Seeking Salvation, Accepting Reality
Reviews and Comments by Ken Burke
1:02 AM 1/7/2021—January 6 (yesterday, relative to this posting) was supposed to be a normal day of final-holiday-celebrations that some call Little Christmas others call the Feast of the Epiphany along with the Constitutionally-mandated-verification by the U.S. Congress of the Electoral College votes for the next President and Vice-President, but that all got sidetracked when what could have been a lawful, peaceful demonstration by Trump supporters degenerated into an illegal, domestic-terrorist occupation of the U.S. Capitol. Certainly, film reviews are meaningless compared to such an action condemned around the globe, but I’ve continued with my posting anyway both as a means of distracting myself from the fear such insurrections will continue and providing you with some trivial distraction from those horribly-disruptive-events. Maybe 2021’s not going to be such a relief after all!
I invite you to join me on a regular basis to see how my responses to current cinematic offerings compare to the critical establishment, which I’ll refer to as either the CCAL (Collective Critics at Large) when they’re supportive or the OCCU (Often Cranky Critics Universe) when they go negative.
Opening Chatter (no spoilers): When streaming for a couple of current-theatrical-releases becomes available (we’re still in semi-shutdown out here in the San Francisco area, as many of you may be also) I’d like to see News of the World (Paul Greengrass, 2020) with Tom Hanks (should be on Netflix soon) as well as watching Promising Young Woman (Emerald Fennell, 2020) starring Carey Mulligan (don’t know yet when and where it will stream)—neither of which are making much impact with box-office-receipts in their rather-limited-theatrical-presence—but until such time I’ll continue on with downloadable-options, which, based on my interests among the various things available, led me this week to a lead review on The Midnight Sky where Clooney also stars as a forlorn scientist at an Arctic observatory watching our world coming to a quick end due to some unspecified disaster, so he tries to make contact with the one Earth-based spaceship now returning home to tell them to reverse course, go back to that habitable-moon-of-Jupiter they recently visited because that’s the only hope for any continuance of the human species; however, his task is further complicated by the sudden appearance of a little girl who's turning to him for comfort although she doesn’t speak. Also, in the Short Takes section farther below I’ll provide brief comments about On the Rocks (Sofia Coppola) starring Rashida Jones as a wife becoming increasingly suspicious her husband’s (Marlon Wayans) having an affair so she turns to her womanizing-father (Bill Murray) for help in finding the truth about her situation. Further, I’ll offer suggestions for some choices on the Turner Classic Movies channel (but too much extra text for line-justified-layout like you see here [Related Links stuff at each posting’s end is similarly-ragged], at least to be done by this burned-out-BlogSpot-drone—oh, tedious software!) along with that standard dose of industry-related-trivia.*
*You can also see an interesting follow-up from our last posting about Wonder Woman 1984, an in-depth-video (26:16 [ads interrupt at 12:30, 17:00]) exploring its Rotten Tomatoes rating dropping so much from 89% the week before it was released down to much lower since Christmas Day (60% as I go to “press”), including factors such as only a limited number of critics were allowed to see it before Embargo Day (in this case 11 days before the movie’s debut, no reviews allowed until E.D.), female critics later responses didn’t drop as much as those of males but only about 30% of those critics are female anyway; there are also some quick numbers given on the Top 10 box-office champs of 2020—domestically and globally—plus streaming numbers from some various platforms as 2020 closed.
Here’s the trailer for The Midnight Sky:
(Use the full screen button in the image’s lower right to enlarge it; activate
that same button or use the “esc” keyboard key to return to normal size.)
If you can abide plot spoilers read on, but this blog’s intended for those who’ve seen the film or want to save some $. To help any of you who want to learn more details yet avoid those important plot-reveals I’ll identify any give-away sentences/sentence-clusters like this:
⇒The first and last words will be noted with arrows and red.⇐ OK, now continue on if you prefer.
What Happens: (There are some notable flashbacks inserted from the present tense of this film throughout, but for clarity I’ll just put most of my comments in chronological order.) In 2019 a well-respected, approaching-middle-age-scientist, Augustine Lofthouse (Ethan Peck [with George Clooney’s voice overdubbed]), gives a presentation about discovering a previously-unknown moon of Jupiter, K-23, which he senses might accept human habitation due to its geothermal properties; that night he meets Jean Sullivan (Sophie Rundle), begins a romance with her, but soon after she breaks it off because of his obsession with work, leaving little time or interest in forming a true bond with Jean. A few years later he discovers she’s had a daughter by him but neither of them reveal to the girl who her father is. Then we jump to 2049 at (fictional) Barbeau Observatory in the Arctic where Earth has just suffered some cataclysmic event (we’re never told what except it was due to some “mistake,” with deadly bands of radiation circling the globe implying nuclear war) so everyone at the base except Augustine (now played by Clooney) goes back to be with their families, even though their deaths are surely imminent. He stays behind, drinks a lot of whiskey (for good reason).
Augustine (who’s likely to die anyway, given he must perform a daily blood-transfusion process on himself due to a severe illness) sets a self-appointed task to make radio contact with the spaceship Æther (in ancient mythology, the "stuff" of empty space) the only one currently in operation, on its 2-year-voyage coming home from exploring K-23 (which they did find to be pleasantly-habitable), but at this point there’s no contact to Augustine nor from him to the crew—Commander Adewole (David Oyelowo), his pregnant wife, Sully (Felicity Jones)—who had a nightmare of being left behind alone on K-23—Maya (Tiffany Boone), Mitchell (Kyle Chandler), Sanchez (Demián Bichir)—so they have no idea what’s transpired on their home planet. Augustine then faces another challenge when he discovers he’s not alone but is sharing his accommodations with a little girl, Iris (Caoilinn Springall), who doesn’t speak but implies her name with a drawing of this flower. Despite his initial distain for suddenly having to take responsibility for the child (says he’s the “wrong person” for her, as he’s kept everyone at a distance throughout his life), he soon begins to grow fond of her, makes the decision they need to undertake a dangerous trek through snowdrifts and howling winds to a weather station which has a stronger antenna, more likely to make contact with the Æther. In the process, they camp one night in an abandoned structure, but ice breaks up the next morning, almost drowning them as well as Augustine losing all his transfusion gear, setting him up for an even-sooner-demise.
Despite being forced to walk through the frigid conditions (their motorized sled also sank under the ice)—and Augustine accepting the moral crisis of shooting a dying man found in an airplane’s wreckage—they reach the weather station, make brief contact with the Æther, although that’s soon cut off because the crew decided to enhance their own communication options by changing course into an unexplored region of space during the return trip, but that led to danger from asteroid debris slamming into them, damaging their comm system and radar. Adewole and Maya do a space walk to successfully fix the injured components but then endure a second barrage which injures Maya; she dies shortly thereafter. Sully contacts Augustine again who implores them to go back to K-23, restart humanity; Mitchell insists on taking a transport down to Earth to be with his family even if they’re already dead, so Sanchez joins him in order to give Maya a proper burial. Adewole and Sully plan on using a gravity swing around Earth to propel them back toward Jupiter with Sully in one last dialogue with Augustine, explaining how his grand accomplishments encouraged her being in NASA.
⇒By this time, we know Augustine knows Sully is the daughter Jean never told him about when they were together, about to part (she lied, claimed a false pregnancy), but when we learn her actual name is Dr. Iris Sullivan we (and he) understand the girl with Augustine in the Arctic is just a mental projection of his long-lost-child, with his ability to break through his emotional walls to care for this apparition is an after-the-fact-attempt to connect with an offspring he never knew, a further symbol of all those he kept at arms-length over the years, pursing his personal quests instead. As is explored in this video (10:35 [interrupted with ads at about 3:50, 10:00]), with its own spoilers (you’ve been warned!), this obvious allusion to Adam and Eve as Adewole and Sully—seemingly the last humans alive until she delivers her baby—may carry some trepidation for a renewal of our species because Adewole wasn’t thrilled to learn about the pregnancy, so as they separately leave the control deck during the final credits we’re left to wonder what sort of “family” situation they’ll develop on that distant moon, especially if Iris/Sully eventually takes after her introvert-father in pulling back from human contact, a result that would surely doom these people in hopes for species-rebirth on what seems to a Eden-like-location—so, if you’ve decided to indulge in spoilers anyway, here’s another video to give you more context to the film’s ending, the last 11:43 of scenes prior to those credits.⇐
So What? Without the slightest attempt to preach Middle Eastern-based-monotheistic-religions to you but simply in an attempt to make legitimate note of something I’ve never really understood from my limited exposure to Torah/Old Testament study, I’ll ask you to go to this link, read through if you're unfamiliar with chapters 4-5 of the Book of Genesis from the Judeo-Christian Holy Book (or skim, if you prefer) to see the human lineage from Adam and Eve (both created directly by God—OK, you also might need to read Genesis, chapters 1-3 to see how this comes about) through their first children Cain, Abel (killed by Cain), and Seth, followed by other sons and daughters, with Cain and Seth both marrying, producing offspring. BUT, if the only women available for these first sons of Adam and Eve (as well as their later offspring and eventually their grandchildren) are all of the same direct lineage don’t we have an enormous scientific or religious or ethical incest problem here? I don’t fully know how various theologians/religious scholars try to explain/rationalize this quandary (attempts are made in the links just cited, yet I see no plausible method of truly squaring science with religion, especially with claims early Biblical humans were somehow “purer” than those who came after the Great Flood), but the same situation—especially from the scientific perspective (assuming these Biblical stories are more literary/faith-based than actual evolutionary-history anyway), which is our actual concern with this The Midnight Sky story—will be in place for Adewole and Iris when they settle on K-23 (sorry if I’m drifting into spoiler territory here, but it’s hard to make my point without some reference to the film’s latter events) because whatever child they first have will need to mate either with her/his parents or later offspring to keep the repopulation-project going, but seemingly with some drastic genetic hindrances that would render the “new humanity” into the mode of the worst stereotypes of hillbillies or inbred royalty (even “pedigreed” animals face this doomed sentence if heritage lines are kept too narrow, severely weakening the gene pool). Is this how we'll "survive"?
So, why my concern with incest-trauma in the midst of a contemplative, intra-familial/sci-fi film? It’s because I think The Midnight Sky, somber as it is, contains more potential value than it’s being given credit for by OCCU critics, for example Variety’s Owen Gleiberman (a guy whose opinion I usually trust quite a bit) who says: “Some viewers will surely be moved. To me, though, ‘The Midnight Sky’ just proves that a movie that reaches for the stars can still come up empty-handed.” I don’t find it “empty,” but it still bothers me its solution for human-perpetuation seems so flawed, unless that’s the point here, that our species has lived past its intended-shelf-life so an evacuation to another celestial home is useless unless we can do so with a huge population of mostly-unrelated-people (easing DNA degradation) as in the more-physics-based/more-cinematically-successful but still-difficult-to-comprehend story, Interstellar (Christopher Nolan, 2014; review in our November 13, 2014 posting).
Bottom Line Final Comments: The Midnight Sky’s adapted from Lily Brooks-Dalton’s novel, Good Morning, Midnight (2016), but not having read it nor finding a comprehensive summary I won’t know if the incest-considerations I’ve brought up are grounded in the original book or in how her ideas were translated into the screenplay. What a great many in the OCCU would tell me, though, is “don’t be so concerned because this film’s not that good anyway” (even the often-upbeat Leonard Maltin [who, oddly enough, like Gleiberman, mistakes the setting as the Antarctic—don’t these guys get press kits anymore or recognize what’s north of Canada and Greenland in an on-screen-map?] says “I felt like I’d seen it before, such is the familiarity of its plot points and its most ambitious action scenes […] even the prodigiously talented composer Alexandre Desplat is defeated by an unexceptional screenplay.”), Rotten Tomatoes only at 51% positives, Metacritic surprisingly-higher (but still lukewarm), a 58% average score (as always, more details in Related Links below on anything I review). There seems to have been a limited theatrical presence from Dec. 11, 2020 (although I find no mention of it at either Box-Office Mojo or The Numbers) so it’s main presence is as a Netflix streaming option if you’d like to explore it there. It’s slow (except when the ice breaks, the space debris flies), thoughtful, unnerving in its depiction/assumption of the imminent doom of our planet (not so damn-far-fetched from the U.S.A. perspective, given how our [soon-not-to-be] current Administration has rolled back environmental protection laws, even in the face of verified, human-dominated climate change), it’s well acted, enhanced with a good many impressive visuals, yet if you just went by standard averages of critical reviews you’d likely never find a reason to even consider it.
Like the OCCU folks, you, too, may be among those who don’t find enough interest in concepts of The Midnight Sky (which Augustine frequently contemplates through a skylight while doing his nightly-transfusions, hence the title) to bother with it, but if you’ve paid your monthly fee to Netflix or are willing to do so given a whole lot of other fine fare they also offer (especially the magnificent Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom [George C. Wolfe, 2020; review in our December 31, 2020 posting]) then at least consider exploring The Midnight Sky, a somber-but-generally-engaging-experience. As usual, I’ll conclude the review with a Musical Metaphor, which has to be Neil Young’s “After the Gold Rush” (from his 1970 album of the same name) at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipNed8wYLdg (I use this live version because it came from a venue near me, although back in 1993), another apocalyptical tale, also about the situation of “Thinkin’ about what a friend had said I was hopin’ it was a lie [… until] The loading had begun Flying Mother Nature’s silver seed To a new home in the sun.” Maybe there’ll be a successful new home for Sully, Adewole, and their descendants, maybe not, but let us take this film’s lesson to heart before it no longer confronts us with fictional scenarios.
SHORT TAKES (spoilers also appear here)
In what’s ultimately a romantic comedy, a NYC wife (Rashida Jones) suspects her husband (Marlon Wayans) of having an affair with his attractive co-worker so she gets her somewhat-estranged, womanizing father (Bill Murray) to help her spy on her spouse, leading to increasing suspicions but no actual evidence of adultery (sort of like claiming there's voter fraud with no proof of illegal ballots).
Here’s the trailer:
Before reading further, please refer to the plot spoilers warning detailed far above.
You’d think teaming Coppola and Bill Murray again after Lost in Translation (Coppola, 2003; Oscar for her Original Screenplay), plus added star-wattage (although for others more so than me) of Rashida Jones and Marlon Wayans, there’d be ample reason to see On the Rocks even without strong CCAL support (RT, 86% positive reviews; MC, 73% average score), but, as with Mr. Gleiberman above, I’m now saying enticing-potential doesn’t always pay off in great results (I say it better, of course!). The basic premise here is a NYC wife, Laura Keane (Jones)—married with 2 daughters, preteen Maya (Liyanna Muscat), younger Theo (Alexandra and Anna Reimer)—faces writer’s block on her new novel while suspecting husband Dean (Wayans) of an affair with sexy co-worker Fiona (Jessica Henwick), because he’s at business-events/traveling with her so much. Reluctantly, Laura enlists the help of her flirtatious, semi-retired art-dealer Dad, Felix (Murray)—he left Mom (Barbara Bain) long ago for a woman who got him into the gallery business but then died; now he maintains men are biological-roamers so he’s just following his genes—to spy on Dean with circumstances furthering their assumptions, yet no clear evidence. ⇒This concludes when Dean and Fiona go to a Mexican resort to close a deal so Laura leaves the kids with Grandma, she and Felix travel there too where she plans to confront Dean but instead learns he’s on a flight home even as Laura finds Fiona (with girlfriend Mandy [Ximena Lamadrid]) simply staying in Dean’s previous room. As you might imagine in a plot played for laughs, all’s well that ends well as Laura makes up with both Dean (she confesses everything) and Felix (after berating him for his treatment of Mom).⇐
It’s pleasant enough but too predictable (now I’m sounding like Mr. Maltin but, again, with more insightful expertise!), has some nice moments like Laura and Felix in his convertible frantically chasing Dean and Fiona’s cab through nighttime NYC streets, but overall doesn’t deliver much although the main actors handle their roles convincingly. While On the Rocks had some marginal presence internationally for a total of about $1 million, it’s mostly on Apple TV+ ($4.99 monthly) if it appeals to you (if you’d prefer a serious version of a relationship impacted by flimsy-circumstantial-evidence I’d say look for any decent film version of Shakespeare’s Othello [1603], possibly the one [Olivier Parker, 1995] with Laurence Fishburne, Irène Jacobs, Kenneth Branagh). Thus, my Musical Metaphor here will try to balance relationship-comedy and full-blown-tragedy with The Alan Parsons Project’s “Eye in the Sky” (on the 1982 album named for this song) at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=QU-8lJtvVA4 (this video uses some grim footage from the ultimate-paranoia-film, 1984 [Michael Radford, 1984]) as it superficially could be about a lover’s devotion but actually concerns pent-up-disgust (“The sun in your eyes Made some of the lies worth believing I am the eye in the sky Looking at you I can read your mind I am the maker of rules Dealing with fools I can cheat you blind”), so maybe you’ll just listen to this song a couple of times (unless you really like these actors).
Suggestions for TCM cablecasts
At least until the pandemic subsides Two Guys also want to encourage you to consider movies you might be interested in that don’t require subscriptions to Netflix, Amazon Prime, similar Internet platforms (we may well be stuck inside for longer than those 30-day-free-initial-offers), or premium-tier-cable-TV-fees. While there are a good number of video networks offering movies of various sorts (mostly broken up by commercials), one dependable source of fine cinematic programming is Turner Classic Movies (available in lots of basic-cable-packages) so I’ll be offering suggestions of possible choices for you running from Thursday afternoon of the current week (I usually get this blog posted by early Thursday mornings) on through Thursday morning of the following week. All times are U.S. Pacific Daylight so if you see something of interest please verify actual show time in your area for the day listed. These recommendations are my particular favorites (no matter when they’re on, although some of those early-day-ones might need to be recorded, watched later), but there’s considerably more to pick from you might like even better; feel free to explore their entire schedule here. You can also click the down arrow at the right of each listing for additional, useful info.
I’ll bet if you checked that entire schedule link just above you’d find other options of interest, but these are the only ones grabbing my attention at present. Please dig in further for other possibilities.
Saturday January 9, 2021
3:00 PM King Kong (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack, 1933) Original tale of a huge ape on a secluded island with natives and dinosaurs, taken away by an entrepreneurial filmmaker as an NYC stage attraction until all hell breaks loose. Marvelous stop-motion-animation by Willis O’Brien of the island’s creatures (racist stereotypes of the natives, though), culminating with Kong’s capture of Fay Wray, carrying her with him to the top of the Empire State Building for the (sad) grand finale.
5:00 PM North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959) One of Hitchcock’s top achievements (that’s saying a lot) about a case of mistaken-identity gone terribly wrong as ad executive Roger Thornhill (Gary Grant) is thought to be a U.S. spy, hunted by thugs working for a foreign agent (James Mason). A marvelous collage of great scenes including the crop-duster-in-the-cornfield; also stars Eve Marie Saint, Leo G. Carroll, Martin Landau providing a great combination of tension and laughs.
Sunday January 10, 2021
2:45 PM Cabaret (Bob Fosse, 1972) An 8-Oscar winner: Best Director, Actress (Liza Minnelli), Supporting Actor (Joel Grey), Art Direction, Sound, Score Adaptation and Original Song Score, Cinematography, Film Editing (close for me on these last 2 with The Godfather which won Best Picture [I agree]). A great film, best musical of all-time for me, set in 1931 Berlin as an American performer & an English academic get involved, Nazis on the rise, notable differences from the play.
Tuesday January 12, 2021
11:15 AM Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) Still my All-Time #1 (even though Sight and Sound’s poll dethroned it in 2012 in favor of Hitchcock’s Vertigo [1958] after 50 years on top); a triumph of script, acting, cinematography, editing, sound design, art direction, special effects, score, with Welles as director, star actor portraying Charles Foster Kane, an enormously wealthy (by chance as a kid) newspaperman (patterned on William Randolph Hearst) whose early progressive ideals succumb to pragmatics destroying marriages to 2 wives (Ruth Warrick, Dorothy Comingore) and a long-time-friend (Joseph Cotton), retaining loyalty only from his business manager (Everett Sloane). Except for the eye-of-God beginning and end it’s told in flashbacks with 5 narrators imparting their subjective accounts of his life (hard for us to know what’s true). Won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay (Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz [grandfather of noted TCM host Ben Mankiewicz]), no others.
Wednesday January 13, 2021
5:00 PM Murder by Death (Robert Moore, 1976) Screenplay by Neil Simon, this hilarious parody of novel/movie murder mysteries brings together versions of famous detectives Charlie Chan (Peter Sellers [yes, seems racist but reflects the numerous original depictions of Chan]), Nick and Nora Charles (David NIven, Maggie Smith), Hercule Poirot (James Coco), Sam Spade (Peter Falk), and Miss Marple (Elsa Lanchester) challenged to solve a murder by Lionel Twain (Truman Capote) and his butler (Alec Guinness); toward the end even Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson show up briefly.
If you’d like your own PDF of ratings/summaries of this week's reviews, suggestions for TCM cablecasts, links to Two Guys info click this link to access then save, print, or whatever you need.
Other Cinema-Related Stuff: Here are some extra items you might be interested in: (1) Variety's ongoing Oscar nomination predictions at their site, The Collective; (2) Films with possible multiple-Oscar-nominations (surprisingly enough, includes both The Midnight Sky and On the Rocks). As usual for now I’ll close out this section with Joni Mitchell’s "Big Yellow Taxi" (from her 1970 Ladies of the Canyon album)—because “You don’t know what you’ve got ‘till it’s gone”—and a reminder that you can search streaming/rental/purchase movie options at JustWatch.
1:02 AM 1/7/2021—I composed the paragraph just below at about 8 AM U.S.A. Pacific Time on 1/6/21 before setting down to morning papers and breakfast, eventually followed by this posting, but around 11 AM the awful D.C. disruption happened, thankfully finally under control, so I’ll just keep my statement below as it is because nothing about those thoughts has changed (yet, regarding various political results). I can only hope the insurrection at the Capitol was a singular event so I can go back to concentrating on meaningless-film-reviews, but that depends on whatever tactics Agent Orange (and his minions) employ next until that blessed date: 1/20/202, Biden-Harris Inauguration.
In closing, I’ll note my (perceived, at least) success with keeping all aspects of this posting shorter than I’ve rambled on in past years so let’s see if I can maintain such brevity throughout 2021. At my end, there were greatly-reduced-hours in the writing and posting process (research for all these links remained about the same, though) giving me time to watch the runoff-election-results for the U.S. Senate which seem to have delivered victories to the Democrats with Rev. Ralph Warnock and Jon Ossoff set to provide a 50-50 split in the chamber, allowing incoming VP Kamala Harris to cast tie-breaking-votes; technically, neither of these races are final yet but look assured, just as the official verification of the Electoral College votes for Joe Biden and Harris will eventually conclude but still drags on as I finish my posting due to the political theater clown show being staged by a good number of GOP members of Congress to curry favor with Trump voters for future elections (reminds me of this "FRAUD AT POLLS!' clip from Citizen Kane where a once-dominant “populist” politician also suddenly found defeat so his media empire lied on his behalf). I’m extremely happy with these Democratic shifts in the political winds, bringing me to some final Musical Metaphors from the days of my youth, Ray Charles with "Georgia on My Mind" (from the 1960 album The Genius Hits the Road), Sam Cooke with "A Change Is Gonna Come" (from the 1964 album Ain’t That Good News), and Crosby, Stills & Nash with "Long Time Gone" (from the 1969 album named for the group), or as Nina Simone exclaims, "It's a new dawn It's a new day It's a new life for me And I'm feeling good" (from her 1965 album I Put A Spell On You). Keep on singing 'til I see you again, next week.
Related Links Which You Might Find Interesting:
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Here’s more information about The Midnight Sky:
https://www.netflix.com/title/80244645
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBeUmOTknDM (15:15 interview with actors George Clooney, Felicity Jones, David Oyelowo, Kyle Chandler, Demián Bichir, Tiffany Boone, producer Grant Heslov, and cinematographer Martin Ruhe; claims to have spoilers, but I’m not aware of
any from watching this video)
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_midnight_sky
https://www.metacritic.com/movie/the-midnight-sky
Here’s more information about On the Rocks:
https://a24films.com/films/on-the-rocks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3risHrSS8U (29:56 interview with director Sofia Coppola and actors Bill Murray, Rashida Jones, Marlon Wayans [with lots of chatter about their mutual love
of NYC and how the city’s charm is captured in this movie—which I don’t really get that much of a sense of after having watched it, but maybe my not-so-pleasant experience of living there in 1973-’73 has something to do with my response, although I admit it was a lot cleaner, less dangerous, more enjoyable on short visits in relatively-more-recent years since the late-1990s])
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/on_the_rocks_2020
https://www.metacritic.com/movie/on-the-rocks-2020
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If you’d rather contact Ken directly rather than leaving a comment here please use my email address of kenburke409@gmail.com—type it directly if the link doesn’t work. (But if you truly have too much time on your hands you might want to explore some even-longer-and-more-obtuse-than-my-film-reviews-academic-articles about various cinematic topics at my website, https://kenburke.academia.edu, which could really give you something to talk to me about.)
If we did talk, though, you’d easily see how my early-70s-age informs my references, Musical Metaphors, etc. in these reviews because I’m clearly a guy of the later 20th century, not so much the contemporary world. I’ve come to accept my ongoing situation, though, realizing we all (if fate allows) keep getting older, we just have to embrace it, as Joni Mitchell did so well in "The Circle Game," offering sage advice even when she was quite young herself.
By the way, if you’re ever at The Hotel California knock on my door—but you know what the check-out policy is so be prepared to stay for awhile (quite an eternal while, in fact). Ken
P.S. Just to show that I haven’t fully flushed Texas out of my system here’s an alternative destination for you, Home in a Texas Bar, with Gary P. Nunn and Jerry Jeff Walker. But wherever the rest of my body may be my heart’s always with my longtime-companion, lover, and wife, Nina Kindblad, so here’s our favorite shared song—Neil Young’s "Harvest Moon"
—from the performance we saw at the Desert Trip concerts in Indio, CA on October 15, 2016 (as a full moon was rising over the stadium) because “I’m still in love with you,” my dearest, a never-changing-reality even as the moon waxes and wanes over the months/years to come.
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