Movie Review American Made

American Made (2017) 

Directed by Doug Liman 

Written by Gary Spinnelli 

Starring Tom Cruise, Domnhall Gleeson, Sarah Wright Olsen, Caleb Landry Jones 

Release Date September 29th, 2017 

American Made stars Tom Cruise as Barry Seal, a real life character who was at the center of the drug, guns, and South American contras controversies of the late 70s and 80s. Barry was just an airline pilot for TWA until the CIA caught wind of his trafficking in Cuban cigars. Sensing that Barry has just the kind of moral flexibility that the CIA needs, Agent Shaffer (Domnhall Gleeson) recruits him to run reconnaissance missions in South America, spying on supposed communist outposts.

Barry graduates to the drug trade when he is kidnapped by the Medellin cartel during a stopover in Columbia. They’ve caught on to Barry’s kamikaze missions and figure he’s the man who can help them get their product into America. Barry is eager to agree and becomes the first American welcomed into Pablo Escobar’s inner circle. Meanwhile, the CIA willingly looks the other way on Barry’s drug trade as long he’s willing to fly illegal guns to the Contras in Guatemala for their supposed fight against the Sandinistas.

This is all pretty crazy stuff and, as directed by Doug Liman, the absurdity starts almost from the beginning and never seems to let up. Barry Seal has no business being at the center of the biggest intelligence and drug controversies in American history and yet here he is, thrust onto the stage with only a giant grin and his moral flexibility to keep him from being killed. Indeed, nothing seems to phase Barry, whether it’s the potential of being shot out of the sky, being shot on the ground, getting arrested, or trying to find places to stuff the millions of dollars in cash his new lifestyle has awarded him with.

Much of the story of American Made has the bizarre atmosphere of my favorite American history podcast, The Dollop, with comedians Dave Anthony and Gareth Reynolds. As I watched the film, I could not help but imagine the extraordinary comic spin Dave and Gareth would put on this story. One scene in particular has the perfect level of insanity that The Dollop lives for. In this scene Barry is attempting to avoid military planes that have been sent to guide him to a military base to arrest him.

Find my full length review in the Geeks Community on Vocal 

Movie Review Mother

Mother (2017) 

Directed by Darren Aronofsky 

Written by Darren Aronofsky 

Starring Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Ed Harris, Michelle Pfeiffer 

Release Date September 15, 2017 

Published September 14th, 2017 

I can’t decide if Mother(!) is Darren Aronofsky’s way of pleasuring himself on screen or if it is a legitimate work of art simply out of the grasp of my pea brain. The film has some seemingly obvious metaphors but they are metaphors that are so blatant that your brain fights the idea that they could be so simple to untangle. At least we can all agree that Mother(!) is a pretentious as all get out work of an egotist artist who’s either far too oblique for his own good or a complete troll.

Mother(!) is the title character played by Jennifer Lawrence who opens the film completely engulfed in flames before waking up in bed. Was it a dream? Stick around, the movie has a little something for you on that later. Mother and her writer husband, played by Javier Bardem, are living in an idyllic old home that has been recovered from a fire. This unique home sits in the middle of a field or perhaps a ‘garden,’ one might call it Eden-like.

The idyll of their country home is upended by the arrival of a snake-like gentleman, played by a skinny, leathery, Ed Harris, who claims to be one of the Husband’s biggest fans. Considering there is no place to stay for miles around they allow the man to spend the night. Then the next day his wife arrives played by Michelle Pfeiffer followed by their warring children played by Domnhall and Brian Gleeson who set about acting out a version of Cane and Abel inside these strangers’ home.

This portion of the film ends with a funeral and a finale in which Mother accuses her husband of not wanting to have sex with her to which he replies with what begins as attempted rape and then becomes a brief sex scene leading to a bizarre reveal and an even more bizarre final act of the film that I will leave you to discover on your own. The portentousness of the reveal is kind of fun and exciting but that pay off was a deal breaker for me, I was pretty much done with Mother(!) at this point and there was still a whole act of full on madness to come.

The lead up to the sex scene in Mother(!) basically states that a woman who is angry or unhappy with her husband to the point where she’s ready to leave him can be satisfied with a good sexing. This, to me, is such a gross and simplistic notion, so remarkably, ludicrously sexist that it seems like a provocation just to get that accusation. Unfortunately, Mother (!) doesn’t offer any rebuttal to this idea. Lawrence’s Mother is ready to leave her husband for not loving her, he attempts to take her by force, she eventually acquiesces because his forcefulness is a turn-on and the movie moves on. There is no attempt to satirize this notion, it is merely presented and that, for me, knocked me out of the movie.

Read my full length review in the Geeks Community on Vocal.