Only because of the fact that “Call me by Your Name” along with “The Shape of Water” are both nominated for best picture this year and the ratings for this movie are incredibly in the high 90’s on rotten-tomatoes, I decided to see this film. For the life of me, I cannot understand why anyone likes this boring, overly long story about a man in his early 30’s and a young boy in his teens – who are trying to decide if they are gay – was ever made into a movie – much less liked by anyone. There is no real story here, just a series of boring scenes in an old town in Italy and I could not wait until it was all over and in the end, after about 2 hours I had to leave early because I just could not stand the whole bad experience.

Considering that 9 movies are nominated now for the Academy Awards and a great movie like “Molly’s Game” was not even nominated and this one was, tells me that there is something very wrong with the voting process for the Academy Awards. As far as the performances, by Armie Hammer who is not gay and the other actor – they were OK but the agony of sitting through this mess was so bad I didn’t even notice. There was also way too much smoking in this movie, even considering that it was set in the year 1983. The sexual scenes were done tastefully, with the exception of one disgusting scene involving a peach that I thought was in very poor taste.

This is one of the worst movies I have seen for a while, and one of the rare times I have walked out of a film before it was over. Do yourself a favor and miss this very bad waste of 2 hours.

I have heard some prominent reviewers comparing the new Western “Hostiles” starring Christian Bale to Clint Eastwood’s masterpiece from 1992 “Unforgiven” and while I agree that this is a good Western, with a very simple story and very well done, it is not anywhere near as good as Unforgiven, which arguably has the best line and scene in any movie of all time, (see video below) and is the best Western ever made. Anytime I see a good Western, it reminds me what a horrible time that was to be alive. Killing people indiscriminately was as routine as brushing your teeth, even including women and children, and US soldiers killed just as brutally as Indians. Life was very hard in those days, and if you got sick or even a small flesh wound or infection, odds are high that you are going to die. There was no medicine or pain killers other than alcohol and the all of the important medical discoveries were years into the future.

I thought the screenplay for this movie was very well written because the story was kept very simple and eventually wound up as a group of soldiers, Indians and civilians making their way to different locations while being attacked my savage Indians. There was not that much more to the story, but the simplicity I thought was the best part of this film along with the scenes of the great vistas of the Western United States.

I recommend Hostiles.