maggieameanderings

I've never seen the late, great Ernest Borgnine give anything other than a fine performance, but in one of his last movies he outdoes himself and should have gotten an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Frank, an elderly man contemplating suicide in this deftly written story. According to the production notes this was Borgnine's 199th film and he was 92 when he made it.

Borgnine leads a first class ensemble of Piper Laurie as June suffering from dementia, Doris Roberts as Alice with terminal cancer and Anne Meara as wheelchair bound Ella as his fellow nursing home residents. Rounding out the cast are Richard Schiff as the son coming to grips with the father he loves but feels he disappointed, a gracefully aging Cybill Shepard as the daughter who refuses to let go and Cameron Monaghan doing a fine job playing a teenage grandson who's still more interested in his grandfather than his iPod. Fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer will recognize the lovely Amber Benson who plays June's (Piper Laurie) granddaughter torn between her love & loyalty for her grandmother and the necessity of living her own life.

In this movie are none of the easy, cheap tricks we've come to expect with movies that focus on the elderly. Borgnine's Frank isn't ignored or forgotten by his family. The nursing home isn't some low-grade horror show of indifference to its patients. Frank's nurse Paul (played by Sunkrish Bala) even becomes such a good friend he gets invited on family outings.

Instead what we get in this movie are real questions on quality versus quantity of life, the value of dignity, and how the person himself and his family deal with end of life issues. We're presented with two different points of view with Borgnine playing Frank a man who's lost too many pieces of himself: physically with the loss of the use of one arm, limited mobility from multiple strokes and mentally (in one of his most powerful scenes) when he admits he can no longer remember what his wife looked like or the faces of his friends so Frank comes to want to die. On the opposite side there's Doris Roberts' Alice the eternal optimist even though she's dying from metastatic cancer. Alice still looks forward to striking it rich on lotto tickets every week, just started a class learning Spanish and constantly holds onto the hope that her friend June can still recover her mind.

Mostly this is a movie about little moments: the warmth of sunlight, the casual everyday indignity of people coming into the room when Frank's sanitary pad is being changed, the bonds of friendship that form in a nursing home, the frustration & love of family life. But there are some dramatic and powerful moments as when Borgnine's Frank recalls a war scene or tries to kill himself or the scene where the distraught grandson offers to help.

Filmed on location in Pennsylvania, the nursing home was an actual hospital, the recently closed Pennsylvania State Hospital campus (also the location for Girl, Interrupted). The directing of this movie suited the material, being quiet, unobtrusive and leaving the actors to do their job and carry the story.

This movie left me with tears in my eyes especially since I didn't see this movie until after Ernest Borgnine's death earlier this year. Unfortunately, this movie is not available on DVD in the US, but Encore Drama is showing it which is how I got to see it. If you get a chance to see this movie and you like small, intimate movies about a real issue that so many of us have faced or will face, I recommend you watch Another Harvest Moon.

A neuroscientist who's apparently afflicted with BOTH schizophrenia (he sees imaginary people a la A Beautiful Mind) and obsessive-compulsive disorder (he can't stand his routine being disrupted a la Monk) who is fascinated by puzzles and can't leave one unsolved (a la House) works as a civilian adviser with an attractive FBI agent (a la Bones) to solve crimes. But despite the fact that it's so obviously derivative and so obvious what it's derived from, I've seen two episodes so far and like it well enough to tune back in.

The highlight of the show is the charming, likable and vulnerable portrayal by Eric McCormack as the brilliant but reality challenged, Dr. Daniel Pierce. The murder mystery of the first two episodes was reasonably well written with a combination of "that was obvious" and "I didn't see that coming." And it's a delight to see LeVar Burton again in his guest star role of the dean of the university. However, Rachel Leigh Cook as FBI agent Kate Moretti is nothing special. She's pretty and perky and obstinate and will defy her bosses to finish a case; therefore, she's completely standard TV fare and Cook's portrayal doesn't lift her beyond standard TV fare.

It's only been two episodes, but I don't think that Perception is going to shape up to be great TV. However, so far it's been a decent show and has a higher level of intelligence than a lot of the shows out there. It expects the viewer to pay attention and doesn't dumb things down. If it keeps up at this level, Perception will be worth tuning into for an hour of week if you're fond of the TV genre of "socially inept genius investigator."

I watched this movie because, based on the name, I was expecting it to be set in New Orleans. So I was a bit disappointed when it was set in Michigan, but I couldn't hold that against the film. However, there was still plenty else I could legitimately hold against the film.

Unlike every other reviewer on here, I had no idea who Dave Bautista was and that he was a wrestler. What the other reviews don't mention is how distracting Bautista's size is throughout the movie. Because he is so huge, dwarfing every other actor, I kept expecting him to hulk out and start smashing things. I didn't understand why they would have cast someone with that ENORMOUS size if it wasn't a requirement for the role (à la early Schwarzenegger as Conan). I also couldn't understand why any serious, dramatic actor (and this is a serious role) would do that to his body as I kept wondering how many steroids it took to get that big. Finding out he was a professional wrestler at least explained that apparent contradiction. I suppose the producers thought they were cashing in on Bautista's "fame."

I'll give Bautista credit for trying and trying very, very hard to act this part which was reminiscent of a film noir detective. Unfortunately, he just didn't have the acting skills to pull it off. (Just because someone like a wrestler, model or singer "performs" as part of their job doesn't mean they can act. News flash: Acting is its own unique specialty. It takes talent and practice to be able to act well.) Instead of restrained, he comes across as wooden. Maybe they thought they'd cast against type by putting Gigantor into a role where he's supposed to be low key, intelligent and only resorts to violence when he's forced to instead of just grabbing the bad guy by his shirt, lifting him off the ground and threatening to pound him back into the ground with his ham-sized fist. As the noose draws tighter and tighter around Bautista's character, you're supposed to feel sorry for the guy, but it's nearly impossible to feel sympathy for the biggest guy in the room. (The one character I did feel sympathy for was the hit-man friend.)

To make things worse the script was bad. Tedious, predictable except where it didn't make any sense at all, and far too slow moving in spots --- deadly dull even. Great acting can salvage a thin script. But this wasn't great acting from anyone. It was mediocre acting with performances as flat as the pages of the newspaper comic strip it felt like the story came from.

The nicest things I can say about the movie are at least it was shot on location in Michigan (and didn't take the usual cheap route of Vancouver, British Columbia) and I somehow made it to the end of the movie. But I don't recommend you make it to the end of this movie or even to the beginning. Just do yourself a favor and skip this one.

DO NOT READ THIS REVIEW IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE MOVIE AND DON'T WANT TO KNOW THE PLOT.

Conundrum, definition: A confusing and difficult problem or question.

The plot of Conundrum starts out as a straightforward police-against-the-Asian-mob-story with the police being a mixed sex pairing of Det. Rose Ekberg (Marg Helgenberger) as a divorced, single mother and Det. Stash Horak (Michael Biehn) as the married, expectant father. The story takes a twist when Horak's pregnant wife and one of her co-workers are killed. Suspicion falls on Rose Ekberg as the relationship between the partners seems very close.

The first time I saw Conundrum, it was 2:37 in the morning and the cat had just woken me up. (The cat is responsible for a lot of my wee hours movie watching as he's fond of waking me between two and three in the morning.) So I turn on the TV and this is on. It had been running for 40 minutes. I tuned in shortly before the dead wife is discovered.

I watched thinking "Is Michael Biehn really such a lousy actor?" I always thought of Biehn as a solid actor, even compelling in a couple of roles. Here he was supposed to be the grieving widower and I wasn't buying his grief. I tried to tell myself that people express grief in many different ways, but all I was getting from him was this kind of creepy vibe. Said creepy vibe explained when it turned out that Biehn's character was the one who had his pregnant wife raped and murdered along with her lover (who was the father of the baby). Well.......that would definitely account for the inauthentic grief.

When Conundrum was over, I was scratching my head. I checked out IMDb as I find the reviews helpful in filling in stuff I missed. There were no reviews......nada.......nothing.......none. I've never seen a movie with no reviews on here, not when it's sixteen years old.

So, I made a note to myself to try to catch Conundrum from the beginning the next time it came on which fortunately wasn't in the middle of the night.

After watching the full movie, I'm still scratching my head. I think Conundrum is one of those movies where you best just go along for the ride because, if you think about the plot, it's going to give you a headache. Like why Horak arranged to have his wife killed BEFORE he gets the test results saying he's shooting blanks so he knows the baby isn't his. (He's at the doctor presumably getting the results when his partner picks him up there. They go off to work the Asian mob case and when he gets home his wife is dead. So he had to have already set up the murders before he got the information.) Or why when Det. Ekberg (Helgenberger) spots an item of a murder victim's clothing (which turns out to contain critical evidence) at a crime scene she doesn't tell anyone but let it lay there until the end of the movie. (Or how it was everyone else missed seeing it when it was so near the body.) Or why the police didn't investigate the husband for the murder. Aren't husbands automatically suspects? And this one had just paid for an expensive double hit. Or why the police never look into the relationship between the wife and the co-worker. So as POLICE dramas go, Conundrum not a good one. (But neither was the Diane Lane movie Unfaithful {in which the police demonstrate their incompetence}, and that was a big hit.)

I'd recommend this movie for Marg Helgenberger fans. It's a strong role for her. It's probably a lot more accurate portrayal of what it was like to be a female in law enforcement than the politically correct, egalitarian world of CSI. Here Helgenberger's detective definitely had to deal with a hostile working environment. One of her fellow detectives was so blatantly biased you just wanted to ask the guy, "Hey, are you LOOKING for a sexual harassment lawsuit?" At first Horak as the partner seemed supportive, and up until he arranged for a double homicide, he probably was genuinely supportive which accounted for the closeness between the partners. But afterward, with his own welfare paramount, manipulation is everything --- something that slowly dawned on Ekberg. Despite her partner's attempt to deliberately sidetrack her and then implicate her, Helgenberger's Ekberg proved to be a tenacious detective who put the pieces together in the end even when she didn't want to believe the way they were shaping up.

For fans of CSI where Helgenberger's Catherine Willows was a former stripper and if you've ever thought you'd like to have seen that, in this role Helgenberger did nudity and showed everything that wouldn't be hidden by a g-string. There was equal opportunity nudity as Michael Biehn, too, showed his bare bum in the sex scene.

All in all, Conundrum, not a great movie, but not a bad movie either. It's an okay movie........interesting enough to pass a couple of hours with.

Without a doubt, Moore will get an Emmy nomination for her portrayal of Sarah Palin.......a portrayal that, for the first time, gave me an understanding of Palin and a real sympathy for her. It showed a confident, charismatic, but essentially superficial person used to swimming in the shallows. It was also a Sarah Palin who was a mother with a new baby, a son going off to Iraq, and a close-knit, loving family who was suddenly taken away from that family and was thrust into the meat-grinder of national politics. Instead of being able to transcend herself and grow from the experience, we see a Palin who instead wraps herself up even more into being just who she is and finds a demographic of fellow shallows swimmers who love her just the way she is. Unfortunate, but after seeing this movie you could understand how it happened.

Harris as McCain portrays a rather idealized statesman, one trying to take the high road. There's no mention of McCain's volatile and explosive temper. Instead we're presented with an understanding, but aloof man at odds with the direction his party is going in. Again a sympathetic portrayal.

The final portrayals are of the political operatives in the McCain campaign. As you can understand the way Palin's personality begins to fracture under the pressure, you can also understand the operatives incredible frustration in trying to deal with it. You can understand when one operative, Wallace, finally just refuses to work with Palin anymore. You can understand the frustration of people who have spent their lives being informed try to deal with a Palin who lacks the most basic knowledge of history, world affairs or even how the federal government works. The tutoring sessions remind you of high school brains who've been pressured by the principal into tutoring the well-meaning, but thick-as-a-plank star quarterback so he can play in the finals. The room is thick with frustration on both sides.

This is a movie with no villains in the cast. If there is a villain here, it's a condemnation of the political process whereby a running mate is chosen solely for the electoral votes that person can bring with no consideration if the running mate is actually capable of running the country.

EDIT on 18 July 2012:

I finally read the book "Game Change" over the weekend. This movie actually is based on a very, very small amount of the book; it's not even the whole of "Part 3" as stated/implied in several reviews. The book is 23 chapters long (Part 1 - 14 chapters, Part 2 - 3 chapters, Part 3 - 6 chapters). The McCain campaign starts being covered at the beginning of Part 2 and is covered for the rest of the book. This movie is taken from less than two chapters (out of six chapters) in Part 3: Chapter 20 "Sarahcuda" which is all about Palin and how she got selected and Chapter 22 "Seconds in Command" which as the title implies covers both VP nominees (Biden as well as Palin). Plus the movie uses four and a half paragraphs from Chapter 23 "The Finish Line": two paragraphs describing McCain's relationship with Palin and 2.5 paragraphs about McCain and the "crazies" (that's what the book calls them) who started showing up at his rallies. The book does not cover the actual day of the election, so none of the scenes from election day are from the book, neither are any of the private scenes between Palin and her family. It was surprising to me to see how little of the book that this movie was based on. But many of the Palin incidents in the book are depicted reasonably to very faithfully in this movie. Now having read the book, I feel that the movie brought a greater depth of sympathy and understanding to Palin than the book did. And John McCain definitely comes off a lot better and more sympathetic in the movie than the book as the book does not minimize his foul mouth, his temper, his obstinacy and the dysfunctional relationship with his wife. If you're thinking about reading the book believing you'll find out more about Palin than what's presented in the movie, you won't. But you will find out a lot more about the election. (FYI: The rating for this review was 26 out 30 prior to this edit. Can't say if those people would have kept the same opinion of the review with this addition.)

Like the other reviewers I stumbled across this movie. I honestly didn't expect to enjoy it, but ended up being drawn into the storyline. I guess my sense of humor must be out of step with most current comedies because they're just not funny to me. It's easy for a movie to make me cry and very hard for a movie to make me laugh. So it's high praise when I say that I laughed more with Spin than I have at any movie I've seen in the last ten years. Simply thinking about certain scenes the next day would cause me to break out in uncontrolled laughing.

The version I saw was the under 80 minute TV edit. It's the story of one night at a club and the morning after from the point of view of six different characters all young (twenty-three years old ----- so we're told in the opening scene), beautiful and living in Southern California. The movie starts out slow, but it grows on you. Somewhere in the second vignette I was hooked. In the end, it's a tightly written script where all the pieces fit together wonderfully and with great humor. Spin is a screwball comedy for the modern era but has some moments of pathos in dealing with relationships.

In the first vignette, we're introduced to a character played by fifty-something Michael Biehn with one of the twenty-three year old girls. I'll admit that repulsed me, and I almost changed channels at that point. No matter how often Hollywood goes to the well of much older men with much younger women, I think that water's undrinkable. But it turns out that Michael Biehn was the hidden gem of this movie. I've only ever seen Biehn in serious, intense roles. I don't think I've seen him play any part other than a soldier or a cop (oh, and one sociopathic cowboy). This was the first comedy I've seen him in, and Michael Biehn has a real gift for comedy with impeccable comic timing. Watching his performance in Spin made me regret that Biehn's been so typecast in non-comedic roles.

The movie's focus is on the twenty-three year old characters, and I found the young actors to be very interchangeable, particularly the females. I didn't think any of the young actors put their own stamp on their characters so that I couldn't imagine anyone else playing that role. Pretty much any other actor with that physical type could have played the role, and I wouldn't notice the difference.

But I'll give chops to the older guy. Michael Biehn's been acting for longer than most of the young actors have been alive, and experience counts for something.

Overall, the strength of Spin was definitely from its script, so kudos to Henry Pincus for writing the funniest movie I've seen in many a year.