouldn't you just say that?  Art.  Doesn't that sound better than Graphic?  Am I getting a decal to stick on the side of my car?  Or a single graphic on a floppy disc to display on my Tandy?  This still boggles my mind--way more than it should.
• A Jog 'n Tramp - Um, we actually had one of these.  Pretty fun as a little kid.  Pretty awful as a game show prize.
• A silver service - Great, something to collect dust in my china cabinet.  Has anyone ever actually used one of these sets to serve tea?
• A trip to Concord, CA - So........I.......wha......I just.........huh.  Concord.
• Silver gifts - What's with all the silver stuff?  Who's picking the prizes, Paul Revere?  And what exactly are silver gifts?  Is this a sneaky way of unloading the leftover silver services from the warehouse?  Is it a pocket watch, a paperweight, just a solid bar of silver?  These are questions that need answers.
• Catamaran - This is my personal favorite.  It's the epitome of impractical game show prizes.  Sure, it might be fun on the open water, the wind in your face and sea mist in your hair.  Too bad it's going to spend the next decade taking up room in your garage or costing you money at a self storage facility.

3.  Horrible production values

Compared to the high-tech, slick TV programming we have today, a lot of vintage TV looks pretty creaky.  Bad sound, fuzzy pictures, cheesy graphics and special effects are not the fault of the era.  They were doing the best they could with what they had.  But even amongst its contemporaries, Press Your Luck was pretty bad.  On more than one occasion I've seen cue card holders and stage hands clearly in the frame.  It's not like this was a live broadcast.  Couldn't they have re-shot those sequences.  Other times I've noticed people just sort of milling around behind the set, their silhouettes clearly visible behind the host.  When the contestants would hit their buzzers to answer the trivia questions, it sounds like you or way slapping our dining room table.  Presumably, the buzzers were not active until the host finished reading the question and only then would they actually buzz when struck.  But contestants were always trying to buzz in early, so there was always cacophony of table slapping to accompany the questions.  It just really hurt the overall professionalism of the show.  No, really.  Also, sometimes the tiles on the Big Board wouldn't light up and you'd just have empty spaces.  Or pieces of the set literally falling apart on camera.  I guess that's what separates the greats from the rest.  Can you ever remember Plinko on the Price is Right not working correctly, or some stage hand loitering just behind Alex Trebek?  I didn't think so.

4  Host Peter Tomarken

Do people aspire to be game show hosts, I wonder?  Well, if Peter Tomarken ever did he certainly found his calling.  The perfect blend of smarm and charm, he was actually kinda funny and appeared to have a good time ribbing the contestants.  Always with a smile that seemed genuine, he signed on with, "Welcome to Press Your Luck, the game where you can win a bundle or lose your shirt," and always signed off with a goofy little poem about whammies.  They were always terrible.  At one point they were sent in from viewers at home (allegedly).  Who would actually take the time and then spend the stamp to sent it in.  But as game show hosts go, he was pretty good.  Not as dignified as Trebek or Barker, not as creepy as Richard Dawson or Wink Martindale after too many plastic surgeries, it's a shame he never did much of note after Press Your Luck.

5.  The Whammies

As mentioned earlier. other cash and prizes, whammies also resided on the Big Board.  If you hit a whammy, a devilish looking little cartoon creature that bore a resemblance to the Tasmanian Devil wearing a cape, you lost all your money and prizes.  Get four whammies in a game and your disqualified.  As a kid I loved the whammies.  When a player got one a little cartoon whammy would appear next to the players money total, manically laughing and erasing their winnings with a lawnmower, WWI era fighter plane, or by moonwalking across them (this was the 80's after all), or other such silliness.  It's a ridiculous gimmick that fans of the show love and haters hate.  Because that's what they do; haters gonna hate.

Bonus Reason:

In 1984 was embroiled in something of a scandal when contestant Michael Larson won over $110,000 utilizing 47 spins in one game, both a record by far.  The game actually had to be split between two episodes.  Believing Larson must have cheated, CBS initially refused to give him his winnings.  However, they could never prove it.  Larson had learned the pattern of the flashing lights and timed his buzzes accordingly.  His run is available on YouTube and is pretty fun to watch.  You can almost hear the producers' brains exploding.  Tragically, Larson lost all his money in bad business deals and died in 1999 of throat cancer.  He was only 50 when he died, though he looks like he was pushing 65 at the time of his winnings in 1984.  People just looked older back in the olden days I guess.

Here's Larson's record-breaking run:

Year in Reviews 2012: Movie Edition - Part 3

Blogger's Note:  Be sure to check out parts One and Two, if you missed  them.  You know you want to.

In our last installment we recapped Tree of Life, The Old Man and the Sea, Gone with the Wind, The Dust Bowl, and Red Tails.  What wonders will this edition bestow!

Midnight In Paris (2011 - Woody Allen) - Other than this one, I think I've only seen two other Woody Allen movies from start to finish, the mildly amusing Small Time Crooks, which I don't remember that much about except that I found it mildly amusing.  The other is Bananas, which I remember was actually pretty funny (that's about three steps ahead of mildly amusing).  I enjoyed Midnight in Paris.  Owen Wilson stars as a hacky screenwriter looking for inspiration to write a novel while in Paris with his neurotic fiance and her kooky rich parents.  On a late night walk he stumbles into an alternate universe where he is in 1920's Paris, rubbing elbows with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemmingway, Salvador Dali, and a few other notable artists and authors of the era.  It's a lighthearted fantastic sort of movie, with good performances from Wilson, Rachel McAdams, and especially Michael Sheen as an uber-pretentious self-proclaimed expert on all things Paris.  The famous figures of the past are perfectly funny caricatures, particularly the manly man Ernest Hemmingway.  Dos Equis guy has nothing on him.  The dialog is clever and it probably helps that Woody is not actually saying the lines he's written.



Three Kings (1999 - David O. Russell) - A pretty underrated movie and one of Clooney's first meaty movie roles--ie not a cheesy action flick, rom-com, or franchise crushing comicbook movie.  Clooney plays an Army major during the closing days Desert Storm with doubts about the war.  He catches wind of a map a trio of non-coms find in an Iraqi soldier's hindparts that supposedly leads to a cache of Kuwaiti gold stolen by the Iraqis.  Seeking to get something out of his days in the desert, Clooney and his booty map (double-meaning!) finding cohorts, ably played by Mark Walberg, Ice Cube, and Spike Jonze, take off to find the gold and end up in a series of sticky ceasefire situations involving the Iraqi Republican Guard, anti-Saddam partisans, and an exploding cow.  Among other things.  Director David O. Russell, who is getting love recently for his Oscar nominated Silver Linings Playbook, co-wrote the script which is both funny and thought provoking, which really all war movies should be.  Very solid flick.  I hadn't seen it for a long time and had forgotten how much I liked it.

How to Train Your Dragon (2010 - Dave Dubois and Chris Sanders) - I watched about half of Steven Spielberg's War Horse today, which is a similar type of story as How to Train Your Dragon, and I found the latter to be exceedingly more entertaining.  Granted they aren't exactly the same kind of movie, slapstick gags and one-liners may have been a little out of place in the WWI horse tale, but they're both "boy and his dog/horse/dragon" stories, where the lead character forms a bond with a creature and some sort of serration or crisis gets between them and the boy vows to never forget/desert the creature.  I won't be too hard on War Horse since I haven't seen it all the way through, but just as I wouldn't expect it to play for laughs, I would expecte it to go for the heart strings.  From what I've seen thus far Dragon tops Horse even in that respect, on top of being funny and exciting.  Rango was my favorite animated film I saw last year, but Dragon wasn't too far behind and had the added advantage of being something I could watch with my four year old daughter.

Rango (2011 - Gore Verbinski) - And speaking of the animated noir with a chamaleon in the lead role, here is my full-blow review of Rango from a few months back.  I really liked it.

From Here to Eternity (1953 - Fred Zinnermann) - Probably one of the most famous images from classic movies, Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr sucking face on the beach as the tides washes over them, comes from this movie.  Starring Lancaster, Kerr, Frank Sinatra, Donna Reed, Montgomery Clift, and Ernest Borgnine, the melodrama based on the racy novel of the same name, tracks the lives of the characters in and around an Army base at Pearl Harbor in the days before December 7th, 1941.  Honor, duty, infidelity, intimidation, love, scandal, friendship; it's all there.  Good performances all around, particularly Ernest Borgnine as scuzzy Sgt. Fatso Judson.  Legend has it Sinatra secured his role with a little help from his Mafia friends, providing the inspiration for the Johnny Fontane character in The Godfather.  No word on how many horses lost their heads to make it happen.

Stay tuned for Part 4.

Year in Reviews 2012: Movie Edition - Part Two

Blooger's Note:  Don't forget to check out Part One if you haven't already.

Last time we took at quick look at Lincoln, The Shootist, Army of Crime, Four Christmases, and The Ox-Bow Incident.  Let's dive into part two.  Once again, these are in no particular order.

Tree of Life (2011 - Terrence Malick) - About a month ago I wrote up a full blown review of Tree of Life on my phone, only to have it inexplicably erased for reasons that are still not entirely clear to me.  I have no idea what life lessons Malick was trying to convey in Tree of Life, but he is indirectly responsible for teaching me one valuable lesson:  don't compose posts on your phone unless you are prepared to save every two minutes.  As the movie actually goes, if you've seen a Terrence Malick movie before you know what you're going to get, more or less.  If you haven't here's what you're going to get:  a non-linear, amorphous "plot", lots of shots of the sun and leaves and hands running through tall grass, and possibly dinosaurs.  The movie is "about" the life and times of a 1950's family in Waco, Texas.  Growing up and domineering fathers (Brad Pitt), and childhood and loss and Sean Penn wandering around looking like he's got IBS and...dinosaurs.  It's not for everybody, but it's worth seeing if for nothing else then its incredible visual beauty.  Just don't expect to have any idea of what's going on for at least the first hour.  Then the dinosaurs show up.

The Old Man and the Sea (1958 - John Sturges) - A straight forward visual retelling of Ernest Hemmingway's famous novella.  Spencer Tracy stars as the Old Man.  Not really much else to say about it.  Considering the vast majority of the movie is the Old Man sitting alone in a boat thinking to himself, Tracy does a good enough job of keeping you interested, but the movie doesn't really add anything to the story and the book is, of course, much better.

Gone with the Wind (1939 - Victor Fleming) - I had never seen Gone with the Wind before, but as an amateur film buff had always wanted to.  However, it's quite a commitment at 238 minutes.  I could watch a few other movies I'd also like to see in that same time frame.  But, when you're laid up on the couch with the flu you've got nothing but time on your hands.  Such was the case this past Thanksgiving weekend.  Like a lot of classic movies, it's one I'm glad I saw and can certainly appreciate it's achievements, but it's not a movie I see myself watching again for a very long time.  It's romantic celebration of the Old South seems juuuuust a touch out of step with today's sensibilities.  Slavery is actually mentioned very little, which might seem odd for a movie set in and around the Civil War.  And though it isn't really meant to be about slavery, it is about the antebellum South and to sort of whitewash the peculiar institution almost completely out of the picture, some may find of-putting.  I didn't, only because it should be viewed as a product of it's time (which is not the same as saying the attitudes of that time are ok just because they were the attitudes of that time, if that makes any sense at all).  I imagine a sort of parallel study of slavery as seen through the history of film making with Gone with the Wind and modern films such as, oh I don't know,say, Django Unchained, would be pretty interesting.  Again, worth seeing for it's place in movie history, and because it is a good movie, but also because you'll recognize a lot of well known lines that have been repeated, copied, and spoofed that you never knew originated from the mouths of Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler.

The Dust Bowl (2012 - Ken Burns) - As a history buff, I'm a huge Ken Burns fan.  His latest offering chronicles the experiences of those who lived in a few small towns in the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles, right in the heart of the dust bowl during the Depression.  If you're unfamiliar with what the dust bowl was, see this movie.  But in a nutshell, for a good part of the 1930's the Great Plains were struck by an ecological catastrophe, caused both by man and by nature.  The combination of drought and over exuberant plowing, left the land barren and windswept.  Giant dust storms became the norm, blowing mountainous clouds of dirt into the air and causing "black blizzards."  You know in dry, dusty areas when you get those nasty black boogers in your nose?  Imagine having that experience for half a decade or so.  In typical Ken Burns style, The Dust Bowl comes to life through photographs, interviews with the regular folks who survived it, and letters and correspondence from those who have since passed away.  Another edutaining look at American history from Mr. Burns.  This Mr. Burns, not this one.

Red Tails (2012 - Anthony Hemmingway) - I gave this plane wreck a full scale review several months ago.  It still makes me angry that the Tuskegee Airmen might not ever get the film treatment their story deserves thanks to this debacle.  Sigh.

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Stay tuned for Part Three.

Year in Reviews 2012: Movie Editon - Part One

Well apparently my 12 Days of Criticismas was a touch ambitious.  Thanks to a pretty bad stretch of The Plague running through my household this month, coupled with a couple of my guest writers not being able to squeeze a post into their own busy schedules, our 12 days ended up being A Week's Worth of Criticismas.  Oh well, even Santa drops the ball every once in a while.  I mean, you have seen the holiday classic Santa Claus:  The Movie haven't you?  Dudley Moore was never better.  We'll give it another shot next year.  I would like to thank Rhett Paro, Josh Carrillo and Peter Brown for their efforts and hopefully they'll be back reviewing bad TV specials, food, and weather phenomena again soon.

Critical Errors isn't the sort of review blog where you're going to get run-downs on all the latest offerings in movies, music, TV, food, products, what have you.  Anyone who's surfed through this humble corner of the Internet at all would know that.  How many reviews of the Ox-Bow Incident written post-1943 do you think are floating around the Interwebs?  My guess is not many, and yet you'll find one on Critical Errors, proudly.  However, I don't spend all my time only watching western morality plays from the war years.  So, I figured I'd do a look back at--nearly--everything I watched in 2012 and would give either a brief two-cents take or a just a link to the review I already wrote for it just in case you had the mis(?)fortune of missing it the first time around.  These are movies I either watched for the first time ever, or first time in a long time, presented in no particular order whatsoever.

Lincoln (2012 - Steven Spielberg) - As popular and successful as he has been for nearly 40 years, Spielberg gets flack from a lot of artsy cinefile types for being too populist and often pulling his punches in service of the happy, or at least happiest possible, ending.  Among other things, these folks will concede his talents as a filmmaker capable of entertaining with the best, but lacking the bravery of a true artist.  Now, my formal film education may only consist of a single community college course, but to those accusations I say, haters gonna hate.  They don't come much braver than Lincoln.  To make a movie about the passing of a piece of legislation, even concerning perhaps the most important piece of legislation in our nations history, in this case the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery, and with as compelling a historical figure as there may be, in this case Abraham Lincoln, and have not one minute of its 150 minute running time feel like history class, is a herculean task only a handful of directors could have pulled off.  Lincoln is a masterpiece and Daniel Day-Lewis channels Honest Abe himself.  Even though I have obviously never seen Lincoln walk or move or heard his voice, somehow DDL manages to perfectly capture what I always imagined he would move and sound like, based on whatever still images I have seen over the years.  It's a virtuoso performance to add to DDL's ever growing list of virtuoso performances.  The movie is chock full of other recognizable faces, like David Straighairn, Sally Field, Joseph Gordon-Levit and pretty much every character actor ever.  Lincoln is a great movie, and to the haters that would say otherwise I have a message for you:  shut up.

The Shootist (1976 - Don Siegal) - Great character piece starring John Wayne as a dying gunslinger.  Read my full review here.

Army of Crime (L'armee du Crime - 2009 - Robert Guedeguian) - A French movie about the French resistance in Paris during WWII.  Based on actual events, while a goodly portion of the French people and French police collaborated with the Nazi's, in many cases without much convincing needed, many of the French resistance groups were actually made up of immigrants; in this case foreign Jews, Spainards, Italians, and Armenians.  The army of crime is a rag tag group of resistance fighters with little to no training, harassing and killing Nazi's in the streets of Paris, some questioning the morality of what they're doing, some enjoying it a little too much.  A pretty interesting, and at times upsetting and at times uplifting, look at an often overlooked portion of history.

Four Christmases (2008 - Seth Gordon) - Don't think this one will be making the yearly Christmas movie rotation.  Simple premise:  couple Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon attempt to spend Christmas day with all four of their divorced parents.  Hijinx ensue.  A scenario that should be ripe for comedy gold.  The best this one achieves is bronze...plated.  There's a few decent slapstick moments, especially with the pair visiting Vaughn's blue collar dad Robert Duvall and his idiot brothers, redneck Tim McGraw (irony!) and ultimate fighter wannabe Jon Favreau.  There's also a pretty amusingly awkward sequence when they visit Vince's mom, Sissy Spacek, who happens to be dating Vince's ex-best friend.  Pretty gross, but also kinda funny.  The biggest problem is Vince Vaughn though.  He just won't shut up!  I guess that's what he does, but it gets seriously annoying.  A far cry from his days scoping out the babies in LA diners.

And speaking of The Ox-Bow Incident (1943 - William Wellman) - here's my 102 word review of the western morality play starring Henry Fonda.

Stay tuned for Part Two of the Year in Reviews 2012:  Movie Edition.