Sitting through this film was like passing by what you know is going to be the scene of a very bad car accident. As as you roll by and look to your right, you don’t want to look because you know what you might see. You look anyway, because this is life, a possible pathway, perhaps the end of someone’s life and in the back of your mind, you wonder if this might happen to you one day and this scares you, but you keep looking anyway. “There but for the grace of God go I”.

This film plays more like a documentary than a movie and has only one named celebrity as the star, William Defoe who plays the manager of this run down Motel in Florida, ironically named “The Magic Castle Motel”. For 38 dollars a night you can live almost like a caged animal in one room squalor surrounded by lavender and pink paint. The tenants of this massive hell hole are who you would expect; poor people down on their luck, but what you would never expect are happy, dancing and running young children who are oblivious to their reality and are not yet old enough to realize that they have no chance. No future. No hope. No way out. These young children have to go along for the ride only because of who their parents are. For me the happy oblivious young children in this story were ultimately the most depressing part because they just don’t understand about money and what its like to be on the outer fringe of homelessness. As an adult your brain has to rationalize a life like this somehow, because if you can’t, you die. But when you’re a child you are just a child and you don’t know anything other than your bleak existence. In the eyes of a child, a horrendous life like this is normal for you because you just don’t know anything else. For me, this was the saddest part of this story.

This movie has remarkable acting and the best actor of them all is 6-year-old Brooklynn Prince, who plays Moonie and is the only child of her single mother, played by Bria Vinaite, a drug addict hooker and complete disaster of a human being who was stupid enough to give birth to and then keep a child. So many scenes in this movie are very hard to watch, because you know that there are real people like this in this country who live lives like this and like passing a car accident, this is something that none of us want to think about or ever see.

This low-budget movie has received many high reviews on both IMDB and Rottentomatoes and I agree with these high ratings as this movie while being quite depressing is also and outstanding depiction of the harsh reality of being poor in this country. The Florida Project gets my highest recommendation.

At first glance I was rather surprised at the relatively low ratings for the new docudrama LBJ, directed by Rob Reiner, only 5.8 on IMDB and 51% on Rotten Tomatoes. I thought this was a very solid and well done history lesson about the political life of Lyndon Baines Johnson, with some of the story told using flashbacks. Much of what happens in this movie is well known but just as much is not known including how difficult Johnson’s life as Vice President to John F. Kennedy was, due to the Kennedy brothers disrespecting and shutting him out of the important decisions of the Kennedy administration. From the perspective of Bobby and John Kennedy, Johnson was an outsider from the South who was made Vice President for political reasons to get Kennedy elected in 1960. On top of this, as was made very clear in this story, Bobby Kennedy was in some ways using Johnson for his own Presidential ambitions for the election of 1968.

To this day its amazing how long it took this country to pass basic human rights legislation, including the Civil Rights act of 1964 that was started by Kennedy and finalized by Johnson after Kennedy was assassinated. What were we thinking for so many years in this country, suppressing the basic rights of millions of people for so many years? So much of this backward thinking was because too many of the wrong people were in charge, including a major character in this movie Senator Richard Russell, played very well by actor Richard Jenkins, who was both a very powerful Senator as well as a bigot who did everything in his power to prevent the Civil Rights act because of his racism and stupidity.

I was impressed with this movie for several reasons, starting with the acting of Woody Harrelson as LBJ, in one of the best roles of his career and Jennifer Jason Leigh who was unrecognizable as Lady Bird Johnson. The makeup and the sets in this movie were all outstanding and I thought Rob Reiner’s direction was also outstanding.

Despite the average ratings for this movie, I thought it was very good and I recommend it.

I found the definition of Ragnarock on Wikipedia and before seeing the new movie “Thor: Ragnarock” today I never heard of the word Ragnarock before. The reviews for this movie are quite high, 93% on rottentomatoes and 8.2 on IMDB and I agree with the high ratings for the special effects that are very impressive, but not for the story which is all over the place, at times hard to follow and is lacking in continuity. This story jumps from one scene to another scene and more than a few times during these 2 hours you have no idea what is happening or who a new character is; case in point the character played by Idris Elba. I wondered if the producers of this movie assumed that the audience read the comic book before seeing this movie.

This movie stars Chris Hemsworth as Thor for the 3rd time in this franchise, not including the Avenger series. Cate Blanchette plays Thor’s sister and Jeff Goldblum as the leader of this strange planet that looks like a garbage dump for the universe. There are very good special effects and some fights including even the HULK character played once again by Mark Ruffalo. The most impressive performance in this movie was by Tessa Thompson who just may have had her breakthrough role with this movie.

Unfortunately, there is not much more to say about this film that I thought was average, at times boring and offered nothing that we have not seen many times before.