Brian's Thoughts on Movies

“I never should have got out of the car.” Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks) in Cast Away Cast Away is my favorite Tom Hanks film.   Hanks’ second collaboration with director Robert Zemeckis tells the story of a Federal Express system engineer named Chuck Noland who is stranded on a desert island in the South Pacific.   I am naturally drawn to survival stories that show normal people who confront unexpected situations. The Edge, All Is Lost, Life of Pi, and The Martian have some similar themes that I also enjoy. As always I will be discussing the third act of the film in detail so please consider this a spoiler alert. Time is a key theme of the film.   Except for the opening shots in the Texas panhandle, the first act of the film is swift as Chuck rushes from a Fedex hub in Moscow (one of his first lines is “tick-tock, tick tock”) lecturing the employees on increasing productivity, to Red Square, then through Paris to Memphis for an all too short Christmas dinner,...

Every time a James Bond film is released many media outlets release a ranked list of the films.  Bond fans also love to create lists of their favorite elements of the series on different sites.  In the spirit of such lists I have created an overall list of my Bond films ranked in order of preference.   Additionally, I have listed several categories below but most of them are broken down by leading man (actor who played Bond) since each actor represents his own era of films and I felt it more fair to judge these elements within their own generation rather than against the whole.  I did not include the non-Eon Bond films, Never Say Never Again (1983) or the 1953 or 1967 versions of Casino Royale.  I also excluded George Lazenby from most of the categories since he is only in one film so there was no other point of comparison. This is just a personal list and is by no means supposed to represent anyone’s opinion other than my own.   Ther...

The future events of Back to the Future Part II take place on October 21, 2015 .  I have decided to use that day to post my thoughts on the film which I feel is a little underappreciated.  Back to the Future is one of the most enjoyable films ever made.  Michael J Fox, already famous on TV from Family Ties, became a big screen star for a few years after portraying Marty McFly, a 17 year old from 1985 who goes back to 1955 and inadvertently interrupts his parents' meeting, threatening his own existence.  Fox plays Marty as good hearted and resourceful but a little irresponsible and immature.  Doc Brown, Marty's scientist friend, is played wonderfully by Christopher Lloyd as a zany wild scientist at two ages (presumably his 30s and 60s).  The friendship between this unlikely pair is the heart of the series.  The joy of the film is watching Marty ensure that his parents ultimately fall in love (and makes their 1985 lives happier in the proc...

“Life gets harder as you near the summit” (fortune cookie opened by me immediately after watching Life Itself). The above statement certainly may apply to Roger Ebert, who was the most prominent voice of American film criticism for many years.   Any film fan born before 2000 should know Ebert’s name and though he may at some point be forgotten every podcast and/or show that uses a two reviewer format can trace its origins to him.   Ebert, for those not in the know, was half of a two man team who from 1975 to 1999 had a show called Siskel and Ebert At The Movies, along with a few other titles.   The half hour show aired in syndication weekly and always had the two undistinguished looking men who were newspaper critics briefly debating five films or so that had come out that week.   Each critic would rate the film thumbs up or down.   Since both men had very different tastes two thumbs up generally meant the film was a can’t miss for audiences (although...

                                                             Prior to discussing Unforgiven , allow me to explain my (lack of) credentials of my familiarity with some of Eastwood’s work. Unforgiven came out when I was about 20, and I watched it on video and thought it was a very good morality tale with incredible performances   but there were some factors that affected my enjoyment of it. For starters I was largely unfamiliar with Eastwood’s work as a director or actor, having only seen The Rookie, (his largely forgettable attempt at a Lethal Weapon type buddy film) and a few scenes that my dad (who was a big Eastwood fan) had shown to me when they popped up on TV (“Make m...