nomadreader

There's a lot to like in Flight : Denzel as a alocholic, drug-taking all-star pilot, a delightfully cooky John Goodman has his drug dealer/fixer/enabler, and a compelling idea for a film. After a night of drinking and sex with a flight attendant, Denzel wakes up to chug a warm beer and do several lines of cocaine to wake himself up enough to fly. It appears to be his standard operating procedure. When things go wrong during the flight, he manages to land the plane and save almost all of the passengers, but when the TSA and airline start looking into what happened, his hero status is in serious jeopardy. What made flight turn from fascinating to unsatisfying for me was that it tried to hard: there were already plenty of areas of moral ambiguity and complicated situations playing out--but instead of allowing those to, the film takes an overly dramatic and simplistic turn that had me wondering if I was watching a made-for-tv movie. Denzel's performance is worth watching, but thi...

The Hurt Locker , directed by Kathryn Bigelow, is the story of a U.S. bomb squad in Baghdad in 2004. It's a raw, honest war movie. It's hard to watch at times because it's intense.  It's very, very good, but it is not quite great. Is it worth seeing? Yes, I think it illuminates the war in a way still photos, news footage and articles cannot. It's important to have a richer understanding of war and this war. Each scene opens with a graphic of the number of days the unit has left on their tour. What keeps this movie from being great as a movie is the lack of transcendence. Much of the film feels like a documentary, which is fine. When a story makes an appearance, it feels out of line with the rest of the movie. Perhaps there's too much side story or perhaps there's not enough. Either way, it was a nice break from the constant stress and tension, but it didn't quite work for me. See this movie. It's not easy to watch, and at times it reminded me o...