Movie Review The Post

The Post (2017) 

Directed by Steven Spielberg

Written by Josh Singer, Liz Hannah

Starring Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Bob Odenkirk, Sarah Paulson, Tracy Letts, Bradley Whitford

Release Date December 22nd, 2017 

The Post is an of-the-moment history lesson about the important role of the media in America. Steven Spielberg has made arguably the most relevant movie of our political moment, given the way that President Trump has made attacking the media a staple of his public discourse. Casting two of America’s most beloved and respected actors in the lead roles only deepens the importance of The Post.

The title The Post refers to the Washington Post, which in 1971 battled the Nixon White House over the so-called Pentagon Papers. The Pentagon Papers refers to a study commissioned by then Secretary of State MacNamara, who tasked members of the Pentagon, including young genius, Daniel Ellsburg (Matthew Rhys), to study the state of the Vietnam War.

After not getting the positive returns that they had hoped to get, MacNamara lied to the media and tried to bury the report. Ellsburg then stole a copy of the report from Pentagon partners, The Rand Corporation, and made copies which he leaked to the New York Times. The Times began publishing the report in early 1971 in pieces before the Nixon White House took the Times to court to stop them.

This is where the Washington Post comes in. Spielberg picks up the story with a desperate Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) hammering his reporters to find out where the New York Times is getting their information. He wants a copy of the report so that the Post can publish them as well. While his reporters are scouring their sources, Bradlee’s boss, Katherine Graham (Meryl Streep) is battling with the board of directors over her position as owner of the company.

Find my full length review in the Geeks Community on Vocal 

Movie Review Lady Bird

Lady Bird (2017) 

Directed by Greta Gerwig 

Written by Greta Gerwig 

Starring Saorise Ronan, Laurie Metcalf, Timothee Chalamet, Beanie Feldstein, Lucas Hedges, Tracy Letts

Release Date November 3rd, 2017 

Lady Bird is a remarkably emotional experience, even if you’re not a teenage girl from Sacramento. Writer-director Greta Gerwig has, in her first directorial effort, relayed a masterpiece of the coming-of-age genre. Lady Bird is a wonderfully human, sympathetic, and smart movie, more in touch with real human emotion than most films of its kind. The film ranks next to my other favorite movie of 2017, The Big Sick, as that all too rare humane masterpiece.

Lady Bird, real name Christine, though she does loathe to be called that, Lady Bird is the name she chose for herself, is an iconoclast. At 17 years old, she has a strong sense of what she wants but not what to do with that information. What she wants is what so many 17-year-old girls wants, to be away from her mother. Don’t misunderstand; there is nothing particularly wrong with Lady Bird’s mother, Marion (Laurie Metcalf), she just tries to make Lady Bird more realistic, and Lady Bird can’t have that.

Marion isn’t a perfect mother. She does criticize too much and is pushy in the way many moms are. She’s also recently the only significant income in her family of five, including her recently unemployed husband Larry (Tracy Letts), their son Miguel (Jordan Rodriguez), and Miguel’s live-in girlfriend Shelly (Marielle Scott). And, of course, Lady Bird who seems to have no concept of the limitations her family lives within, locked within her bubble of teenage self-involvement.

Boys have become a new focus of Lady Bird’s attention. Attending a Catholic all-girl school, she was rather sheltered until she found out about the school’s partnership with a nearby boy’s school to perform musicals. With her best friend Julia (the wonderful Beanie Feldstein), Lady Bird pursues acting, if only to indulge her theatrical nature and meets Danny (Lucas Hedges), a stand-out actor, up for the lead part. The teenage romance between Lady Bird and Danny is one of the most perfect presentations of first love that I have ever seen on screen, and I have seen a few teen romances in my time.

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

Movie Review: Bug

Bug (2007) 

Directed by William Friedkin

Written by Tracy Letts

Starring Ashley Judd, Michael Shannon, Harry Connick Jr. 

Release Date May 25th, 2007 

Published August 10th, 2023 

Legendary director William Friedkin died on Monday, August 7th, 2023. On the next episode of the Everyone is a Critic Movie Review Podcast, we will be talking about the remarkable career of William Friedkin including his well known classics, The Exorcist, The French Connection, Sorcerer, and Cruising, as well as his underrated gems, The Hunted and the movie I am writing about today, Bug, starring Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon. Bug is a brilliantly paranoid thriller that takes advantage of Ashley Judd's innate sympathetic qualities and Michael Shannon's talent for skin-crawling creepiness that you can't look away from. 

At one time, in the late 1990's Ashley Judd seemed on the verge of becoming one of the top stars in the industry. After the twin successes of Kiss The Girls and Double Jeopardy, Judd was the in demand female star of the moment. Sadly, those pot-boiler mysteries that made her a star also lead to her type casting as the heroine of ever more ludicrous mystery thrillers which reached their nadir with the unwatchable, alleged thriller Twisted in 2003. Of course, what really happened to Ashley Judd's career was less about type casting and more about Harvey Weinstein's blacklist of actresses who refused to sleep with him. 

Nevertheless, after taking nearly two years away from the movies, Judd returned in a remarkably different role in the small scale, buzzy thriller Bug. Helmed by maverick director William Friedkin, Bug offered Ashley Judd a career remaking performance as a drug addicted woman sucked into the insanity of the first man to offer her positive attention in years. This is a brave and bold, full bodied performance that should have brought Judd back to big time stardom. She did keep working after Bug, but not nearly in the kind of challenging roles that a performance like this one should have earned for her. 

In Bug, Ashley Judd stars as Agnes White a waitress at what is likely the only honky-tonk lesbian bar in all of Oklahoma, though Agnes is not a lesbian herself. She has in fact survived a horribly abusive marriage to Jerry (Harry Connick Jr) and the loss of their son who was kidnapped. Jerry is recently out of jail which may explain a series of hang up phone calls to Agnes's room at a flea pit motel, appropriately named the Rustic Motel. Into Agnes's lonely desperation comes an odd, somewhat creepy, but gentle stranger named Peter Evans (Michael Shannon). Peter is a gulf war vet who attached himself to Agnes's friend R.C (Lynn Collins) and was invited to Agnes' hotel room for a night of drinking and drugs, though he does not partake.

The encounter leads to Peter spending the night, he sleeps on the floor, Agnes on the bed. Soon the two are getting close and things do eventually get physical but soon afterward bad things start happening. A seemingly inconsequential bug bite begins a paranoid delusional breakdown that quickly leads the schizophrenic Peter and the lonely desperate Agnes to a heart stopping denouement. Friedkin's talent for nasty visuals, honed on The Exorcist, is on full display in Bug. As Shannon and Judd begin to feed each other's madness, Friedkin fearlessly plumbs the depths of that madness with skin crawling, stomach turning visual touches that make Bug a visceral fright.