Serenity was a picturesque but very complicated movie to put across. It’s the story of a teenage boy (Rafael Sayegh) who escapes into technology for relief from his and his mother’s horrible lives with an abusive stepfather.

The movie starts literally with a teenage boy’s eyes and your tv screen fills with the computer instructions he is working on. The camera then rushes over beautiful waters to his real father Baker Dill’s (Matthew McConaughey) fishing boat life in which he has no cares except to keep his boat running. He doesn’t even seem to realize or remember he has a son until his ex-wife (Anne Hathaway) arrives before her abusive obnoxious rich husband (played very well by Jason Clarke). The ex-wife asks Dill to kill her husband for $10 million which he refuses to do.

They seem to be kind of deadpan characters at first. The townspeople gave you the feeling of the tv show Cheers—”you ought to go where everybody knows your name” and your personal business. After Matthew McConaughey played in two of my favorite dramatic movies starring him—Amistad and A Time to Kill—he began making movies with characters similar to how this movie began with him being selfish and not caring about anything or anybody except catching the biggest tuna known to man, losing customers along the way.

thought it was a very different part for Anne Hathaway which gave the movie a film noire feel. She usually plays perky but serious young women in romantic comedies except for her dramas like Les Miserables in which she played Fantine, a dying prostitute. Dill’s partner, Duke (Djimon Hounsou), is the conscience of the movie all along and begs Dill not to kill the man.

The son’s imagination is creating all of this to get away from his abusive life. Then the science fiction aspect of the story takes over when Dill is approached by a man (a strait-laced “suit”) who tries to sell him a fish-finder to find the biggest tuna in the islands. But it turns out that the fish-finder salesman (Jeremy Strong) is actually the rules in the program/game who ask him not to kill the boy’s stepfather because it was not in the original program.

Meanwhile, the real son is planning to murder his real stepfather. I will not tell the ending, but it was quite a twist to find out other details which will not be revealed until the end. And, yes, there is nudity in the movie with Dill carousing with the local rich woman Constance’s (Diane Lane) partial nudity who pays him for sex basically.   And, Anne Hathaway’s mostly partial nudity in front of Jason Clarke’s abusive husband and in sex with Matthew McConaughey as she tries to convince him to murder her new husband.

Director Stephen Knight also wrote the screenplay.   The movie was released January 25, 2019: budget 25 million; box office 11.4 million.

Written by Rosa L. Griffin

You can write fiction to include historical figures like King Leopold II of Belgium or Samuel L. Jackson’s George Washington Williams character.    Williams was a real-life Civil War soldier, Baptist minister, historian, politician, lawyer, and journalist who died in his 40s.

I went to a movie theater to see this movie because I like Swedish actor Alexander Skarsgaard as an actor.   I first saw him in the HBO television series “True Blood” when he portrayed the vampire sheriff. 

Over 200 films have featured author Edgar Rice Burroughs’ character, a white orphan raised by apes in the African jungle.   A multitude of different white men have played as Tarzan since 1918, either in the flesh or in voiceovers.   I had seen all of the Johnny Weissmuller movies in which Johnny portrayed the fictional Tarzan, Lord Greystoke.   Weismuller was a 5-time Olympic gold medalist who made 12 Tarzan movies beginning in 1932.  For decades, Tarzan was Hollywood’s biggest foreign export.   In the 1966 NBC series, Ron Ely did his own stunts in his portrayal of Tarzan and ended up with lion bites and broken bones.  

What I didn’t like about the Tarzan character as I was growing up was that Africans were always portrayed as big-eyed and hopping around comically, always earning Tarzan’s vengeance or salvation.  The name Tarzan literally meant “White Skin”.   I also noticed that not all of the Tarzans were comfortable walking around in a loincloth whether in movies or television shows.

The Legend of Tarzan is the best of all the Tarzan movies.  It was made to reflect what is going on in the world today.  “For the first time in the franchise, black lives matter.”  There are many things I liked about this movie:

1. The romance between Tarzan and Jane was different than in the Weismuller movies.  Jane (Australian Margot Robbie) was portrayed as Tarzan’s equal in many ways.
2. Skarsgaard, being tall and lean, built up a lot of muscles for the movie.
3. There was a dignified portrayal of African tribes made up of brave and intelligent men and women which is our history.
4. In the movie, Tarzan seemed to be ashamed to be thought of as the book character published at that time and only seemed to relate to children as Tarzan. 
5. The poignant part of the story of a younger Tarzan killing a chief’s son because the young tribesman killed Tarzan’s ape “mother” and the chief (played by Benin-born Djimon Hounsou) grieved and swore revenge over the loss of his son, resulting in his giving Leopold’s cause a box full of diamonds.
6. The villainous Captain Leon Rom, played by Austrian Christophe Waltz, traded Tarzan for diamonds for King Leopold, “ruler” over the Congo.
7. The CGI special effects, especially of the gorillas and other animals, were perfect.
8. And, of course, Samuel L. Jackson, played George Washington Williams, who convinced fictional Tarzan to come out of retirement to help prove the slavery situation in Africa’s Belgian Congo which Williams actually promoted in letters.  

This movie, The Legend of Tarzan, was directed by David Yates, and written by Adam Cozad and Craig Brewer.   The movie cost $180 million to make and earned $356.7 million at the box office.

Sources noted in the articles below:

Keegan, Rebecca, Los Angeles Times Movies, “Can You Make a Non-racist Tarzan Movie?” latimes.com, July 1, 2016.

Price, Lydia, “15 Hunky Actors Who’ve Played Tarzan Throughout the Years”, https://people.com, June 30, 2016.

Bady, Aron, “The Only Good Tarzan is a Bad Tarzan”, Pacific Standard, July 8, 2016.

Hughey, Matthew.  The White Savior Film: Content, Critics, and Consumption.   Temple University Press.  2014.

Hochschild, Adam.  King Leopold’s Ghost:  A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa.  Mariner Books, 1998.

Written by Rosa L. Griffin

In 1986, I buried my father without shedding a tear for him.  He seemed a nice man, but he was always distant, like he didn’t belong in this family with six kids.  But, one day, a year later, I was walking across the President Street open-air parking lot at the Harbor.   A man walked past me smoking a pipe, and right away, I was in full cry mode for my father who smoked a pipe and cigars.  I cried for a full block.

This type of thing is sort of what Collateral Beauty is about.   The phrase “Remember the Collateral Beauty” is a line spoken in the movie a few times.

Howard, a working, inspiring, idea-filled, and happy man (played by Will Smith) co-partnered with Whit (played by Edward Norton) at a non-Madison Avenue ad agency.  The major officers of the company were Claire (played by Kate Winslet) and Simon (played by Michael Peña).   Howard is 60/40 with Whit in the partnership.

But, as soon as his six-year-old daughter dies, he loses every interest he ever had in life except riding his bike and building things with dominoes all day at work instead of working.   The partnership, his wife, talking, and, even eating no longer mattered to him.

Howard’s colleague-friends devise an ingenious plan to try to reach him and bring their dying company back to life.   They hire a detective and three actors to confront him about love, time, and death—his three stratagems that move people to buy products.

The acting was top shelf by everyone.  However, three characters stood out to me.   Time/Raffi was played by young actor, Jacob Lattimore (The Maze Runner).  He was refreshing and strong.   The investigator, Sally, was played by Ann Dowd (The Leftovers) whom I’ve seen in a number of roles.  Although she was behind the scenes in practically every scene, she was great in what her character was allowed to say.   Simon was played by Michael Peña (Antman I & 2, Battle: Los Angeles, A Wrinkle in Time, Gone in 60 Seconds, My Fellow Americans).   It was wonderful to see him in another dramatic role.

This movie, Collateral Beauty, was perfect for Will Smith (7 Pounds, The Pursuit of Happyness, I am Legend, Suicide Squad, Hitch, Men in Black, etc.), Helen Mirren (Prime Suspect, Red 1 & 2, Winchester, The Nutcracker and The Four Realms, Calendar Girls, The Leisure Seeker, Hitchcock), Edward Norton (The Illusionist, Red Dragon, The Grand Budapest Hotel, American History X, The Painted Veil), Keira Knightley (Love Actually, Colette, The Nutcracker and The Four Realms, several Pirates of the Caribbean movies), Kate Winslet (Titanic, Love Actually, Divergent, The Holiday, Sense and Sensibility), and Naomie Harris (28 Days Later, a few Pirates of the Caribbean movies).*   

There were unexpected twists and turns, especially at the end.   Also, there were many sad parts, but the movie was heart-warming, not depressing.    I wish I had seen this movie on the big screen but thank God for the library’s DVD service.

Written by Rosa L. Griffin

*Movies mentioned are movies I have actually seen

The worst part was the terrible comical werewolf mask that made up the “old” werewolf (Brion James) who infected a Mom (Jeanne Bates).  The werewolf looked more like a comic version of a vampire.   Creating a more realistic mask would have added more horror to the movie.   Other than that, the acting was great for a movie of its type:  horror/comedy.  

A “guy” comes to a mother’s door answering an ad for a room.   It turns out that he’s a werewolf.   Mom is extremely naïve, because he posed as a blind man which creeped me out, but it didn’t creep Mom out at all.

Her son (Mark Thomas Miller) was a newsman who visited his Mom often especially after finding out that she was killing people because she was a werewolf.   So, her son decides to keep her locked up in her own room in her own house to protect her from herself.   Her son asked a doctor to come to his Mom’s house to examine her, but Mom buried the doctor in the back yard like a bone.  

Mom had a daughter who was very well-to-do and lived out of state.    But her daughter never visited and sent Mom a pair of dime-store slippers once a year.  The one time her daughter visited, her Mom ate her.

However, Mom did not kill her pregnant daughter-in-law nor her son who each treated Mom with the respect a good mother deserves.   I did like the idea of a good Mom kicking ass, but a few innocent people getting killed goes with the territory.

Director was Patrick Rand.   The writers were Patrick Rand and Kevin Watson.

Written by Rosa L. Griffin