There are thousands of ways to tell a story. In my opinion, for movies, the most straightforward way of creating a timeline and telling a story is always the best. When there is an overt attempt to be different, very often the strange and unusual storytelling becomes greater than the purpose of the film because following what is going on, becomes too much of a strange experience.

I admit that I have never seen a story told the way it is told in the new film, “The Dinner”. Two brothers and their two wives meet at a very expensive restaurant, a restaurant so expensive that each course and every item on the menu requires a long explanation from the waiter. At the top of each new course of the dinner, there is a new part of the story that is revealed through the use of flashbacks.

The main characters in this story are Stan Lowman, who is a politician running for Governor, played by Richard Gere, his mentally disturbed brother played by Steve Coogan and their wives played by Laura Linney and Rebecca Hall. The flashbacks are mostly about Lowman’s brother and the various reasons for his mental illnesses and how it relates to his job as a high school history teacher and of all things, Gettysburg and the Civil War.

The story telling at times during the many different flashbacks was I thought too scattered and seemed to be trying too hard to be different almost to the point of throwing the entire story under a bus. The main message of this movie had to do with a horrendous act of cruelty done by each couple’s teenage sons and then discussing what was the best way to handle the situation, especially considering that Lowman is running for Governor. What followed was an extremely strange and abrupt ending to this film that seemed almost as if the director ran out of film.

For these reasons, despite the good acting in this film, I cannot recommend the Dinner.

The odds are very high that nobody has ever heard of the explorer Percy Fawcett. This is the main reason why I like historical movies because you learn about events in history that you would have never known about otherwise. The greatest example of this in recent movie history is the great film Hidden Figures, where we all learned about who were the true heroes of NASA during the early years of space exploration.

The movie The Lost City of Z is about an explorer and army officer named Percy Fawcett from England in 1906 who became obsessed with finding an ancient city in the Jungles of the Amazon. What is most amazing about this story is how anyone can be obsessed with finding anything in just about the worst place on earth. The heat, bugs, wild animals, natives trying to kill you, the long trip there and back and the very high risk of death would for most people mean that looking for an ancient city so far away would be something you would only try once in a lifetime. However, Percy Fawcett tried to find this lost city 3 times during his life, the last time was after he survived being a soldier in World War 1. The rule for all risk takers is the same. The more you tempt fate the higher the odds that the math will just catch up to you one day. One thing you learn about Percy Fawcett during this movie is that he was extremely lucky to have lived as long as he did when you consider that he was in World War 1 and he had this obsession with finding a lost city in the Amazon.

This movie stars Charlie Hunnam as Fawcett, Sienna Miller as Fawcett’s wife Nina and an unrecognizable Robert Pattinson as Fawcett’s best friend. I thought the story about the incredible hardships and risks in trying to survey and explore a part of the world as dangerous as the Amazon jungle was very well done as was the acting. I recommend The Lost City of Z.

I was very surprised to see the very low reviews on both IMDB (5.5) and Rotten Tomatoes (16%) for this movie.  I thought this movie was about average but not overly bad. The message of this film is a very good one, “when has technology gone too far”, or “when do the good things about technology infringe too much on basic human privacy”. This movie stars Tom Hanks, who probably has about 6 scenes and 20 lines and Emma Watson who is the real lead actor of this movie, so the trailers are somewhat misleading. The late actor Bill Paxton also has a small role in this movie as Watson’s father, who has Multiple Sclerosis. I found it rather depressing to see Paxton in this movie so soon after he died of a heart ailment at only 61 years old. The actor John Boyega also has a relatively small role in this film as a disgruntled employee of the Circle but he seems to be a character that was added on at the last minute, rather than having any significant reason to be in this movie.

As this film progresses we see that this huge internet company called “The Circle” hires Watson and very slowly demands more and more of her personal information and private time and very quickly she is living in an insane world that believes that all information, regardless of how private, is everyone’s business. Tom Hanks plays the CEO of the Circle and early in the film, he introduces a new kind of camera the size of a marble that the company has placed all around the world. This sophisticated camera is not only able to create pictures from all around the world, but also record all aspects of the environment it has been placed in. Considering the small cost of creating such a small camera and the ease they can be placed practically anywhere, its obvious that a device like this can get out of hand very quickly.

I thought it was brave of the producers of this film to show the campus of the circle as looking almost exactly like the new Apple Campus that is opening this month, (see video below). As a producer, I would think that doing something like this would be too risky considering the possibility of litigation from Apple concerning the negative aspects of this story. I was impressed by the message at the end, which I thought was if the person who believes that all aspects of someone else’s private information are everyone’s business, how would they feel if that very same spotlight was turned on them? Another way of looking at something like this is; if the people who vote to send young people to war would have to go to war and get killed themselves, would they still vote yes?

Despite the obvious flaws in this movie, I give it a marginal recommendation.

The Circle – Book Amazon