Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is arguably my favorite Quentin Tarantino’s (Inglorious Bastards, Django Unchained) movie. However, that isn’t saying a lot since he is not one of my favorite directors out there. I admit that there is an audience for his movies. I’m just not a part of that audience. For me, his films are too often over the top, are loaded with extreme and unneeded violence, and contain the foulest language you’ll hear from a big-budget movie any year that one of his movies was released. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was FAR different than his previous eight films. The story was not over the top. The cursing, while present, was used to accent a verbal exchange rather than serve as the root of it. And outside of a 10-15 minute sequence, there wasn’t any over-the-top violence. This movie was long and a bit boring, but it wasn’t bad. It also had excellent acting performances.
Category Archives: Emile Hirsch
Lone Survivor (2013)
It took the entire year to find it, but the last must-see movie of 2013 proved to be the most emotional and tear-jerking movie of the year. With apologies to 12 Years A Slave, which was very gut-wrenching at times, Lone Survivor is the movie that plays with your heartstrings like no other. Mark Wahlberg (The Fighter, The Perfect Storm) gives the performance of his lifetime as Marcus Luttrell, the only surviving member of a four-person Navy SEALs team on the now infamous failed Operation Red Wings mission of 2005. The covert mission is simple enough. The four SEALs are to find notorious Taliban loyalist Ahmad Shah, a man currently residing in a village in Afghanistan who is responsible for killing 20 US marines a week earlier. Intel has informed him of his location, and the team knows what to look for because Shahd has no ear lobes. They are informed of the terrain, the mission’s dangers, and the engagement rules. The mission’s main goal was reconnaissance and surveillance of Shah and then informing the waiting military team, who had the authorization to launch an air strike on the village to take out Shah and his men.
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Into The Wild (2007)
The Sean Penn (The Crossing Guard, The Pledge) directed Into the Wild had all the promise of a movie that could have lived in the lives of high school students around the country for years to come. The novel of the same name, penned by Jon Krakauer, is part of the high school curriculum in many school systems around the country. The movie is rated R. I’ve seen it twice. Had a couple of scenes been toned down, the movie could have easily garnered a PG-13 rating, thus allowing it to be viewed in English class after reading the book. I don’t know if Penn thought about this when making the movie and, if he did, if he even cared. It is, however, food for thought.