Captain Phillips Movie Review

The difference between bad acting and good acting is fairly obvious to most people. It’s the difference between stiff mimicry and genuine imitation, or even expression, of emotion. But to distinguish between good and great acting is something else. There’s a much more subtle distinction. It comes down not only to how well the actor reads a line of dialogue or how convincingly he portrays an emotional moment, but to the choices he makes and the wholesale embodiment of the emotional dips and rises that the scene demands. I can understand how an actor depicts certain emotions. I can imagine working myself up to a frenzy for a manic scene or well up with anger to express rage. I can even imagine pushing myself to a dark place to show sadness or melancholy. But as Captain Richard Phillips, the cargo ship captain who was held hostage for several days by Somali pirates in 2009, Tom Hanks gives us one final scene that is so off-the-charts good, it mesmerizes and reveals exactly how brilliant his choices were for the first two hours.

The Hunger Games Movie Review

I like futuristic dystopia stories for what they suggest about humanity at present and where we are ultimately headed if we continue down certain paths. But I generally like the vision to make some sense. I don’t necessarily demand a lot of back story and exposition to explain how the future became such as it is, but I would like it to make some sense according to what I know of the world today. Even when our real life timeline inevitably reaches the fictional year of some such movie or story and it turns out the vision hasn’t really panned out, in the best ones we can find some parallels and maybe say, “Well, it’s not 100 percent accurate but I can still see it as a possibility.” The year 2001 came and went and although we have yet to develop the capabilities to forge deep space travel as depicted in 2001: A Space Odyssey, we have been to the moon since the film’s 1968 release and humanity has explored (via unmanned probes) the far reaches of our solar system. Blade Runner presents a vision of Los Angeles in 2019 that is not close to coming to fruition, but still looks like a possibility in some more distant future.