The Imitation Game Movie Review

Maybe I’m just not easily impressed anymore. Maybe it’s because I rarely see any of the really bad movies anymore and so by comparison, the stuff that is really good seems so ordinary. The Imitation Game is supposed to be one of the year’s best movies, but it is so utterly conventional, I just found it sort of dull. This is the story of Alan Turing, the British mathematician who helped decode the messages churned out by Enigma, the Nazis’ communication device, which should be a ripe subject for a fascinating story. The machine Turing developed to break the code laid the foundation for modern computing.

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug Movie Review

Each of these dwarfs is just like the others...

As if the first chapter weren’t already interminable enough, the second part of The Hobbit has arrived. This one, subtitled The Desolation of Smaug, is the insufferable middle section of a trilogy that had no business being, at most, a single three hour movie. Like The Two Towers a decade ago, it’s a movie without beginning or conclusion and so it just feels like you’re awash in stuff that happens to characters. Only it’s far worse than The Two Towers because that was at least based on a book of its own whereas this is from part of a single book with lots of additional crap thrown in.

12 Years a Slave Movie Review

The terrible and embarrassing legacy of slavery is a dark mark on this country. It was a human atrocity that we have only just begun to understand. It remains, more than 150 years after its eradication, the defining factor in race relations. White people would not be where they are in terms of status and privilege without having held black people in bondage. And blacks continue to bear the burden of that time. I’m not sure any movie could possibly do perfect justice as a representation of the horrors of slavery, punishments, beatings, rapes, and other indignities that slaves suffered, but 12 Years a Slave comes closer than anything I’ve seen. This is possibly the least sanitized version ever put on film.

The Fifth Estate Movie Review

We’ve set up our society in the midst of the digital information age in such a way that we want everything and we want it now and if you have the opportunity to provide something and make an impact, you’d better do it this instant before someone beats you to it. There’s no prize for the guy who sits on an idea and gets beaten to the punch by his competitor. There’s no recognition for having had the idea first. Action counts. News works this way. Because of the Internet and 24 hour cable news there is no longer as much emphasis placed on getting a breaking story right as there is on just getting it out. The result is new reporting that is often shoddy, under-sourced, and sometimes entirely inaccurate.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy Movie Review

If you find yourself asking “What happened?” at the end of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, don’t assume you’re alone. This is not because it’s confounding to the point of being indecipherable, but rather for its insistence on avoiding the clichés of spy thrillers that we’ve grown so accustomed to.

To summarize the plot could take all day. Based on the John le Carré novel, the story is set at the upper echelons of British Intelligence in the thick of the Cold War, when Britain and Russia each had spies working to subvert the other and each likely had moles working in the other’s foreign office. Le Carré knows something about British Intelligence, having worked there for many years before retiring and devoting himself full time to writing spy thrillers. His work is the antithesis to Ian Fleming’s James Bond series, which rely heavily on action and thrills, where Bond’s moral clarity is rarely, if ever, questioned. The characters that le Carré creates live in a world of moral ambiguity. Their conflicts are within their own offices and directed internally much more than toward any foreign power. That this story involves the presence of a well-placed mole at the top of British Intelligence is just par for the course.