In life, we all know that there is a price to pay for everything. Everything we buy and everything that most of us sometimes take for granted. There has always been a huge price for being young. Most of the time you have no money of your own, you are at the mercy of your parents which can be both good and bad, you have to worry about fitting in at school and figure out what you want to do with the rest of your life and for many of us, 17 or 18 is too young of an age to know what you want to do as an adult. In recent years bullying has become a huge problem in this country mostly because there are so many more ways to bully someone with the advancement of the internet, social media and smartphones. It seems teenagers are now even more cruel now than they have ever been which makes the entire difficult task of becoming and adult that much more challenging. Add to this the stress of tests, SAT’s, hormones, confusion, trying to figure out who you are and it is a wonder any of us were able to survive 4 years of high school. The unique phenomenon of bullying is all about some sick damaged kid trying to find some kind of temporary sadistic relief from their own misery with the thrill of making some other kid feel worse than they do. The problem of bullying is rampant and it seems there have been no real solutions offered in the last few years.

Since the 2008 crisis the plight of 20-year-olds has become much worse, with the incredible rise of college costs, the guaranteed money you will probably owe when you graduate from college and facing the impossibility in many cases of ever getting any decent job for a long period of time. The realization that owning your own home is going to be much more difficult than it was for your parents, if this ever happens for you and facing a life long possibility of having to rent an apartment where the rents increase every year, mostly due to the housing crisis in 2008. If that were not enough, the realization that social security will probably not be there for you when you need to be able to retire is another problem facing you in the future. These are not good times for young people in this country, unfortunately.

The movie “The Edge of Seventeen” is a very good story about the very difficult late adolescent years of a 17 year old girl Nadine, played extremely well by Hailee Steinfeld, who has proven herself to be not only a great dramatic actor with her Academy Award nomination in 2010 for True Grit and a very good singer, but now a highly skilled comedic actress in this movie. Ironically Hailee herself was bullied while in high school, which eventually lead her to be home schooled. There are a series of life events in this movie, some depressing but many funny, especially the conversations between Nadine and one of her teachers played very well by Woody Harelson. Woody and Hailee have a very strong chemistry together and the contrast between her manic nervous personality and his extremely calm laid back demeanor is one of the many highlights of this very well made film. The actress Kyra Sedgwick plays Nadine’s mother and Nadine’s best friend is played by Haley Lu Richardson and both were very good in their roles. This movie was both unusual in dealing with the very common problem of adolescence and growing up which is more difficult now than it has ever been.

I thought this movie was well acted with a very solid story line and was also very funny despite the sometimes very difficult story. This movie was also produced by James L. Brooks which is another sign of the great quality of this production. I highly recommend this film.

The movie “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” is without a doubt the most unusual war related movie I have ever seen. Within the first 30 minutes it became pretty obvious that the entire purpose of this film and the reason why it was made was to prove that treating war hero’s like Football stars or like any other celebrity makes absolutely no sense, most especially when they are first returning home from some battle scarring incident and they are still recovering from the mental and physical damage. The question I asked myself within the first 30 minutes of this movie was, “is the obvious point this story is trying to make enough to justify and sustain a two-hour movie?” My conclusion for the most part when the film completed was, that no it was not. Much to my surprise I found a great deal of this film rather boring because most of the story involves a group of soldiers and the main character Billy Lynn, played by newcomer Joe Alwyn getting ready for and attending a halftime ceremony for them during a football game. Another backstory involving a film producer, played by Steve Martin had to do with putting these soldiers in some kind of a movie portraying what they went through in IRAQ and for the most part I thought that this part of the story was unnecessary and could have been something that was added on to make the movie last a full two hours. The director Ang Lee directed this film and from the trailers I have seen and Lee’s involvement, I was expecting a classic war movie, but instead I was overall pretty disappointed.

The acting was good in this film, including Kristen Stewart who played Lynn’s sister and Vin Diesel who plays an army Sargent and squad leader in IRAQ were both very good in their roles, but unfortunately not enough to save this film. The comedy actor Chris Tucker also makes an appearance in this movie as a Hollywood agent trying to negotiate a movie deal for the soldiers. I thought that he seemed to be somewhat miscast in his role and the entire movie idea did not really work, given the subject matter. There are many flashbacks in this movie showing the main battle the soldiers and Billy Lynn were involved in and the movie did a good job showing some of the psychological damage war can do to anyone, including even the insane desire to return to battle after miraculously surviving certain death.

I give this film a very marginal recommendation, mainly because it was way too boring for too high a percentage of time and the point of the story was not compelling enough to warrant a two-hour movie.

While watching the beginning of this excellent science fiction movie about the arrival of aliens entitled “Arrival”, I remember thinking after seeing the tragedy the main character in this movie Dr. Louise Banks goes through in the very beginning of this story, “How can anyone get through something like that and go on with their life afterward?” Then I thought that one way would be to be called to help the United States Military to communicate with Aliens that just arrived in the form of 12 egg-like pods around the world. At least the importance and the enormity of a task like this would be something that would at least distract her from her recent tragedy, so that just maybe she would be temporarily able to move on with her life. As it turns out this tragedy at the beginning of this film, is a thread that connects all the elements of this entire story and results in a surprise ending that might be considered as surprising and impressive as “The Sixth Sense”, that was released in 1999.

The part of Dr. Banks is played very well by Amy Adams is a world famous professor and linguist and should a miracle on the scale of aliens visiting us from some other world, millions or billions of light years away ever happen, who better to be called than an expert on Language and Communication and Mathematics. The Mathematics professor role is also played by very well Jeremy Renner. Over the years many movies about aliens visiting us from other planets have been made but this is the first one I can remember that had everything to do with the cerebral aspects of such an event, rather than the same old special effects and war confrontations almost every other movie like this has been made before. For the first time in my experience with movies like this, the science aspects of how the world would handle this kind of an amazing event was addressed. During an an alien visit like this one, we would have great difficulty communicating with the aliens, they would not look like us at all (in this case they looked like Octopus-like creatures), everything about the way they think would be different including how they would interact with all the laws of physics including most importantly, the aspect of time. In this movie it was suggested that these aliens do not think of time in a linear way, instead, their concept of time can exist at any point in time. Any alien method of writing and communicating would be vastly different that ours; in this case, the aliens write using smoke-like circular symbols that Dr. Banks works on translating during a majority of this film. I thought all of the science and mathematics behind trying to understand these very complex smoke circles was extremely well done in this movie and even believable, when the communication codes behind them were finally understood towards the end of the story.

As would happen in real life, the Unites States military is involved with the alien arrival and the head of the operation Colonel Weber is played very well by Forest Whitaker. During the movie, there are several conflicts between the scientists and the military as well as the decisions of other countries in dealing with the other alien spaceships that have landed in 11 other locations around the world. When the word “weapon” comes up during the conversations with the alien creatures, several countries starting with China overreact and this causes some major conflicts as the movie concludes. The conclusion of this movie is both surprising and outstanding and ties everything together perfectly and for me reminded me of the ending of the Sixth Sense.

The movie Arrival is a great production and gets my highest recommendation.