Posts Tagged ‘1960s’

Short Take: Redeems the first sequel. A fun an fulfilling ride.

Director: Barry Sonnenfeld

Screenwriter: Etan Cohen; Lowell Cunningham (comic)

Cast: Will Smith, Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin, Jemaine Clement, Emma Thompson

Length: 1h 46m

Synopsis: Long before K (Jones) and J (Smith) became partners there was a nefarious alien named Boris the Animal (Clement), who by some stroke of luck was captured sans one arm back in 1969 by K and sent to a prison on the Moon. Now, forty years later, Boris has escaped and is looking to get revenge. His plan is to time travel back to 1969 and kill K, allowing himself to roam free and eventually lead his race to taking over the Earth. When J realizes K is missing, the MIB claim he had been dead for forty years. After traveling back in time himself, J must prevent K’s murder and help ensure the correct passing of events to protect the future. The trouble is, the younger K (Brolin) and ‘60s MIB have a hard time believing J’s predicament. In earning the trust of the younger version of the partner he’d known for years, J tries to take advantage of the opportunity to find out more about K than his older self would divulge. As it so happens, what he discovers changes their relationship forever.

Read the rest of this entry »

Short Take: Though it bares no relation, it has a chance to be as memorable and cherished as "Fried Green Tomatoes"

Director: Tate Taylor

Screenwriter: Tate Taylor, Kathryn Stockett (novel)

Cast: Viola Davis, Emma Stone, Bryce Dallas Howard, Octavia Spencer, Jessica Chastain, Allison Janney, Sissy Spacek

Length: 2h 17m

Synopsis: Rural Mississippi in the 1960s, before the civil rights movement gained much momentum, was a cesspool of racism and bigotry. In the town of Jackson, where every upper-middle class housewife hires the services of a negro maid to cook, clean, and raise her children, recent college grad Skeeter (Stone) decides to collect testimonies from the maids of her friends and neighbors. Looking to reveal the level of hardship these women go through on a daily basis, Skeeter’s project commences with the testament of a maid named Aibileen (Davis) who works for her friend Hilly (Howard). As the stories get darker Skeeter can’t help but become more involved, and before she knows it her sympathies for negroes ostracizes her. She and the women she interviews, with tensions growing throughout the town, grow increasingly disconcerted, but despite the dangerous risks they take they must believe that their collaboration is for a higher purpose. When fortune smiles and Skeeter’s work is published as a compilation of anonymous depositions a palpable sense of relief can be felt, as though the gravity of what they accomplished had drastically changed their world in an instant. However, the reality is that what they had done had not yet changed their world as they had hoped, but it did begin to change. And in a town where progress hadn’t been seen in ages, to see it again at all is enough to provide hope that they might get to see even more of it.

Read the rest of this entry »

Short Take: Action packed and emotionally arresting. Rivals "X2" for best of the series.

Director: Matthew Vaughn

Screenwriters: Ashley Miller, Zack Stentz, Jane Goldman, Matthew Vaughn – Sheldon Turner and Bryan Singer (story)

Cast: James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Kevin Bacon, Rose Byrne, January Jones

Length: 2h 12m

Synopsis: It is 1963 and the world is still largely unaware of the presence of mutants. This is not to say that they are few in number, but most are still very much in the closet. There are a few, however, that are not shy about their abilities. Sebastian Shaw (Bacon), an ex-Nazi who ran the concentration camp where Erik Lehnsherr (Fassbender) was separated from his family, is a mutant who is trying to manipulate the American and Soviet governments into nuclear war. Meanwhile, mutants Charles Xavier (McAvoy) and Lehnsherr are attempting to recruit a special team of fellow gifted individuals to stop Shaw before it’s too late. But while Xavier is determined to avoid violent methods whenever possible, Erik is looking to get revenge on his former captor by any means necessary. How their battle concludes will not only affect how mutants will be looked at for years to come – as friends or foes – but whether humans will continue to outnumber mutants across the world.

Read the rest of this entry »

Short Take: Solemnly beautiful to no end

Director: Mark Romanek

Screenwriters: Alex Garland (screenplay), Kazuo Ishiguro (novel)

Cast: Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley, Andrew Garfield

Length: 1h 43m

Synopsis: During the 1960s, Ruth (Knightley), Tommy (Garfield), and Kathy (Mulligan) begin their early years as students of the Hailsham boarding school for “special” children. Such children are the clones of humans, created to provide healthy organs for their originals later in life. The school’s main function is to keep these children healthy and indoctrinate them into accepting their purpose. Early on, Kathy and Tommy, both being outsiders of their respective social corners, begin to form a strong bond between each other. Each has seemingly fallen for the other, until Ruth pursues and woos Tommy herself. When all three turn eighteen they graduate to living outside of the school, with Ruth and Tommy still a couple and supposedly good friends with Kathy. Both girls are aware that the connection between Tommy and Kathy is real and the one between Tommy and Ruth is not, yet because of various reasons neither Tommy nor Kathy look to disrupt the status quo. This arrangement, however, does not last forever. When the inevitable happens and the three begin fulfilling their “purposes,” their true natures begin to surface – or rather, they do all they can to prove that they have true natures.

Read the rest of this entry »