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Media report!
Nov. 21st, 2023 07:01 pmTwo Spielberg + Tom Hanks movies from the early 2000s.
Catch Me if You Can has such a fun premise: Leo DiCaprio plays a young con man named Frank who gets jobs as an airline pilot, a doctor, and a lawyer. Tom Hanks plays the FBI agent who chases him down. Unfortunately this is played for Serious Drama and Daddy Issues, and was not for me, though overall I think it's an OK movie. The beginning and ending were too long and slow. An editor needed to cut a bunch of stuff out including a very cringey scene with Jennifer Garner as a high-end sex worker. Frank uses his forging skills to cheat her out of 1400 dollars and it's played like some kind of gross male fantasy.
The story goes something like, Frank really wants to please his father (Christopher Walken), and this leads him down a wrong path. The right path is finding a positive father figure in the Tom Hanks character.
If you like con artist stories, Leverage is just so much better. "The Pretender" is another example of a story where someone uses his genius skills to help people and is much more warm and fun.
The Terminal also has an interesting premise but it fails to deliver. An Eastern European man, Viktor (Tom Hanks) becomes temporarily stateless and gets stuck living in a airport. This was SUCH a frustrating movie, because it had a bunch of things going for it-- good actors, some comedy, a familiar setting that gets re-contextualized, and the potential to say something interesting. But the story structure was bad. You'd think that before someone spent all that money making a movie, they would make sure the story and script are good. That is the FIRST thing one should do, the foundation.
Stanley Tucci plays the antagonist, a guy in charge of the airport, and his character is all over the place, no clear motivation or development, does not act in any kind of consistent way. There was a great moment where I thought this story might be about resisting a police state (airport as metaphor/tiny police state), or finding ways to resist and de-escalate the conflict of policing, but of course it didn't hold up.
Catherine Zeta-Jones, similar. She spends the movie getting to know Viktor and breaking away from her bad boyfriend. But then in the end she goes back to the boyfriend for no reason.
Zoe Saldana and Diego Luna were both super cute, but their romance was not well developed and ended up making no sense at all.
So, anti-rec for this film.
What my family and I absolutely love watching is The Incredible Dr. Pol, a reality-based show about farm veterinarians in Michigan. Dr. Pol is an old man with a ton of energy, a ton of experience, humor, warmth, a great love for animals. It's streaming on Hulu and we watched 3 or 4 episodes before the technology gave up on me. We used to watch it on cable but my parents gave up cable; maybe I'll see if I can borrow some DVDs or something. There are several various vet shows with a lot of episodes and this could keep us happily entertained in the evenings. (nota bene, I made a festivid about vet shows.)
We all find Dr. Pol and his colleagues super engaging and my dad even shared a story I hadn't heard him tell before, about his dad pulling a calf. He said his dad put the pulling rope around his shoulders, put his feet up on the back of the cow, and put his whole weight into it. On the show they have a chain-and-ratchet method for pulling calves that are stuck.
My dad said, "We're farm people, but I wonder what non-farm people think of this show?" It's true that they show a lot of the down and dirty of small farms and I love this. Unlike some other vet shows, Dr. Pol does not over-treat or over-test. The vets also see all kinds of animals: lizards, turkeys, camels, reindeer, parrots, chickens, etc.
Catch Me if You Can has such a fun premise: Leo DiCaprio plays a young con man named Frank who gets jobs as an airline pilot, a doctor, and a lawyer. Tom Hanks plays the FBI agent who chases him down. Unfortunately this is played for Serious Drama and Daddy Issues, and was not for me, though overall I think it's an OK movie. The beginning and ending were too long and slow. An editor needed to cut a bunch of stuff out including a very cringey scene with Jennifer Garner as a high-end sex worker. Frank uses his forging skills to cheat her out of 1400 dollars and it's played like some kind of gross male fantasy.
The story goes something like, Frank really wants to please his father (Christopher Walken), and this leads him down a wrong path. The right path is finding a positive father figure in the Tom Hanks character.
If you like con artist stories, Leverage is just so much better. "The Pretender" is another example of a story where someone uses his genius skills to help people and is much more warm and fun.
The Terminal also has an interesting premise but it fails to deliver. An Eastern European man, Viktor (Tom Hanks) becomes temporarily stateless and gets stuck living in a airport. This was SUCH a frustrating movie, because it had a bunch of things going for it-- good actors, some comedy, a familiar setting that gets re-contextualized, and the potential to say something interesting. But the story structure was bad. You'd think that before someone spent all that money making a movie, they would make sure the story and script are good. That is the FIRST thing one should do, the foundation.
Stanley Tucci plays the antagonist, a guy in charge of the airport, and his character is all over the place, no clear motivation or development, does not act in any kind of consistent way. There was a great moment where I thought this story might be about resisting a police state (airport as metaphor/tiny police state), or finding ways to resist and de-escalate the conflict of policing, but of course it didn't hold up.
Catherine Zeta-Jones, similar. She spends the movie getting to know Viktor and breaking away from her bad boyfriend. But then in the end she goes back to the boyfriend for no reason.
Zoe Saldana and Diego Luna were both super cute, but their romance was not well developed and ended up making no sense at all.
So, anti-rec for this film.
What my family and I absolutely love watching is The Incredible Dr. Pol, a reality-based show about farm veterinarians in Michigan. Dr. Pol is an old man with a ton of energy, a ton of experience, humor, warmth, a great love for animals. It's streaming on Hulu and we watched 3 or 4 episodes before the technology gave up on me. We used to watch it on cable but my parents gave up cable; maybe I'll see if I can borrow some DVDs or something. There are several various vet shows with a lot of episodes and this could keep us happily entertained in the evenings. (nota bene, I made a festivid about vet shows.)
We all find Dr. Pol and his colleagues super engaging and my dad even shared a story I hadn't heard him tell before, about his dad pulling a calf. He said his dad put the pulling rope around his shoulders, put his feet up on the back of the cow, and put his whole weight into it. On the show they have a chain-and-ratchet method for pulling calves that are stuck.
My dad said, "We're farm people, but I wonder what non-farm people think of this show?" It's true that they show a lot of the down and dirty of small farms and I love this. Unlike some other vet shows, Dr. Pol does not over-treat or over-test. The vets also see all kinds of animals: lizards, turkeys, camels, reindeer, parrots, chickens, etc.
