Reviews

I won't bore you folks with my armchair assessment of this film. Others can do that. But if you want to find a great, if underrated actor, give a performance you won't soon forget for all the right reasons, then watch this flick and Samuel L. Jackson. The man made me laugh so hard I pert near busted my britches.

I had the benefit of attending a coed Catholic High School with the freedom to challenge your soul. And so we were compelled to watch this emotionally compelling movie with Alan Arkin providing us the prism thru which the heart seeks love, finds it in unusual places and suffers the kind of pains that evade the limits of language. Even as high school juniors, we all knew people who struggled with the requirements of living. Such are the benefits of living in a town large enough to hold characters yet small enough to know about their lives. Don't discount Sandra Locke. She was perfectly cast and comes across as the duckling on the cusp of womanhood. She is imperfect. How human! Life is precious and often hard. The ways we all react demand attention. This movie helped teach me the power of the human soul and the frailties of the human heart.

Holly Hunter, William Hurt and Albert Brooks knock it out of the park in this case study of pretense, jealousy and bipolar love. If you were in your 20s or 30s in the late 1980s, you'll find yourself aching to go back in time. Big hair, big egos, big impacts and passion abound. Hurt, Hunter and Brooks pull off the rare 1+1+1=4.

Ordinary people often face extraordinary obstacles. And so it was for Tom Joad, family, friends and their kind. If superb acting from the lead character to the bit parts entices you to watch, then do so. Every part is played to perfection. It would have been easy to overact. But the restraint in each performance is enviable. The body language in this film is matched by the cinematography. Truncated. Abrupt. Minimalist. Poignant. Perhaps my favorite film.... certainly too five.

The first sign of bias is the refusal to listen. This program is long in interruptions and short on listening. No need to watch unless you like bickering without any positive results. Hey...reasonable people disagree, especially in politics and religion. But asking a question for the sake of pretense and launching your point of view vaguely disguised as the next question when the guest is one sentence into their answer is a reason to ignore this show.

This story focuses on the lives of four blokes, one woman and the people in their intersecting lives. As one gent dies, the lives of these five people are told with a wide lense, punctuated by their individual lives and secrets. "Luck" is a repeated mantra of this film bursting at the seams with acting talent of the highest order. But the true theme is humanity and the sacrifices it requires in large part because of the hand fate. These friends tell their story between the present and the past with a degree of intimacy reserved for a secret diary. Stick with the story. In the end, the human spirit stands tall. Battered, but not beaten.