May 28th, 2018

I have been watching a fair bit of Netflix, and that is mostly on Suits.  I am nearing the end of Season 2 (there are 16 episodes or so) more than you would expect, but it has been engaging.  Most roll their eyes at my interest saying it is a Meghan Markle thing, and honestly I find Donna (the assistant for Harvey far more engaging than paralegal Meghan).   Good to note too that the young non-lawyer is played by Torontonian Patrick J Adam.    Anyway, I will continue to get through this, but onto the films.

Deadpool 2 – Alison summed this one up quite succinctly.   I will be more verbose.  But not much more.   For me this was a film that suffered somewhat from expectations.  There was the surprising first one that packed laugh after laugh and had all the crass and violence attached with it.  The story was the backstory with a villain who was just a bad guy.  The hype for this one being “amazing” was already out there.   Here we have the metal man (Josh Brolin) doing his best to impersonate The Terminator, and then the task of dealing with the wayward fat teenage mutant.  If you make him a turtle, come to think of it, that movie has already been made.   Never mind.   Some new characters are introduced.   One of the better sequences is when DP tries to form his own “X Force” with not so predicable results.   I laughed about the legs being grown back and sitting splayed out.  In the end, despite the frenetic pace of laughs, there were only a few truly memorable ones.  Girlfriend liked this far more than I did, and that’s to be expected as she really likes superhero movies and I generally am not.   Certainly she follows X Men and Avengers more than I, and laughed heartily at one of the X Men jokes.

Monster Money – on Netflix, this is the George Clooney and Julia Roberts film, directed by Jodie Foster about the Jim Cramer-type investment talking head whose advice was taken literally by an investor of modest means and the result is a stock that tanks.   The disgruntled investor does what seemingly everyone these days in the US does, and grabs a gun and a bomb and threatens the TV guy and gets his 15 mins of fame.   This story reminded me a bit of Phone Booth with Colin Ferrell and Kiefer Sutherland).   Both move along with a good pace and create tension with the scenario they provide.  The audience is left to wonder, where is this going to end up?    Here the Outlander star helps out with The Affair actor acting as the CEO of the company that had a one time computer glitch cause his stock to lose $800M.   It was worth a viewing, and at the right price.   My expectations were exceeded with this in truth.

The Fifth Estate – is the Wikileaks, Julian Assange movie starring Benedict Cumberbatch.  Funny in retrospect that we are still feeling the reverberations from all of these activities even today.  The film was in 2013, and 5 years later we are still dealing with the political turmoil of the Russian influence in the election, that put Trump in power.   The idea (in concept) of people knowing what is happening and transparency is a good one, but like many ideas in practice needs to tailored to the situation.   It’s not an absolute right to knowing everything, and there are those people who need to be protected in the jobs that they do.    Is Assange a fighter for open government (like the example in the film of UK newspaper people who were hanged for reporting on the Parliamentary debates)?  I am not sure.   One could argue that elected officials are paid for by the taxpayer and we have a right to know.  That would included emails and private servers from “Crooked Hilary”.   But seemingly things like tax returns and other sensitive documents are things that should only be protected if you are high enough up on the food chain.   Assange is living in London at the Ecuadorian Embassy in asylum.   His name popped up just last week about Russia and it might impact his continued stay there.   As a movie this is not as engaging as I would have expected.   The political climate and impact is there but it didn’t hold my attention and wasn’t really memorable.