The View From The Mountain

I remember the hysteria surrounding the release of Solo: A Star Wars story. It was a two-pronged attack: the first was the hand-wringing over the fact that they released a Star Wars movie barely six months after the last one ( The Last Jedi , which managed to scare up some mass hysteria on its own), and the other being the “fact” that Solo was yet another brain-washing piece of excrement (along with The Last Jedi —jeez, that flick really knew how to make new friends and influence people, didn’t it?) that had been released by the “evil” Kathleen Kennedy, who runs Lucasfilm—and who should now fall on her sword, since Solo didn’t make the mega trillions that it was expected to haul in. But amidst all of this panic and frenzied second guessing remains a very important question. Is Solo: A Star Wars Story any good? Yes, it is. Not only is Solo good, it’s an extremely well-made space adventure that actually manages to be a fun ride. Pushing aside all of the hysteria that surrounded this...

What can I say about my love for The Shape Of Water that hasn’t already been expressed in the glowing reviews that it has already received? It’s even been warmly embraced by the Oscar voters, who gave it the Best Picture Oscar of 2017. Guillermo del Toro’s wondrous fairy tale, about an unusual love story taking place at the height of the Cold War, is at times charming, warm and loving, and extremely weird. And it’s all good. The mesmerizing Sally Hawkins plays Elisa, a mute woman who works as a cleaning woman at a government facility. One day, a special item is brought into the facility, a strange fish-man (played by Doug Jones in a performance that’s just as challenging--and silent--as Hawkins’). This fish man comes with his own jailer, the man who caught him in South America, Richard Strickland, a hard-nosed martinet played by Michael Shannon, whose black-hearted performance feels just a little over the top at times. But this story is framed as a fairy tale that’s being told to us...

I was pleasantly surprised when I saw Rampage , the latest popcorn flick starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. I initially didn’t have high hopes for it because…well, because it starred Dwayne Johnson, a Hollywood star whose films are usually big on the spectacle but short on brains. Rampage begins in familiar territory for those who have seen the recent Life , starring Ryan Reynolds: aboard a rapidly deteriorating space station, with Marley Shelton doing a superb job playing a member of the crew who is forced to rescue several of the research specimens before she’s even allowed to get on the life pod by her callous unseen bosses. Unfortunately Shelton’s character doesn’t survive, but the specimens that she got aboard the life pod wind up being scattered all over North America when her life pod explodes upon reentry into earth’s atmosphere. One of the specimen containers lands in the gorilla pen of the San Diego Zoo, where George, an albino gorilla that’s been raised by Davis Okoye (J...