Reviews

When I first saw Kramer vs. Kramer, it was extremely painful for me. And that's a good thing. The movie covers its difficult topic about as well as it can be covered. It doesn't offer any easy answers, like so many similar movies. Thus it respects the subject matter and presents hard emotional truths for us to swallow. And that is how a person can develop a wise heart. Ideally, all movies would be working toward promoting the right emotional and intellectual responses in all of us, instead of desensitizing us toward serious human issues and rendering us apathetic and stupid. Kramer vs. Kramer demonstrates how a movie, simply by provoking the right questions and framing issues discerningly, does not have to offer many explicit answers to be extremely meaningful and constructive. And, in a way, doing that is an answer to life's problems. Perhaps one of the most important kinds of answers of all. Marvelous leading performances by Meryl Streep and Dustin Hoffman and Justin Henry. Great character acting from the rest of the cast. A superb movie in every respect.

An adequate acting performance manages to avoid detracting from the quality of the character it portrays. A good acting performance enhances it. In "The Accountant", there is only one good acting performance of note, by Anna Kendrick. She is extremely sympathetic and relatable in a very limited role. J.K. Simmons, among others, makes a valiant attempt to elevate characters from irretrievably poor material that doom them to be mediocre at best. Cynthia Addai-Robinson gives a poor performance, adding vagueness and inaccuracy to a character that would have been far more vivid if we just exclusively read the screenplay. There is one adequate acting performance of note, Ben Affleck. Unlike the movie "Argo", where he detracts from his character, his performance in "The Accountant" is perfectly serviceable. The film unfolds in a number of different story arcs, each of which could easily be an entire film unto themselves. This plentiful material would be a boon, but only one of the story arcs, the one that directly follows the main character with his personal history and relationships and choices, is well executed. For the rest, we are left to soak up massive amounts of plot and character exposition in short scenes near the end of the movie. Again, we would do almost as well reading this material in screenplay form as by watching it in the movie. Worse than that, the movie includes far insufficient material to begin to make sense of or sympathize with these massive and complex plot developments, leaving the viewer with a lot of incoherence. A common misconception of art analysis will surface here. Some audience members will argue that they can fill in the blanks with their imagination and come up with excellent results. But if you the viewer are forced to essentially write material yourself that is vital to the quality of the movie (unlike, for example, the audience imagining gratuitous exposition to add to an already great movie), then that is a credit to your imagination but an indictment of the actual movie's quality. For the quality of the main story arc and of Kendrick's and Affleck's characters, I give this movie a 6.5.

A masterpiece leaves you with a sense of being filled up and flowing over. A deep well for your spirit to drink and be sated. A masterpiece is ineffable, much more than the sum of its parts. It's not that every part of it is perfect, far from it inevitably, but the whole is transcendent, and as such it transcends even its own limitations and problems. The characters in Princess Mononoke are living and breathing, full of life and profundity. It is partly in the characters themselves, and partly in the way the movie gives us to understand them. Through voice acting (the English version is marvelous, I can't speak for the original), music, dialogue, facial expressions and body language, and more. The imaginary world's symbolism doesn't let us down either, as do most. It is wonderfully coherent and rich.

Every person is capable of good intentions. And within intentions lies the phenomenon one might term " good faith". That is, can a person make the utmost of the moral understanding at their disposal to translate their good intentions to the material and practical world in a profound and honorable way? If you can, you have "good faith", regardless of how far that falls short of objective justice. One example of good faith would be a slave master, in a world where all they know is slave-keeping, from their parents, religious leaders, and culture, but yet they find their way to treating their slaves with great compassion and respect, and eventually even to setting them free. Is this enough to satisfy objective justice? No. Should we demand from them that they do far more? Yes. For example, the slave master should obviously fight against slavery in general, not just let his own slaves go free. But what we can do with such a person is respect their good faith. That is to say, we can appreciate their good intentions that they have translated to the world around them, and we can sympathize and identify with that part of them. Because after all, none of us are immune to grave moral error. We must salute the flag of good faith in all people, regardless of their moral condition in other respects. Southpaw is a movie about just such a person. He comes from a world of extreme violence and survival. But in the end no one can deny how hard this man tries, to do justice to his wife and daughter and himself. And that quality we should salute in him, a quality that raises him in stature above other human beings who have the benefit of far better moral understanding, but who have made less of what they were given. This movie benefits from an extraordinary performance by Forest Whittaker, and some excellent moments from Jake Gyllenhaal and Oona Laurence.

Summary: This film is fantastic. Deserves a much better rating than it currently has on IMDb (4.7). Don't see why this movie's average rating is not at least a 7.

Comments:

The rare movie with an empowered, non-hypersexualized female lead character, whose humanity is the most important thing about her, not merely that she is a female. She is not fetishized nor relegated to caring only about relationships with men, nor does she need to be rescued by a "big strong man" to do all the dirty work for her. Rather, she is capable of doing anything any human person can do, but what in cinema is often reserved for males alone, such as wielding worldly power, being emotionally tough, and perhaps most importantly, simply being independent. It is not enough to merely put a gun in a female character's hand and let her shoot someone, and then celebrate the movie as non-sexist. Not if said female character is still portrayed as utterly relationally dependent on men, as usually happens in such movies. Not here.

In line with this, the movie takes a far more realistic, compassionate approach to how it portrays human relationship, character, and choice, rather than the macho, male-dominant, "shoot/beat up everyone and make it better" tropes in so many other movies with similar subject matter. It actually takes the time to show the plot from the point of view of all the characters, female or male, adult or child, powerful or powerless, "glamorous" or ordinary. One example being a gunshot victim's sister. Just an ordinary kid, no reason the movie has to include her at all, but it does, because this movie cares about the human element. In this regard Badge of Honor is very reminiscent of Clint Eastwood's best directorial work, such as "Gran Torino" and "Unforgiven".