Can a movie be considered great just for one single scene that may last as little as one minute? This possibility is very rare but for the movie Unforgiven which came out in 1992 a scene like this did occur. Of course a movie could never be great if only one single scene was great in the whole movie. The quality of the film has to be there for the whole 2 hours, but for the movie Unforgiven, this one single scene changed it from a very good movie to a great one.

Unforgiven was directed by Clint Eastwood , who won a best Director Oscar as did the movie which won best picture. Unforgiven was an old fashioned Western and all of the best scenes had to do with the huge vistas which were shot most likely because of the reduced costs in Alberta Canada. The story was very basic, easy to follow and the mostly had to do with revenge. Morgan Freeman was excellent in his role as Eastwood’s character’s “Billy Munny” best friend and Gene Hackman in one of his best roles was also great as the antagonist in this movie.

The big payoff for me with the Unforgiven was of course the great ending, but the scene that was one of the greatest in the history of movies came in the middle where Eastwood put the camera at an “up angle” to his characters face towards the sky and and in response to the regrets of the young man who killed someone a few moments earlier, there was a pause and he said one simple line: “We all got it coming kid”. This one scene is so profound there is a special video on Youtube for this one minute moment in this great film.

If you have not seen this great movie, you owe it to yourself to see it. It could be considered the greatest Western ever made.

Is it possible for 3 actors to peak 24 years ago? When you look at the history of Tom Cruise , Jack Nicholson , and Demi Moore and a great serious role that they were lucky enough to get, one could argue very strongly that the best movie all three of them were  in was “A Few Good Men” , which came out in 1992.

As far as Tom Cruise he has never been better in any movie, and that includes “Born on the Fourth of July” which came out in 1989. For some unknown and insane reason Cruise was not even nominated for a best actor or even best supporting actor academy award proving once again that there are some major problems with the voting for this award. Jack Nicholson was nominated for best supporting actor and Demi Moore, in arguably her best ever movie role was not nominated for any award which considering her great performance in this movie is ridiculous. Rob Reiner was not even nominated for a best Director Oscar for this movie, which is another snub for one of the best movies he has ever made. The movie was nominated for a best picture Oscar but did not win, in 1992 the movie “The Unforgiven”, which is another great movie won. I will be reviewing that movie in this blog as well.

The acting in this movie was some of the best I have ever seen and this is largely due to the incredible on point writing of Aaron Sorkin , who was also ignored by the academy for this great screenplay.  In my opinion A Few Good Men is one of the best pictures of the last 25 years and for all who have not seen it, owe it to themselves to see this great movie.

IMDB – A Few Good Men

According to Dictionary.com, the adjective plausible means:

Having an appearance of truth or reason; seemingly worthy of approval or acceptance; credible; believable:
a plausible excuse; a plausible plot.

The entire premise of the movie “Criminal” is about the process of injecting the memories of one human being who has died into another person who is alive and is a dangerous criminal. Unfortunately the fact that a medical procedure like this is impossible is irrelevant to everyone who decided to make this ridiculous movie. Perhaps 500 years from now something like this will be possible through a brain transplant or some other means using computers but most likely not from injecting cells from one brain to another brain.  Had this movie been set in the distant future then perhaps it would have been a better experience, but this movie is set in the present day and from the beginning idea of transferring the memories of one brain to another is downright stupid and from there there is no reason to continue watching this mess.

For some unknown reason, Hollywood producers seem to be in love with the concept of one character becoming another character and having the memories of another person.  The movie “Face Off” is one example of this,   “Selfless” , which came out last year starting Ryan Reynolds , who is also in this movie is another example.  There are several other movies over the years with this theme of personality transfer and the plausibility and believe-ability of an idea like this means nothing to the producers. Perhaps the box office numbers for this idea has worked in the past, so the producers believe that if it works once then it will just have to work again.

Making matters worse is that the overall story of Criminal is a bad one. Some kind of spy played by Ryan Reynolds is killed before he is able to give valuable information to his CIA bosses about a mastermind who is trying to obtain software that can control nuclear devices. The idea to then inject his memories into an insane criminal played by Kevin Costner really makes no sense here but perhaps the thought was that this experiment was to see if injecting the personality of a good person into an insane criminal would make the criminal a better person? This stupid idea also does not work in this movie.

Kevin Costner has made a good number of bad movies lately, the last few include McFarland USA and Black and White . I was also surprised to see great actors like Tommy Lee Jones and Gary Oldman in this bad movie and it made me think that there must not be too many good scripts out there for quality actors anymore because this was a pretty bad movie that should definitely be missed.