The new movie The Commuter” is another example of a screenwriter trying to find something new and different within a genre that we have all seen many times before, “Intrigue and murder on a train”. The problem with trying too hard to be different and new within something done so many times before is that the job of creating the story is even more difficult because of the problem of plausibility. How can you make something so new and at the same time make the whole thing believable? This is where this movie fails, because I didn’t believe the story.

There were things to like about this movie, including the star Liam Neeson and some comments about his financial problems because of the 2008 financial crisis that the whole world can relate to and the other harsh reality of so many commuters in this world who have to take a crowded train to work, five days a week, which is something I could never do. Mainly because of the story, that I did not really believe, I can only give this film a very marginal recommendation.

Any time Steven Spielberg is involved in making a movie as a director or producer, you just have to go and see what its all about. Spielberg’s new film The Post” is a movie about something that happened in history, and this kind of film has always been my favorite because you may learn something you never knew. All us know how bad and how stupid the mistake this country made with the Vietnam War. Why Vietnam happened in the first place and why it took so long to finally end, are due to the politics involved that were as underhanded as they come.

Robert McNamara has been called the architect of the Vietnam War and he is played very well by Bruce Greenwood and the story of The Post really revolves around him and all of the bad reasons why the Vietnam continued for years long after the United States knew that the war was no longer winnable. The moment that got me the most was when it was said that 70% of the reason why the Unites States continued fighting an unwinnable war was to avoid looking like a loser in the eyes of the world. Over 58,000 young men died during the Vietnam War and to learn that 70% of the reason for continuing was for saving face; makes the entire war all the more worse than it already is.

Tom Hanks plays Ben Bradlee who was the executive editor of the Washington Post and Merryl Streep plays the woman who owned the paper after her husband died. Their courage to publish McNamara’s memos and documents about what was really going on in Vietnam opened the flood gates of criticism and about the Vietnam War and could even have hastened its end. Overall, I thought that the acting was very good, but for a Spielberg movie I did expect something that was great, and not just rather good.

This is a good movie about an important moment in history and I do recommend it.

When the movie “Office Space” was released in 1999, I remember thinking that I have never seen a film that so perfectly captures the reality of working in the corporate world. The frustrations, the insanity, the injustice, the managers who do nothing and have no skills and yet they are in charge and the fact that as you look around your cubicle environment very often it feels like you are throwing your life down the drain. Very often you are forced to do work that you do not want to do and feeling trapped in a depressing life, “because of the money”.

This movie was also very funny, starring Ron Livingston who was perfect as the miserable employee who just didn’t want do to any of this anymore, Gary Cole, as his annoying boss and Jennifer Aniston as Livingston’s girlfriend who was given a hard time by her boss as a waitress, because she never wore enough buttons on her blouse to please him. What is also great are the irony’s that all the employees of this fictional software company have to face as 2 men are hired to fire a mass of people and they are most impressed by Livingston’s character who at that exact time, had decided to give up on working and do nothing all day and the famous TPS report idiotic nightmare at the beginning of the movie that summarizes all the frustrations and insanities (see video).

If you have not seem Office Space on cable or DVD, you owe it to yourself to see one of the best parodies of the nightmare of working for other people ever produced.