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Movie Review: Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere

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Most fans of the great entertainer Bruce Springsteen will probably think that the new biopic “Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere” is about how someone born in Freehold, New Jersey, in September 1949, came from nowhere and became an international sensation. This movie would be about a sequential story spanning many years of squalor and hardship, including sleeping on couches, living in a car, and in bad hotel rooms, with no money, hunger, and desperation, and somehow never giving up the impossible dream of becoming a famous singer. This film would also be about his friends in “The E Street Band” and how their friendships grew, and how they all overcame so many years of bad times and then finally tremendous success.

Unfortunately, this movie is not about any of these things. The screenwriter/director, Scott Cooper, decided to make this entire movie about a small moment in time in Springsteen’s career after his album “The River” was released, when Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White) spent time in a rented house in Colts Neck, New Jersey, and records a new album on low-quality sound equipment and spends too much of the remaining movie brooding and depressed over releasing this new album “Nebraska” as he recorded it originally. This includes many disagreements with his manager Jon Landau (Jeremy Strong), and his off and on again relationship with a single mother Faye Romano (Odessa Young), which, due to his conflicts and depression he treats very badly in this film. Ongoing flashbacks with Springsteen and his abusive alcoholic father (Stephen Graham) are at times hard to watch, because his father turned his anger and rage over his horrible life and bad jobs out on his wife and son, a life reality familiar to too many of us.

Most impressive are the way too few singing performances of Jeremy Allen White, who closely masters the sounds and single style of one of the greatest singers of all time. Anyone would have to admire the amount of hours of training and practice to master a voice as challenging as Springsteen’s.

Once again, in an effort to do something new and different, a great opportunity was lost with this movie because just about everybody would rather see a true biography and not a small, depressing excerpt of the career of Bruce Springsteen. This is the reason behind the low ratings of 61% on Rotten Tomatoes, making a movie that should have been a huge hit, a big miss, for reasons that are so obvious. Overal I also rate this movie a pass, only recommending the scenes of some good acting and the too few singing performances of Jeremy Allen White.

Movie Review: After the Hunt

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Some months from now, some insomniac will be streaming the new movie “After the Hunt” and will be sound asleep within minutes, and then worry that the coma this movie puts you in might never end.

After the Hunt is entirely about PHD candidates and professors at Yale University in the year 2019. Julia Roberts plays Alma Imhoff, a professor of philosophy, who is married to Frederik Imhoff who is a psychiatrist played by Michael Stuhlbarg but is also having an affair with Hank, another philosophy professor who later in this story is accused of raping a PHD student, Maggie (Ayo Edebiri).

Given that the main part of this story is a he-said-she-said conflict, amazingly, all these well-named successful actors agreed to act in this long and boring movie, but stunningly, this simple storyline dragged on for a nightmare 2 hours and 18 minutes. There are attempts at filler side stories, including Dr. Kim Sayers (Chloë Sevigny), who is friends with Alma Imhoff and is a student/faculty liaison at the university, but her presence in this film has almost no significance. The worst part of this bad movie is the too many scenes of chain smoking, once again, a decision the producer made to fund this movie, probably because the script was so bad, they could not get money anywhere else.

The merciful ending includes a scene with Alma, who is in the hospital for an ulcer condition, and provides a major revelation about an event in her childhood that tries to tie together with the story, which also mostly fails, along with this movie, which, despite some scenes of good acting, is a big miss.

The very low 38 and falling ratings on Rotten Tomatoes for this extremely long and boring movie are correct this time around. This one should be missed by everybody, except for the most die-hard insomniacs.

Movie Review: Good Fortune

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While watching the new movie “Good Fortune”, which has a lot to do with people who live at the edge of homelessness, I was thinking that the writer/director of this film Aziz Ansari, knows about this life from his years as a struggling Indian stand-up comedian. Aziz also plays the lead role in this story, Arj, whose life is a disaster of living in very bad Motels, sleeping in his car, and working odd jobs that even include standing in line for hours for other people to get concert tickets and even hard-to-get popular food.

Arj majored in film and documentary editing, guaranteeing him a difficult career trying to make a living within a field where the opportunity for any job is almost nonexistent. Much of this story is hard to watch, understanding the risk Ansari took in attempting to make squalor and financial desperation funny. Arj lives in run-down Motel rooms and far too often has to sleep in his car; none of this is ever funny.

This movie comes off like a combination of “It’s A Wonderful Life” (1946) and “Trading Places(1983). Keanu Reeves plays the angel in this story, named Gabriel, trying to save the life of Arj, and later his very wealthy friend Jeff, played by Seth Rogan. It turns out that Gabriel tries to teach Arj that his horrible life of no money is still worth living, by swapping the lives of Jeff and Arj, a very similar idea to Trading Places.

The good part of this story is how Ansari demonstrates the huge contrasts between a life of absolutely nothing and another life that has no boundaries. The parts that are off about this story are that it is too erratic, slow, and at times strange – almost as if the screenwriter was trying to make the movie two hours long regardless of the sequences of scenes making enough sense. The character Elena, played by Keke Palmer, works for a Home Depot-like company and tries to start a Union to help the many employees who are not being treated fairly. Her off-and-on again relationship with Arj, at times, seems more like filler to make the film two hours.

Some of the messages and statements in this movie about how unfair life is, and the differences between the lives of people who have everything and those who are on the edge of suicide and despair because they have no money, are brilliant. The best example of this is at the end of this film, with a speech from Jeff, who announces new rules in dealing with the delivery employees of his company when he says, “Enough of us getting rich off the misery of other people”. Another harsh reality of life, when the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, the main reason is that rich people have no empathy for those who live at the bottom of the world.

This film has numerous excellent messages about good and evil, rich and poor, and despite this, this film is receiving middle-of-the-road, below-average ratings of only 77% on Rotten Tomatoes. This is because of the erratic storytelling and scenes that seem more like filler than advancing the story. My rating is a solid 80% for some of the humor, acting, and the overall message, which is very well conveyed.