Man’s inhumanity to man. The year 2008 and the following nightmare of the housing crisis which almost brought down the economy of the entire world is yet another example of “mans inhumanity to man”. Mega rich billionaires were given the ability to do whatever they wanted in an attempt to revive an economy that was in bad shape since the internet bubble and bear market of March 2000 to October 2002. Home loans for any dollar amount were given to everyone regardless of their income or even if they had no job. As a result because of the leverage caused by all this; the insane loans that were given to so many Americans who soon defaulted resulted in the worst housing bubble in US history and created a disaster that has almost quadrupled the National Debt of the United States.

The movie 99 Homes is about what happens to people when they can’t get a job for a long period of time or when they can no longer afford their adjustable rate mortgages. What happens is they are cruelly evicted from their houses, regardless of whether they have children or are very old or are waiting for a legal proceeding that might save them. Unscrupulous criminals are then able to take advantage of this situation to the determent of so many people who are forced out of their houses. During the housing bubble and subsequent economic disaster that started in 2007; appliances were stolen and houses were trashed as the people abandoned their houses. What this movie showed is that some criminals were removing these appliances illegally and then charging Fannie May for the replacement of these appliances and pocketing the profits. This movie is about criminals who will do anything to get rich and could care less if they ruin many lives to get there. This movie is also about a young man who gets caught up in this criminal activity after his own family home was foreclosed on and in the end he develops a conscience.

This movie was very well done and very well acted and is highly recommended. The actors Andrew Garfield and Micheal Shannon did a very good job in this movie. Micheal Shannon might be a candidate for best actor.

IMDB 99 Homes

According to a display at the beginning of this movie: “Sicario in Mexican means Hit Man”. This movie points out some horrible life realities about Mexico and the poor that we all already know about. When you are so poor that your future life will mean living on the streets then the only way to survive is to either illegally break into the United States or lead a life of crime which mostly includes drug trafficking.

Recent news events and comments about illegal immigration in this country from the likes of Donald Trump is at the center of this movie which is about major drug king pins from Columbia and Mexico and tunnels that lead from Mexico into Arizona and Texas. This movie is also about revenge and a strategy by the CIA and FBI to flush out the worst and highest ranking drug criminals to get them to reveal not only themselves by their higher contacts in Mexico and Columbia in an attempt to reduce drug trafficking from the top down.

This movie was well made for the most part but during other scenes it was kind of slow, not really moving forward for some time. There was a long scene in the beginning of this movie which involved a long convoy of SUV’s driving through many miles of Mexican roads through crime country, that eventually lead to a major shootout on a highway which was highly unusual in how it eventually came about. The acting was very solid throughout and the ending scenes which involve revenge of of a Colombian drug agent working with the CIA was very well done but at the same time very disturbing. Emily Blunt did a fine job as the lead in this movie but just like her character she seemed at times over her head with some of the extreme violence in some of the scenes.

I do recommend this movie.

IMDB Sicaro Movie

This movie does live up to the hype and the movie trailers and the anticipated special effects. The director Ridley Scott , who is most famous for many of his space movies starting with Alien in 1979 directed this movie about a group of Astronauts who have to suddenly leave Mars because of a very bad storm that hits the area where they have been living. During the evacuation, one Astronaut played by Matt Damon is impaled by an antenna and knocked some distance from the space ship that would have taken all 6 of them off of the planet. The remaining 5 astronauts believe that Matt Damon’s character has been killed and some months later it is discovered that he not only survived but is continuing to survive on his own on the planet by grown his own potato plants. Too much of the movie is devoted to the mostly boring planting of the potato plants and the difference science Damon’s character uses to survive eventually finding the first Mars space probe from 1997 and even the small space car that dug for soil samples so many years earlier. Its this 1997 space probe that provides the method how Damon can communicate with earth and begin the long process to save his life and return home.

The year this movie takes place is not really made that clear, unless I missed that somewhere, but the science and technology seems to be about 10 years in the future. I wonder if the current group of people trying to go to Mars for life will watch this film and change their mind about going. As they say in the movie, there about a million things that can go wrong on any mission to Mars.

The ending of this movie was not good enough and involved some Hollywood drama that was rather ridiculous for dramatic effect. A decision was made to put a bomb on the spaceship in order to link with Damon’s spaceship to somehow make up the distance between the two spaceships. I thought this ending was rather stupid and not up to the quality of the rest of this movie.

I highly recommend this movie despite the unsatisfactory ending.

The Martian IMDB